Remember the front porch that was here when we bought the place? I love that there is a front porch on this house – I just don’t like the front porch itself. It must have been super cute back when it was first built. But it dates the house, and all the posts were rotted out at […]
We had been thinking to keep the kitchen floor and build a new one over it, but since we’re doing everything the right way I decided to just go ahead and rip it out. I also wanted to assess the condition of the subfloor, knowing already that there were a couple small rotten patches around the […]
We can’t do anything structural to the house until the sill plates have been changed out (can’t build a strong wall on a crumbling foundation after all). So I’ve been casting about for other projects to do so I’m not just spinning my wheels, and I’ve started on the bedroom closets. I’m terrible at remembering […]
Good news – I got my building permit! It’s a big relief. I’ve never gone through the process before. But I was in and out in under an hour and they had an answer for me within a few business days. Easy! (Good thing, too, since we had to start demo already). Here’s the original […]
So remember how there were termites in the walls? …. yeah. Turns out there were termites in the sill plate, as well. Just the, you know, foundation of the house. You know how they fix that? They jack the house up in the air. Seriously. If we didn’t think this rehab project was getting real earlier? It […]
I am really kicking myself now that I didn’t get better pictures, but below are some of the reasons I was glad that we did end up opening all the walls. Check out some of the crazy framing I found inside. There was no solid corner stud there. It was a conglomeration of little 6″ […]
Man, there was a lot of junk to get rid of after the house was gutted. Way, way more than I’d thought. The girls had fun loading Dumpster #1 – at least the first day. (Yes, dumpster #1. We filled it and had to ask for another. Who would have thought that a house with […]
So I left the house like this: and came back to it like this: Quite a shocking change, but also? Really exciting. I love doing things from scratch. I was going to be able to craft this house from its basic skeleton through to completion. Possibilities opened up where there hadn’t been possibilities before – all […]
Well, so much for the bathroom. Sigh. This is how bad the termites were in the bedroom/bathroom wall I discovered via the closet: Once they took off the drywall, the wall crumbled to pieces. See the door header on the right of that picture above? That’s a hole right through to the other room. And that […]
I was waiting on guys to come rip out the subfloor/tub in the bathroom for me and I decided to tackle the hallway closet. It was a very strange thing; the door didn’t fit, it looked like it’d been sort of roughly framed-in as an afterthought and never re-trimmed, it was full of shelves made of […]