I finished installing the fascia on the eaves and the soffits today. That was a real… chore.
And now the painting has begun. I got about 95% of the first coat on today.
Of course, it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, and then all next weekend. Maybe I’ll get this “little” project done one of these centuries.
And I’ll be so glad when we order that dumpster to get rid of that big pile of trash mostly off-camera….
Until next time...
The siding is done! Well… almost done. I still have to install the soffit, which I don’t know if technically that counts as siding. But it involves me up on a ladder, so I’ll call it siding. And gutters too. I need to install those as well. And then paint. Must paint.
We also finally have the back door installed. We haven’t had a back door on the house since May 9. Seriously. No door at all. Just a big, gaping, lack-of-security hole in our house. I’m so glad that’s corrected now.
A bathroom with a view. (click to see it bigger on flickr)
After that, I get to start playing with all that “fun” insulation.
Until next time...
Two more months have passed since I last blogged about the remodel that started in February with “The Great Leak” and snowballed from there.
Since that last post in July, the roof has finally been completed, and we have since installed the windows.
Then came a little “time off” with our trip to New Orleans for Southern Decadence. Now that we have finally recovered from that trip, it was time for us to get back to the business of the remodel.
We had the HardiPlank fiber cement siding delivered way-too-damned-early Sunday morning. We started putting it up this morning. Here’s the result of what we were able to get installed today, er yesterday (Monday).
(click to see it on flickr)
(click to see it on flickr)
That stuff is freaking heavy. I can barely lift my arms now to type.
And believe it or not, the new master bathroom is not the only project we’ve got going on around the house. There’s the whole back deck we’ve been working on, and we’re also replacing the existing covered front porch that was on the house with a larger, columned front porch similar to Antebellum architecture in the Greek Revival style.
Here is what the porch looked like when we purchased the house in 2002.
We took the tin roof off in either 2007 or 2008, with plans on starting the new porch at that time. But due to some other issues, that project was put on hold. Since then, we have also decided to remove the wooden front porch and replace it in it’s entirety with a concrete front porch.
(click to see it on flickr)
We’ve poured all that concrete by hand, in stages. The Husbear’s concrete mixer has definitely seen better days.
It’ll be nice to get the columns installed and the new porch roof built. One of these days….
Until next time...
It’s been three months since I last blogged about the “little” construction project.
Here’s where we stand at the moment:
(click to see it on flickr)
This has pretty much consumed my weekends, and some time before work each day and after work on some days.
We’re waiting on the windows to come in (we had to custom order them). And the HardiPlank lap siding.
That will finish off the exterior of the now new addition.
Then we get to start the inside of it….
Until next time...
We last left off with the discovery that two of the back walls of the house had slipped off their foundation at some point in it’s history since 1892, and had been well camouflaged by a previous owner.
The Husbear and I found a way to correct this problem! And it’s relatively simple. Relatively.
We will simply increase the footprint of the house by adding an entirely new Master bathroom, and remove the existing back walls. (Which also means we will be moving the Master bedroom downstairs in the near future.) I think the Husbear must employ some mind-control device on me to get me to agree to such things.
I said “simply”. We know how that goes….
Unfortunately, we had a 60+ foot tall problem sitting right in the middle of the proposed area for the new Master bathroom.
A great big tree.
This picture was taken in 2005. I thought I had taken a more recent picture of it, but alas. The tree had grown a wee bit since 2005. So much that it towered over the roof of the two story house by at least 30 feet. At least.
Just like Earl, the tree had to die.
I hate being up on a ladder. And I hate chainsaws. Put them both together, and it’s worse than my dislike of clowns and politicians! But after some creative cutting of the larger branches, and some narrow misses on bringing said limbs down on the house, we were left with the trunk and the stump.
Ugh. The stump.
First we axed it for a while. Then dug and cut around the roots with trowels, hammers, and a sawzall.
Then we bought a pressure washer and blasted out the dirt so we could see the roots. After that, it was a “simple” matter of cutting the remaining roots and pulling on the stump with a cumalong. “Cumalong”. Heh heh.
Yea! The stump is removed!
Now that the stump is out of the way, I can string out the area for the new foundation so the form for the raised concrete foundation could be built.
The form is almost ready. Hopefully we’ll be able to start pouring the concrete this coming weekend for the walls of the foundation. If it doesn’t rain. Again.
Can you tell we’re wore out?
Until next time...
So… the day ended with it raining in the kitchen:
The hot water pipe going into the upstairs bathtub popped. It flooded the upstairs bathroom, then seeped through the tongue-and-groove flooring into the crawlspace, then through the tongue-and-groove ceiling down into the kitchen.
In the kitchen, it ran through the cabinets and onto the floor. It also ran through all the overhead lighting.
So, the kitchen got an unscheduled bath today.
And we think we know why it popped: too much pressure. We moved the hot water heater and the washer and dryer to their new alcove today. While doing so, we added a check valve on the cold water supply going into the hot water heater. With no ability to back-flow as it had been doing before, the heated water system over pressurized, and found the weakest link.
Anyway, here’s what the alcove looks like with it’s bits in place:
The alcove had to be completed first so we could move the washer and dryer from their previous locations. With that done, we could start gutting the rest of the old laundry room and bathroom, which ended up looking like this before the previously mentioned internal rain interrupted said gutting today:
While gutting the area, we discovered something ugly. Well, uglier than all the mold we found? And uglier than the fact that we found absolutely no insulation in the North-facing walls? We found that the back wall of the house is not sitting on the slab at all. It’s sitting directly on the ground.
Can you say NOT FUCKING GOOD? Yes. I just cussed.
How did we not notice this on the outside, you ask? The previous owners had glossed it over with siding. Just like so much other stuffs we’ve found that they, and even more previous owners, had done.
So, what started out as a leak in the main water line, turned remodel, has now turned into a major structural undertaking!
Frak.
Until next time...