Walls be gone

Took them away. They were only thin interior walls and the enlarged space is much better.

One big space

A problem shared is a problem quartered

Ma and Pa are in town and have been extremely helpful. Now whilst I'm working on something, I can hear three more people doing something else that I would otherwise have had to do. Very good.

We have, in about 5 days, cleared all the wallboard from all walls and all the ceiling we need to, figured out some wiring, spec'd bought and acquired a kitchen which took all sunday whilst we waited for Ikea to pick it out from the warehouse, and put up all insulation and a good bit of wallboard.

Things are coming together nicely.

Kitchen stripped, but there was a leak in the tap faucet which had been damaging the floorboards for years, we reckon.

Floorboards fixed using scrap pieces. Insulation installed

Front bedroom, with half the drywall installed. Where's Rooney?

Front bedroom with the other half of the walls not covered, but insulation in

Dining room and kitchen

Back bedroom, partially boarded

Living room with insulation installed

Living room

Dining room with kitchen parts scattered

Coming along!

Drywall is hard

All the walls have to be stripped of their plywood and their fibreboard then re-covered with new drywall.

I've been watching youtube about it and it seems easy, but what's not clear on the internet is how heavy and unwieldy the boards are. Still, it looks nice when it's done.

Old fibre board

Kitchen with its new insulation and board

Dining room/kitchen

Rooney's new hangout

(Steph writing)

We have fenced in the back yard!

Turns out this view is more than 100 feet.

Now Rooney can get busy with some of his favorite activities, like obedience training (here he is showing you his best 'down'),

digging holes,

chewing sticks,

looking cute,

and playing with his rope.

Something Constructive

(Steph writing)

You may have started to notice a pattern in our work so far: almost every post is about how we destroyed something! It's starting to feel like everything we do shows us just how much more work there is to go. Not to be the stereotypical lady in this project, but I'm ready to make things look nice.

Unfortunately we have to carry on tearing things apart for a while before we can get to the contructive stuff. In the meantime, here's a little crafty side-project:

All the doors in the house have their original knobs and door plates intact. Sorry, but I didn't get a good picture of them still on the doors. Just know that deep down inside they are nice looking, but had been painted over and over and over again since 1925 until they pretty much had become a part of the doors themselves. I spent an evening removing them all (not easy!), and then we got to work with the paint stripper.

This is what Friday night looks like at our house.

The rough brass lurking underneath 90 years of paint.

Hey! What a lovely oil-rubbed bronze finish! Amazing what a little Rust-oleum spray paint can do.

I'll post again once we've sanded, primed, painted all the doors and re-fitted the hardware. It's going to look good, I can feel it....

kitchen, then and now.

Well, I'm still on the kitchen. I wrecked it, and Steff and I picked up the pieces. Rooney dismembered a cockroach, which just gave us 7 parts to vacuum up instead of 1. He's cute, though.

Here's how once it was:

Here's how it is now:

I am Steve, destroyer of kitchens

More board, chipboard and half the wall covered in tonge and groove board. Shame to pull the last out, but needs must. Whilst I was at it, I thought I'd bring down the ceiling.

Next I have to figure out how to get out the 400lb sink and its cabinet.

Outer wall down, ready for insulation

Ceiling too, why not?

more outside wall, more boards, more work to put the boards back

Kitchen wall no more

The kitchen was small and a bit crap, see here:

The kitchen as we found it

The sink is a vintage thing, and it's a shame not to reuse it but the price of refinishing it will be much greater than a new and more useful version. We'll save it, just in case we change our mind.

the walls are covered with yellow faux-tiles. It's basically particle board with a tile-pattern embossed on it. Under that is something else very similar which seems to be made of tar and hair with a smooth finish. Also it looks like tiles, but is much harder to remove. Below that is tongue and groove wood - very hard to remove.

The upper half is plasterboard, the only plasterboard in the house that was not installed by us. Sadly, it's not up to snuff as it's been installed over the particle board, the same soft, crappy particle board that's been used on every fecking inch of wall and ceiling in the entire house. The whole lot must come down, sadly that includes the ceiling.

Faux tile board over older faux tile board

Plasterboard over orange-painted particle board. So much to remove. Those wooden strips don't come out without a fight, either.

Ugly vinyl flooring, over less ugly vinyl flooring over plywood over old vinyl tiles over boards.

The flooring had to be pulled up, but the plywood over the tile over the boards will provide a strong subfloor for the new tiles.

Time to remove that wall, not easy and keeping in mind the roof strucuture, I had to leave in some strategic bits.

crappy board on both sides

Plywood over crappy board on the dining room side

getting better

A little more removed

Next is to figure out how to rewire the power cables and run them down the walls.

One day i'll look like these:

Demolition

(Steph writing)
So we started pulling chipboard off the walls of the bathroom closet, and removing all the nails so that we can put up new sheetrock for a nice finished closet that matches the new walls of the rest of the room.

And then Steve kept going in the back bedroom.

and going...

and going...

and going.

Then we had a little cleanup to do:

Recycle

For whatever reason, the driveway had a thick handrail built up the middle of it. This rendered it useless as a driveway, but it yielded some good material for other projects.

It was made of 4x4 and 6x2. So far it's provided support to the ceiling/bathroom floor, replaced old joists and now has made us a bed. Along with the half price mattress Steff scored at Ikea, we can now sleep in comfort rather than on the air mattress we've been enduring to date.

If Rooney could just stop scratching in the night and thus beating on the side of his crate, I will be well rested.

The rail - it's not that clear, but you can see it down the right hand side there.

Now:

Floor joists

New bed! It's massive, but it sure is comfortable.

Making a house a home

Finally we have somewhere to sit! Our kind friends donated the sofa, apparently to the dog. (see him watching)

Where to keep our stuff: part 2

(Steph writing)

When we drove down from Maine, we put all of our stuff in a trailer which we stashed at Justin's house until we were ready to put it all into our little basement apartment/cave. We figured that he would eventually NOT want all of our earthly posessions cluttering up his house, so fetched the trailer a few days ago and emptied the contents here.

But the old issue remains: no furniture=no storage=nowhere to put said stuff. We solved this by piling everything up in the corners of every room, which made it feel a little like living in a storage facility.

Never fear: Steve is very good at whipping up a little storage solution. See today's effort:

Empty storage closet

 plus pile of wood

equals tidy shelving!

A little modification this morning to keep the middle nice and strong