Bedroom Update

The main bedroom is done with the exception of the floor, trimming out the closet, attic panel and ceiling light.  Here is a shot of the new Light Stone Gray Walls, Ceiling Painted Flat White, Semi-Gloss on the trim and windows, and new blind. Oh and lets not forget the electric baseboard heater the bank made us add. We are hoping to be able to move it to the wall on the right.

Front and Back Door Refresh

It's amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do to improve the looks of things. The front and back door both of which were white got a coat of primer and semi-gloss and new lock set.  The dark brown trim also got painted white. Took about 3 coats of primer to the brown trim before we could add the finishing coat.  The blind for the back door adds a nice touch.  Looking GOOD.

Old News Delays Project

You can only imagine my surprise when we found the floor in the small bedroom lined with old newspapers.  It was the layer right above the original wood floor. Needless to say we lost quite a bit of time reading what we could from 1949.  I have know idea why they would do this.

Blue is the new Green

when we took the corner down to the studs in the small bedroom the blown-in insulation had compacted leaving gaps at the top and some had crumbled to the floor. The crumbling continued and became a issue and a pain to clean up. We decided to replace the old blown-in insulation with Denim Insulation. This stuff is awesome. No itch and easy to install. The only real drawback is that it cost about twice as much as the tried and true fiberglass. The following link from How Stuff Works covers everything you would want to know and then some about this amazing product. Denim The New Insulation

Royal Flush

I was not planning on replacing the toilet. The current one while a little grungy worked fine. However, it was only 14 inches tall from the floor to the seat.  We are a tall family and everyone felt like they were sitting on the floor.  So we are replacing it with a 18 inch from floor to seat model.  Now I want to replace the sink even more. The bathroom is proving to be quite the budget buster.

Moving Operations To the Porch

I spent one day just cleaning up the mess we had made of the back porch. Things were really starting to pile up in there. It had became a catch-all for all our demo work and anything else that was in our way. I bagged up all the lose stuff, took the big stuff to Thing 1 and Thing 2 and cut and rolled up the old carpet and padding for pickup.

Once the porch was cleaned up. I decided it was time to move all the sawing from the Living Room and Kitchen to the Porch. It is obviously much colder but the dust and mess was starting to get out of hand.

The kitchen is the last room scheduled to be done and will not be ready by the scheduled move-in-date of April 1, but it has to be useable.  We hope to have it done by the end of April. The Enclosed Porch doesn't make the list until May

Demo Demo Demo

Okay it didn't take long for me to figure out I couldn't DIY remodel and blog at the same time. So much for the Day by Day blow by blow post. So I am just going to start posting some of the highlights.

We had two demolition projects that turned out to be real nightmares. The first was the built in walk in closet that was made out of the small bedroom. It was built as a permanent install and was heavily re-enforced. My son Tony had quite the time ripping it out.

To add insult to injury we found that the back left corner sagged and when we ripped up the flooring, we found some water damage.  We ended up taking the corner wall down to the studs to see if there was a leak in the wall. The good news is that we found none. We think the problem maybe caused by a broken seal between the house and enclosed porch addition. We are going to have to wait for warmer weather to remove the vinyl siding to see if we can find the problem.

The other nightmare was the kitchen  cabinets just inside the porch door. At first I thought these cabinets had been added for extra storage as they do not match anything else in the kitchen. Come to find out they were the original cabinets and we soon found out why they were still there. They were built into the wall and there was just no easy way to take them down. 

My youngest son Tyler pictured here holding the bottom portion of the cabinet had some blood, sweat and tears on this project. We ended up having to saw and hack the cabinet to pieces to remove it. The end result was one ugly wall and a hole in the drop ceiling where they had tiled around it. You never know what you are going to find when you starting tearing into things. It's like peeling back layers and layers of previous DIY's.