Half A House

Week 1

7am, Tuesday, Sept. 7

Ask me how excited I am that our builder, Jim Wright-Kaiser, has his crew start their work day at 7am!!! I guess if there is one good thing about my hormone chaos right now, it is that I am usually awake at 5am anyway, so the coffey pot just goes on then :o)

As the sun came up, the dumpster arrived (we suspect our neighbors are loving us more than they already do!)

Jim's crew of 6 strong young men landed on the house like a swarm of flies and took no time at all raising the front porch. It took them about 3 hours to remove it. This brought us great pleasure as we have wanted that eye sore removed since we bought this house.

You can see why this porch needed to come down now before it fell down. YUCK! We expect the porch was added about 25-30 years ago and wasn't built very well. It has always leaked since we have lived here (9 years now).

We are having the crew remove the original cedar siding so that we can reuse most of it to re-side the new addition. This house was built in 1953 and the siding is in fantastic condition. They just don't build houses today like they used to. The quality materials used in 'the old days' last a lifetime.

Wow! The house already looks so different without the porch.

This is our friend Josh who is also on the crew. He used to live in one of our rental houses. He is the one who introduced us to our builder Jim (who is his step-dad).

The crew quickly moved on to raising the garage after the porch came down.

This is our builder Jim. A really wonderful guy and a great builder. He helped us remodel the roof and add on a new front porch to one of our rental houses a few years ago. Please take note of this friends if any of you have any building needs. And, yes, that was a plug for Jim :o)

Once the siding was removed from the garage we noticed what perfect shape the original douglas fir framing was in, so we decided to salvage most of the lumber to reuse in the construction of the addition (ching, ching! I can hear the savings). That cedar siding really has protected the framing for the last 57 years. Absolutely no bug or water damage anywhere. Not even on the roof.

This is Chris, our youngest member of the crew at 20 years old. He is a solid ball of testosterone. He attacks every task with gusto and wasn't even asked to take this sledge hammer to the concrete porch slab. He just wanted to do it for fun! Just couldn't wait until tomorrow when the jack hammer shows up to help out with that task.

It is amazing how they got the porch and garage raised in one day. They are certainly moving right along.

At the end of the first day, we now have about half a house.

Can't wait to see what happens tomorrow :o)

New Digs

Here is an update on what's been happening during the last 10 days.

We have finished moving everything out of the living room, dining room and kitchen. It's a miracle we have been able to store everything (except the couch) in other parts of the house, which will save us a chunk of money otherwise spent on renting a storage space. Believe me, now that all of the estimates have come in, we are hacking away at saving every penny we can (I REALLY want a new stove for the kitchen if we have any cash left after the build :o) ).

Here are some photos of the final move and our new living space:

For protection, we are covering all of the wood floors with a layer of red rosin paper, cardboard and then OSB board on top of that.

The kitchen floor will be covered the same way. I have started taking some of the cabinets out too.

The doorways to the hallway, kitchen and washroom will be sealed off from the bedrooms and bathrooms to help protect us from the demolition noise and dust (yeah, right!). I am screwing a layer of blue foam, plywood, tape and plastic to the door frames to seal us off.

Here are some shots of our new digs. We have set up the kitchen and living room in the basement (we added a stainless steel sink last year in preparation). It is all working out pretty well, so we think we may survive trying to live here while half of our house is torn away (who needs clean clothes anyway?....).

So, all of you know by now how much I love to cook. Well, this new situation presents a challenge as the stove is currently being stored in the garage. To solve this problem, we went out and bought a new grill last weekend. We had intended to use our camp stove, but we will need a new grill for the new grill chimney on our new front porch anyway, and since they are all on sale right now, it was the right thing to do. We got a steal deal on a new grill that includes a burner on one side, so I am still able to cook some pretty tasty morsels.

Here is my first try at coq au vin with mashed potatoes using the new grill. Yummy!

Also included is a delicious heirloom tomato. It looks like we will not starve :o)

Get ready for some MAJOR demolition in my next post.

