Finally, an update....

Long time, no post.  I guess that's what happens when you do a super crazy move, trying to pack one house and paint and repair the other all while being pregnant with a bad case of anemia.  I had never felt so weak in all my life!

Laundry room before

 Laundry room, work in progress

We still have flooring, trim and stuff to finish, but what a difference.

Bonus Pic:  baby Jade

Progress....finally

Things are finally starting to look better instead of worse at the house.  The plumbing is all in.  We haven't turned it on yet, maybe next week once we are past the worst of the cold weather.  Hot water heater is installed and ready to go.  The kitchen wall is all wired, insulated and dry walled.  Rob got the line for the oven all ran and hooked up.  We can cook now if we want to.  Now to work on getting the cabinets sanded and painted so those can go in.  Lots of painting to do in the kitchen too.  Not to mention the cleaning that needs to be done.  Any volunteers for cleaning or painting????

 

Windows are in.....kitchen is gone

We started ripping out the kitchen cabinets.  The plan is to remove cabinets, appliances and whole back wall of kitchen and start over.  These cabinets are so disgusting it is ridiculous.  I have never seen so much mouse poop in my life.  It's like they had a mouse motel underneath them.  The cabinets would have been nice to keep if they had not been so nasty.  There was so much dirt/grime on them I don't think you could have made them right.  They were actually built all together interjoining, so it was impossible to just remove each cabinet.  They came out in chunks and pieces.

 

 What a mess.  Now we are going to remove all the insulation because it is crunchy????  I don't know what happened to it, but it is not normal.

 This is our new kitchen window.

 And one of our bedroom windows.

 Our other bedroom window.

 My sewing room/spare bedroom window.

 One of the upstairs windows.

Another new window. 

 And the new door.

 

 Our well is all drilled and hooked up and ready to go.  Now we just need some plumbing......

 Bonus Pic:  Tirzah's 5th Birthday.

This was shared on Homestead Barn Hop #148

Good Finds on Craigslist

Well we didn't do much work ourselves on the house this past week other than continuing the gutting of the upstairs.  We went to Home Depot and picked up our windows that we had ordered.  We found some good electricians off craiglist that are doing the work for a fraction of the price you'd normally pay.  We have to upgrade the electrical panel, fix a bunch of messed up wiring, and run new wiring to the upstairs.  We had been debating on what to do with the kitchen cabinets in the house.  Here's some pics of the kitchen......

I know it's hard to tell from the pics, but these cabinets are disgustingly dirty.  I have looked at a lot of dirty foreclosed homes, but these cabinets are the worst.  I don't even know if they are cleanable.  So we were wanting to just rip them out and get rid of them, problem was with all the other repairs needed, we really don't have the money to buy new cabinets and counter top.  But we found a really good deal on craigslist on some used cabinets.  They have some slight damage, but definately fixable and WAY better than what is in the house now. I'm so glad we found them even if we did have to drive 30 miles in the negative wind chills to load them up and freeze our butts off.  Here's the pics of the new cabinets.  Can't wait to get them in the house and all set up, but I'm sure it will be some time till we're ready for that.

Bonus Pic:  Colby being a geek

 

This was shared on Homestead Barn Hop #144.

The demolition continues

Here's a little update.  We got all the walls tore out in the boys room.  We just have to drop the ceiling.  Ceilings are always the worst and this one has a ton of insulation above it in the attic.  We also have to tear out more of the big boards like you see in the picture below.  The boards are pretty thick and all the insulation is behind them.

 

 We haven't decided what we're going to do with the chimney yet.  Once we get the ceiling down we'll have a better idea of what is there.  It might be better to just leave it there and drywall around it then to tear a million pounds of brick out.

 This is my brother Joe helping out.

 This is Tirzah's bedroom.  We don't have all the walls tore down yet in there.  It takes so long to clean up all the plaster.  We have to scoop it up into a trash can, haul it down the stairs, thru the house and out to the dumpster.  Plaster is HEAVY.  You can only get about 1/4 of the trash can filled and still hope to be able to drag it out.  If you're lucky you can heave it up and dump it in the dumpster without looking like a fool.  Or if you're me, it takes a couple times and you look like a complete weakling and feel like your arms are about to fall off.  When we tore all this plaster off in the picture below, we discovered they had had a fire at one time.

 This is one of the boards we pulled off, all burnt.  I'm not sure how the fire started or how they put it out.  The lath and plaster was all in tact.  But the boards are so burnt, it must have been a pretty good fire.

 This is what the living room currently looks like.  Our pile of lath and paneling that just wasn't going to fit into the dumpster.

 And one dumpster filled.  We'll be getting another in a couple weeks.

 And our carpet pile is gone!  haha

Bonus picture:  Tirzah working on her birthday party invitations.

This post was shared on Homestead Barn Hop #143

Let the Demolition Begin

Well after much thought we decided to gut the entire upstairs of the house.  I don't know how we're going to afford to put it all back together, but we'll figure it out somehow.  This will be the easiest way to get it done because once you're all moved in it becomes more of a hassel, furniture moving, the dirtiness of it all......Anyway, the upstairs really was in the worst shape.  Crumbling plaster, old paneling, patched over spots where the roof had leaked bad, old old windows, old wiring.  Plus once we get the ceiling down we will discover what kind of creatures are hiding up there.


Here are the starting pictures where we have just took off the paneling and started busting out plaster.

 The bumped out part of the blue wall here is actually an old chimney that someone has just plastered over the brick.  The chimney actually just starts right on the 2nd floor and was only used for heating the upstairs of the house, way back when.

 The spot up on the sloped part of the ceiling actually had a piece of metal covering it that we removed.  They at one time had a really bad roof.  There are signs of leaking throughout the house.  This must have leaked so badly that it actually destroyed part of the plaster.  The one NEW thing the house does have is a roof.  So they did fix the roof, just not all the water damage.

 This bedroom has an overhead light, but no light switch and so we cannot use the light.  WEIRD.  Also Rob loves it when I get him in the picture! (not really!)  You can also see water damage in the pic on the floor where the broken window pane has leaked.  I guess duct tape doesn't fix everything!  ha



Next time I will post the post demo pics.  I completely forgot to take pics once we finished up.  We managed to get all the plaster and lathe boards off the walls in one bedroom.  Completely forgot to bring something to scoop all the plaster up with though.  So next time we'll clean that up, then drop the ceiling.  Lots of blown in insulation up there and it will be quite the job, but nothing we haven't done before, unless an animal happens to drop on us.


Bonus Picture.  4 new pillows I made.  Gavin just loves them.

 

This was shared on the Homestead Barn Hop #142

After the Ice Storm

Here's our latest work.  We tore down the ceiling of the laundry room.  They couldn't stay, a lot of them were falling down already.

I made sure to save a bunch of the tiles I pulled down.  There were actually some that looked pretty new. 

 I need them to fix the living room ceiling which has a big water damaged spot.  Actually most of the rest of the living room ceiling is in pretty good shape except for this spot.

 Here's some pics of the yard showing the damage from the ice storm.

 Colby found himself a good job.  He enjoys tearing down wallpaper apparently.

 

 

 

And a little bonus pic, my quilt I just finished for our couch.