Back to Work

We finally have some new progress to report for the house! Winter was quite slow, but we are rapidly picking up speed with our early spring.  Our kitchen cabinets will be delivered on Friday to be sanded and primed. We will be painting them after they are installed in case we have any issues/damage during installation.  


Before we install the kitchen we would like some extra security.  We got very lucky while shopping for new doors and also got a great deal on windows.  We were able to purchase 3 doors and 7 windows at a great price.  


The biggest project we worked on last weekend was the installation of a new door in the kitchen.

BEFORE

We had a remove the insulation and cut a hole in the wall to make room for our new 36" door.  We did not expect there to be so many layers of siding, so we were in for a surprise.  We will be tearing off the top layer of siding and residing the house either this summer or next (depending on when all of our windows are installed.)

(As Ryan says, "Let me get a picture.  Seeing you work is like seeing bigfoot.  No one will believe me without a picture!")

AFTER

We were able to also install a new front door and porch door in the short time we were there.  

We also began working on a built in shelving unit for the bathroom.  More details will come on that project soon! We hope to have many more updates in April and May than we have had the last couple of months.

We hope that everyone had a great Easter weekend!  

Model Kitchen

This weekend we worked on getting measurements for windows, doors, and cabinets.  All of the windows and doors need replacement or fixing, so we are currently looking for those items now.  Once we have the correct windows and doors we will be able to drywall the bathroom and kitchen.  

I was able to find a program online that will let you input all of your measurements to make a 2D and 3D model of rooms and houses.  Once we took all of our measurements this weekend, we were able to input everything and get an idea of what our kitchen will be like.

The program does have some limitations so it is not perfect, but pretty close.  I wasn't able to put in a cabinet above the stove so you will have to use some imagination.  Also, the sink will be under the window.  Here is a snapshot of what we are looking to do:

We will be removing one small window.  The door in the kitchen next to the fridge will lead to a pantry.  The door behind the stools will lead to the bathroom and we will be adding the glass exterior door soon. The last door leads to a bedroom that will probably be used as an office. 


You can use the following link to see the kitchen in 3D and you will be able to rotate it and look at everything.  Just click the link, then click "copy design" in the right side bar.  After that you can play around with the design and view it in 3D.  It won't affect our design because you won't be signed in, so feel free to take a look.


http://www.homestyler.com/designprofile/e0129c62-f885-47e7-b697-4d8b4cedf0fe


It is hard to believe something like that can come from this:

Hopefully we will have some real progress to show soon. Thanks for reading!

Kitchen Work

Every time we work on the house we are faced with the question "Should we cover it up or do it the right way?" This weekend we finished taking down the beam in the kitchen. There was a drop ceiling throughout the kitchen area.  The beam was not supporting anything, but was pulling down on the rest of the ceiling.  

BEFORE

We worked on the beam and noticed that the drop ceiling did not have much support.  Our only choices were to try to add support throughout, or take down the ceiling and use the old, higher ceilings.  We decided to use the high ceiling to open up the kitchen, since it will be kind of small.

DURING

It was a lot of work, but at least it is done right now.  There was some drywall that we needed to take down, boards that had to be taken down, and there were some slats and plaster that needed to be removed.  Now we have nice tall ceilings.  We just need some drywall and our kitchen will start coming together.

AFTER

It might not look like much, but it is getting a lot better!

Kitchen

It has been a long journey, but we now have brand new subflooring in the kitchen and bathroom area.  We still need to address the furnace room and hallway flooring, which we hope to finish next weekend. The floor looks nice, but there is a lot of work buried under it.  Moving forward, we will now get to do some work in the kitchen that will actually be seen! 

BEFORE

 DURING

After the old bathroom walls were removed

Starting the plumbing

Digging out the crawl space

Insulating the crawl space

Laying out the new bathroom

Pulling up and laying down flooring

AFTER

The bathroom is to the right of this photo.  The rest will all be the kitchen.

This is a view from the bathroom door

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Looking at the bathroom, we will put in a new exterior door along this wall

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We removed the walls around the furnace

Next up:

Finishing the hallway flooring

Fixing the ceiling

Putting in kitchen and bathroom lighting

We really do appreciate comments and suggestions, so feel free to tell us what you think.  Thanks for reading!

-Ryan and Christine

A Pleasant Surprise!

It is a winter wonderland up north!  We got over a foot of snow over the weekend and were able to get in some great snowmobiling and relaxation time.  I went to the Packer game on Sunday while Ryan spent the day working at the house, and I'm glad I got out of helping on this one!

We recently decided to remove the paneling in the living room just to see whats underneath.  The thought of just covering it up was appealing, but we were a bit too curious to see what the house had originally.  

The room started like this:

The previous owners had started to cover up the paneling with dry-walling mud.  It wasn't a good look.  
After ripping off the paneling, Ryan found a layer of red and green wall paper that matches the wall paper on the stairs:

Ryan decided that wasn't a good look either and decided to go deeper.  He peeled of at least 2 other layers of wall paper to find old plaster with slats of wood that is found in older houses.  Beneath that...more wall paper.  This one in a nice shade of green with large leaves.  I can now see why a camel and Egyptian themed fireplace cover matched the room.  Finally, under that ugly green wall paper we have rough cut beadboard original to the house:

We are planning on keeping what we can.  Ryan was able to remove the plaster from one whole wall in about 5 hours.  We can see that the beadboard is under at least one other wall in the living room.  The last layer of wall paper was nailed on, so the wood has a lot of square nails put into it.  We are not entirely sure what we will do, but we are thinking it will need to be painted eventually.  It would be really nice to keep some of the original wood work in the house and most of it has already been removed by previous renovators.  This was a nice surprise to find under that ugly paneling and wall paper.  

It has been busy but things are moving along nicely.  Winter will be filled with more destruction than construction.  We will be ripping up the living room flooring to level the house and lay new flooring.  We will also be taking down the walls around the furnace so that we can get the furnace out and get a new one in later this summer.  We will be building a new room for the furnace with a door.  Right now it is in a bedroom closet and partly in the kitchen.  We will keep it there, but make it more accessible:

Overall, we had an amazing weekend with family and friends.  We hope you also had a great New Years and wish you a happy 2012!

Update 12/12/2011

Just to keep everyone updated:

We have not had much free time to work on the house lately.  The boys in our family helped out so much with installing electricity, but we found out we need an all new furnace.  This did put some delays on the work that we can get done before spring.  We still have some major projects we can do without heat, such as putting in the kitchen floors and tearing out the living room floors to start leveling them.  We will keep you updated, but the progress is slow.

We hope everyone has an amazing Christmas and New Years!

Before and After Bathroom Pictures

Here are a few pictures of our progress.  We managed to get a lot of work done this weekend.  

First we removed the door:

BEFORE

AFTER

Then we leveled the floor joists and laid down a new subfloor: 

Lastly, we built bathroom walls and installed our bathtub:

We also installed heating ducts and are ready to put down the rest of the floor soon.  We looked at the wiring issues in the house and were a bit disappointed.  Even with the new electrical box we only have a couple outlets that are working properly.  Fixing and installing electrical will be our next big project with updates coming soon!