A Little Catch Up

There have been a few projects around the house that I have neglected to blog about. A lot of these involve the upstairs so I'll start from the bottom up. You may recall that we have (or had) a door at the bottom of our stairs. We also had a bulk head right after the door that you would hit your head on every time you went up the stairs. These two things made it impossible to get anything bigger than a twin upstairs which to us wasn't reasonable. After checking to make sure that there wasn't a reason for the bulkhead, which there wasn't, we took them both out. Now we can easily fit basically any size mattress upstairs! Here are the before and what it currently looks like.

 And this is the disappearing bulk head

Our next neglected project is the whole house fan. Our upstairs geats REALLY hot when it's hot outside and so we installed the fan to relieve some of the heat. It works really well and was actually pretty easy to install. It basically turns any windows that are open into fans so when it's cool outside you get all the hot air out and the cool air into the house.

 

 

 Our next stop is in what has become my favorite room in the house. Our guest room is in it's final stages of finishing touches. In my opinion it is very comfortable and now that we have window coverings, our guests can sleep in!

Before

After

So that is the update on some of the neglected areas of the house. As for the areas we are actively working on, we are making pretty good progress on the back porch. The support beams under the entrance of the porch were no longer really supporting anything so Nate made a new footing and ripped out and replaced the retaining wall that had been damaged. He also finished framing out the back of the house so now you can start to see what it's going to look like!

New retaining wall and support beam

Outside view

Inside View

We have a tarp over the door area so water doesn't get on all the wood stored in that area so you can't really see that area. We also found out that we get to pick up our windows and doors tomorrow so hopefully by this weekend we will have those installed and it will look closer to a room!

The Demise of the Pool - Part I

This past weekend my dad came down to help with the house. He spent Saturday morning loading up the rest of the trash from the gazebo and organizing (yes organizing) the trash in the dumpster. By the middle of the afternoon we had the most organized dumpster I have ever seen. It is amazing how much more you can fit into an organized dumpster than one where you just toss things in willy nilly.

 Unfortunately the carpet is blocking the view of the perfectly stacked old wallboard.

All the trash is gone!

As you can see, this weekend included renting a jack hammer in order to start taking apart the pool. This has been a long anticipated moment for us and unfortunately jackhammering does not lend itself to speedy results. Above you can see Adam starting the process.

Here are the boys about an hour or so into jack hammering... The walls of the pool are about a foot thick and since they are trying to jack hammer vertically down it makes it really hard to control the jack hammer. After a few more hours they got one vertical line cut in the concrete and by the next day there was enough done to push a wall down!

Before the wall went down

 And it's down!!

By Sunday afternoon/evening we had the long wall ready to go down but we had to break up the short wall first. Unfortunately we ran out of time with the jack hammer so the rest of the pool will have to wait until later this week to come down.

The Destruction Continues

Between jobs, puppies, trips and holidays, we've been to busy to update the blog! However, we have not been to busy to keep ripping things apart at the house. The water damage in the support beam for the floor joists in the back porch was bad enough that Nate ripped down the entire back wall.

Here is the back of the house with the top part of the wall taken down. We were able to keep the roof and side walls in tacked but you can see even from this picture how gross the supporting beam was.

And it's gone! Nate and his dad were able to support the floor and replace the supporting beam. They also were able to level the previously slanted floor and make it super solid.

This is what the back of the house looks like now. Since we had to special order our door and windows (leveling the floor made the back of the house a few inches smaller than a standard door) they won't be here for a month and so the framing is on hold while we try and finish up some other projects. One of those projects was/is the gazebo/trash bin in our back yard.

This is what it looked like a few days ago

After taking a lot of trash out and the half walls down

And down it goes!

Now that the gazebo is gone we can get the rest of the trash out and into the roll off. We are currently on our second roll off. They carted off 30 cubic yards (5 tons) of trash yesterday. This is proving to be much more tiring than expected especially due to the 90+ degree weather we've been having and the 2 bee hives we've discovered in the process.

As of today we are also completely moved out of the house we were house sitting for. This means that we currently have boxes piled up all over the place that don't have a place to go yet. Since it was so hot and humid today, Nate worked in the much cooler basement making storage selves.

Now we have a place to put our things that don't have a place yet like all our sporting equipment!

It is now late and we all are tired so I will leave you with what we do before we go to bed after a long day of work.

We all take showers

And then we pass out regardless of where we are