Adventures in Home Ownership: renovations

Showing posts with label renovations. Show all posts

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Progress

Just a little comparison post to show you how far we've come! I find it's easier to compare "before & afters" when they're side-by-side. Plus it'll be nice to look back on and see how much we've done. I've already forgotten what we started with, it feels like such a distant memory...

Kitchen, before & current

Dining room, before & current

Living room, before & current

Office/Laundry, before & current

Demolition, week 4

The only major thing left to do now was finish off the living room. So much lath & plaster to tackle!

Ryan demonstrating the lung-safe way to demo, with a gas mask!

Ceiling half done, 3 more walls to go...

We tried a different approach to the walls, but I prefer taking it all down at once

I was very glad when we were done with this process, I think it took me 2 days to get the plaster dust out of my hair!

Plaster dust much?

Let me also take this opportunity to let you learn from my mistakes... When you have baseboard heating, and plan to demo anything, make sure to protect your heating elements before getting started, otherwise you'll be learning how to straighten heat fins like I will be...

Cleaning up the mess

Off to the fire pit with you, lath!

I can't believe how wide some of these sheathing boards are, 20"!!!

Ryan standing back and admiring all of our hard work!

Found 3 of these guys when we were moving the wood from the deck to the fire pit, they were less than impressed

We got the kitchen cabinets moved to their temporary home in the garage

Beautiful tongue & groove kitchen ceiling under the drywall, we're going to try to re-purpose this elsewhere

Open concept stairs? These will be gone soon enough!

The end of August was also essentially the end of demolition, save a few small items still to do that aren't really worth mentioning. Demo was a lot of fun, but exhausting, and I'm excited to be able to start putting things back together now! I always have the end result in mind, which hopefully will help me keep plugging along when we start to lose motivation. But for now we can take moment to rest!

Demolition, Week 3

We tackled the lath & plaster in the office/laundry this week. It looks so different without the multiple layers of crap on the walls!

Not sure why I was surprised to see another solid-wall construction...

A growing pile of bonfire fodder

I see you, hideous wallpaper panel, peeking through my walls

Ohaithere stairs!

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Demolition, Week 1

Everything seemed to be moving according to plan, pulling up carpet & masonite to reveal the hardwoods underneath, until I got to the corner at the front of the house, where the living and dining rooms meet. I got stuck here, and needed to remove a few pieces of trim in order to get the masonite free. Well, morbid curiosity got the best of me, and then this happened:

Oops! Would this be categorized as excavation, or archaeology?

Hello, can of worms! At this point we re-evaluated (read: threw logic out the window) and decided "screw it, let's take it down to the studs"! Onward ho...

Down came the drop ceilings...

...to reveal original lath & plaster ceilings in the living room...

...and some gorgeous bead board in the dining room (unfortunately not salvageable)

In the flooring-uncovering-process, we also discovered some boo-boos that decided for us that we will be painting the original wood floors, as opposed to refinishing them.

Damaged wood due to wet boots

Needless to say, I'll be learning how to patch hardwood floors soon

When brainstorming about the project scope, we initially planned to take out the weird half-chimney, and at the same time cut the wall it's in down to a half wall in order to open up the rooms a bit more. However, once we pulled the drywall off that wall, let's just say the wall wasn't constructed how we imagined it would be... I have never in my life seen a wall constructed solely out of boards! No studs, no electrical, nothing logical, just a solid wall made of boards! No wonder the electrical situation in this house is so screwed up! The only electrical on that wall of the kitchen was run through what used to be the doorway, hence the "strip" power they had all over the place... Sheesh. At least we know the wall can come out now!

Now we know what was holding up the chimney...

We also discovered that there is wood sheathing on the inside of all the exterior walls, through which we could tell there is absolutely no insulation. So it turns out to be a good thing that we decided to go balls-to-the-wall crazy gutting, because now we can get some insulation in the walls before winter and (hopefully) save ourselves a lot on heating! Blessing in disguise!