Week 7

This week we really focused on the 2nd floor. We weren’t really supposed to be doing this work right now, but we are waiting for the contractor to finish the 3rd floor and we are excited to move on. We removed that icky subfloor that was under the even ickier carpet. We have an awesome friend (Jason) who is willing to help us. He came over Saturday and installed the new subfloor with Geoff in record time. Hurray for no more icky floor! It smells better already!

We also got a new roof and though unexpected, we are happy to have the roof stop leaking. Now we continue on with the 3rd floor without worry of it getting wet! The drywall can now be installed. The electrician came and started with all of the wiring while there is no drywall.

While filling the dumpster (#3), I meet the cute neighborhood bunny who is very excited about our remodeling (or at least our grass).

Week 6

Week 6

Since we have finished the 3rd floor bathroom, the 3rd floor is now pretty much in our contractor’s hands. This means we can focus on other areas of the house much earlier than expected. We started with the 2nd floor where there was some water damage. It turns out there was much more damage than we thought… so now we get to replace a large chunk of our exterior wall. You can even see our ugly blue siding from the inside now! On the bright side, we are getting French doors to replace the exterior door that goes out to the deck on the second floor. This will look so much better than having a steel exterior door in master closet/bathroom area.

Being that it has been so nice outside that the snow could finally melt, I have been noticing just how much work we have outside. I started by removing the rotting wood fence and I think it looks much better now. It also appears that we will be getting new siding much earlier than anticipated. Now we just have to pick a color and soon our house will be pretty on the outside!
In other news, we FINALLY got a dumpster! Our garage and most of the house are now clear of debris. Only one problem – it’s full already and we need another one!

Week 5

Week 5 started out with some excitement as we learned that the beam holding up our roof was rotten all the way through. This brought the work to a halt as our contractor built a temporary wall to hold up our roof while we order the new beam. While we were already planning on ordering a new beam, we did not expect things to be quite this bad. Along with the beam, we are going to need about half of our roof replaced. This was unexpected as the roof was replaced about a year before we bought the house. Clearly they didn't do such a good job.

Even with this happening, we managed to get the third floor bedroom layout figured out - and got to knock some more walls out! We also made some significant progress on our bathroom.
I have to admit that we were pretty lazy this weekend.

Week 4

Our contractor started (kinda)! We got our new furnace and hot water heater this week along with an upgraded gas piping system. (woohoo??). The hot water heater is a tankless one which is basically a computer with some heat coils.

We got most of the tiling finished this week so not we just have to finish a bit and then we can grout. Geoff finished the mudding and taping so we can soon paint the bathroom. I’m very eager to do this so that we can get the toilet installed! I love how the boarder turned out in with the shower tile, but boy does tiling take FOREVER! I’m impressed at Geoff’s skill and he even taught me how to use a tile saw!

I picked the paint color for the bathroom and I think I may have finally picked a color for the rest of the apartment, but with all those choices I may just change my mind again. We also ordered our granite countertop and the doors for the bedroom/bathroom. While we were there we picked up a garage door opener which Geoff installed on Saturday.

The sad part of this week is that we failed at getting a dumpster. We were supposed to have one delivered on Friday but there is still too much snow :(. We also meet with our FHA inspector and made our first draw for money. We’ll see how that goes…

Week 3

We picked up our new hot water heater this week just in time for our contractor to install it early next week. We also got our new garage door. At first they tried to deliver a small 1 car garage door so Geoff had to send that back. Thankfully they were able to find ours because Geoff had already taken down the old door. All this happened while I was at an all day meeting Saturday oblivious to what was going on.

We knocked the wall down between two of the 2^nd floor bedrooms. The second floor is being reduced from “4” bedrooms to 2. Knocking down this wall down takes care of two small bedrooms, making them into a usable bedroom. One of the other “bedrooms” is more like a small closet and is not legally big enough to be considered a bedroom, plus it doesn’t have a closet. So we are adding this onto the bathroom. This means the first two floors (unit 1) will only have two bedrooms. Though not very happy about this, this makes the floor plan much more usable.

I’m beginning to get more skills in construction and I put them to use this weekend. While I was waiting for Geoff to finish some work, I took down all of the interior doors on the second floor. I put my new drill to use!

Week 2 - Our First Permit

We applied for our first permit this week, which is an interesting process. Our biggest problem was the fact we don’t live at the house. But we can’t live there until we fix it up and fixing it up requires a permit. Hmmm… but we did finally talk them into giving us one once they found our homestead paper work. Whew!

We also continued to make some progress on reconstructing our bathroom. We got the plumbing in, the sub-floor and insulation installed, and began to drywall the room. We also got the water turned on. This means that once we get that toilet installed we won’t have to go to the neighboring gas station anymore! Woo hoo!

I also began the horrific process of removing the 2^nd floor carpet. It is disgusting. I mean repulsively, horrifically disgusting! If you don’t believe me check out the pictures in the demo and reconstruction part of the photo page. I can’t wait to get this part over.

Week 1

Week 1 seemed to be about spending money. This is probably one of my favorite parts of this project. It has been a ton of fun designing the apartment part of our house and finally getting to buy all of the materials to create it was awesome! Plus we can learn from our mistakes on the third floor (hey we don’t have to live there) and this will make designing the first 2 floors even more fun! We also ordered our garage doors purchase and installed the service door. We have even started to receive some of this material which is extra exciting – we have a fridge!

We also got to do a walk through with our contractor and finalize some of our plans. He won’t be starting until March 16^th, but he is getting some materials ordered including our new windows for the 2^nd and 3^rd floors. This is the first time I have gotten to meet him and he seems like a nice guy. Anyone out there looking for a general contractor – I’ll let you know if he is any good.

We began some of the demo this week and boy are we both sore!