re:ady

the HVAC guys demo'ed out all of our old ductwork, air handlers and condensers on friday (which kind of sucks since it's supposed to be 90 today thru wednesday)...


and we spent the weekend getting the house ready for the framers to start.


so, framing is starting today. i think they are starting on the stair, which will involve bracing the 2nd floor and demo'ing the old stair first. stay tuned for big changes!

re:sume

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.

re:move (more)

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!

re:gurgitate

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...

re:deem

the past couple weeks we've been working on bringing the house back to the way it was meant to be...

we've been removing aluminum siding:



...revealing some wood siding in really good condition (albeit with probable lead paint):


and also a few boards that will need to be replaced:

and we also took off the metal window awnings:


this weekend we went to a home & remodel show to pick up info on windows, flooring and plumbing fixtures. we're still waiting on pricing from framers, and we need to get a structural engineer to look at the piers & foundation at the existing one-story addition to see if it's even possible for us to do the vertical expansion. but the roofers are starting at the end of this week!

re:veal

demo day 1!
we pulled up the carpet & pad, began stripping wallpaper (revealing some surprises on the walls, much to my dismay), and the kitchen is gone! i like it better already!

bye bye carpet!


stripping wallpaper:




kitchen in progress:
(anthony took care of this one, because it was so gross that i couldn't bear to be in there)
 



kitchen complete:


the dumpster at the end of day 1: