this weekend we continued with demo to get the house ready for the framers to start this week. we stripped some plaster, removed sheetrock, took down some interior walls...
found evidence of the fire the house had in the 90s...
and our dumpster got its fill this weekend! (this is the third time we've had the dumpster emptied!)
we also went to a tile auction and got this beautiful marble tile for our master bathroom, yay!
so, the framers are supposed to start this week! hopefully i'll have pictures to post of their progress.
we got a window quote, and yikes! shocking. this quote was for top-of-the-line marvin clad wood windows (primed wood interior and aluminum clad exterior) - and was for contractors pricing plus an architects discount...but it was still about 1.5-2x what we were thinking. but we've recently been talking about doing all wood windows instead - they will look better and maintain the integrity of our 1935 house. yes, they're more maintenance, and we have to paint them, but on the plus side, they're less expensive than clad... and we just feel like its the right thing to do. so, we'll get a couple more quotes.
anthony took the drawings down to the permit office today. we were nervous because we've heard conflicting experiences of it taking anywhere from a week and a half to eight weeks to get a building permit. so, anthony went down there today and walked it through and we had our permit in two hours!
here is our permit set of dwgs (click to view larger):
ready to go on the big stuff - hopefully all of our subs can start next week! yay!
sorry, no update to post this weekend. anthony was out of town and i took the weekend off to rest. we have gotten a second framing quote and a window quote should be coming in by tomorrow. we need to work on getting the building permit this week!
this weekend we scraped the popcorn off the ceilings!
it was a very easy task - much easier than we anticipated (finally! something easy!) - just very messy.
we just used a hose with a spray nozzle to spray the popcorn, let it soak in for a minute and then used a 12" scraper to scrape it off. easy as that! and now we have nice smooth ceilings, yay! the ceilings feel higher already. :)
so glad we decided to do this ourselves rather than hiring somebody - we got the entire house scraped in one day!
we also took out the sheetrock at the future loft:
i love how open it makes the stair and upstairs hall feel.
and we also started pulling up some of the old wood flooring in the kitchen, to get down to the subfloor - which clearly needs some patching and/or replacing (those are holes into the crawlspace)...
(by the way, we're doing this because there were so many layers of flooring in the kitchen (sheet vinyl on top of plywood on top of vinyl tile on top of t&g wood on top of diagonal 1x subfloor) that it was higher than the surrounding rooms, and we want the transition between rooms to be seamless.)
this week we should be getting pricing for the structural/foundation work at the back of the house, as well as another framing quote. hopefully we can move forward on those soon!
i can't let the scary post below be the first thing people see when they click on this page, so until i have new work photos to post, these are a few of the beautiful houses we get to look at from our front porch...
so now that the roof is fixed, i'm pulling down the last of the damaged sheetrock in the top of the closet in the back bedroom upstairs, and then this falls down from the attic:
it's a rat or a squirrel skeleton, one - because as you can see it's hanging from its tail.
this is the head of the rat/squirrel skeleton that fell off the body and that i accidentally stepped on with a sickening crunch as i quickly climbed down from my ladder:
at this point, i am near tears at the foulness that i am dealing with, and i tell anthony that i don't want to do this anymore and ask if he can finish, and he just laughs and says, "you have to finish!" jerk.
that thing did not want to come down, and i didn't want to get remotely close to it, so i'm blindly using a crowbar to try to shake it down from the top of the closet while the rest of my body is outside of the closet, and finally it falls with a shower of insulation...
sick.
so, if any of anthony's friends or coworkers are reading this, please tell him he's a bad husband and call him a girl (or something similar and more imaginative), because he's always doing this to me - making me kill spiders or palmetto bugs...
moving on... this weekend we also began taking down the plaster and lath from the one room that still has the original plaster...
and anthony also pulled off some more of the aluminum siding from the front of the house...
good stuff.
i don't even want to think about the possibility of other carcasses in the attic...