No Turning Back Now

We are committed. Or, maybe I need to say 'we SHOULD be committed!'. The Baker Stone guys came Monday and removed the stone from the front of the house. It was amazing how quickly the whole thing happened. An example of how having the right tools for the job, and some really strong guys, really makes a difference. They had all of the stone removed by lunch time. Here are a few photos of the process.

This is Bubby. He was the first of the crew to arrive. This man can perform magic with a hammer and chisel.

When Sam (the head of the crew in the white shirt) and the others arrived, things moved along really quickly.

Eventually, the guys brought out the big guns using a small hand held jack hammer to remove the more difficult stones. The sound and vibration in the house sent the cats right under the bed to take cover..........and this is only the beginning! We found it truly amazing how these guys pick up these stones like they are a bag of groceries. We are glad to let them do this part of the job.

All of the stone is being stacked on pallets in the front yard. It will all be reused to extend the height of the chimney and added with some new stone to build the new porch.

The house is now naked on the front and of course it will now RAIN!!!!! I will be covering the exposed part of the house with plastic by Thursday morning. Starting next week the house will lose an arm - the old garage. stay tuned for that. We cannot wait for that old porch to be gone too!

This weekend we will lose our kitchen for about 4 months. Everything will be moved to the basement, including the fridge. What an adventure!

The Big Shift

Definition: Shift (Oxford English Dictionary) Only appropriate definitions shown.

1. A movement to do something, a beginning 7a. Hist. A woman’s loose-fitting undergarment, orig. worn also by men; a slip, a chamise b. A woman’s loose straight unwaisted dress 9. A group of people working for a specific period of time, usu. One equivalent to a days work; a period worked by such a group of people 11. The action or an instance of shifting; a transfer, a transition; (a) change, a move. And the definitions go on and on and on and on…………

It's time to catch all of you up on what has been happening with our house project for the last couple of weeks. As you can tell from the title of this post, there has been a lot of moving going on and some of it while wearing a dress :o) Lets just clear all of that up right now.

Here are photos of us shifting our things for storage:

The guest room is now the storage room

The dining room gate-leg table has now been moved into Rowan's office as our temporary eating space. You can see we have also moved many of our plants here too. We think it makes a nice cozy little eating spot where we can look out over the backyard and try to forget about the chaos taking place just outside this room.

We have also moved all of the irises and lillies from the front beds of the house. We are storing them in big containers in the backyard during the construction.

Now that shifting should not be confused with this shifting:

I know you must be laughing right now :o) but I do wear my grandmother's old shift sometimes while I am packing (I have even been seen wearing it out front when I am grilling which makes Rowan run and hide). It has been so bloody hot here the last 2 weeks (mid 90's to over 100) that it is the coolest thing I can wear. Gram would be so proud of me!

Here are some photos of what some of the remodel will look like. We have taken masking tape and drawn out on the walls where the entry for the new dining room will be, and where the french doors to the new porch will be. You just need to visualize.

Part of the dining room entry is shown below (that whole wall will be knocked out). Shelves will be added in the rectangle on the left. The window will go away and that wall knocked out too.

The blue tape is the new french doors that will open out to the new stone porch. The existing front door will go away and be moved to the far right end of the orange room in the previous photo. The ceilings will also be removed and we will have new vaulted ceilings with skylights.

And of course the cats have been a tremendous help!

We are not only shifting the contents of our house, but also food and all the ingredients that go along with making it. We have packed away most of the kitchen utensils and cooking pots, etc. except for the basics. We will spend this last week of having our kitchen appliances (stove/oven) by cooking up a storm and filling the freezer with staples to get us through the next few months until we have our kitchen back. We will be cooking by microwave, toaster oven and a camp stove starting Sept. 7 in our temporary kitchen in the basement. We have also moved the gas grill to the back garage so we can do the grilling in the back yard. So, here are a few photos of what is being cooked up for storage in the freezer.

Goolash. A fall and winter staple in our house. My mom's delicious recipe.

Grandmas shift is also frequently found at the butchers block in the kitchen. Still witnessing delicious things being made in the kitchen.

The mince ingredients for shepherd's pie.

And, you just must see the most FABULOUS brandy wine tomato from our garden. A gift from the heavens. Nothing like a fresh sliced tomato to make our hearts go a-pitter-patter. DELICIOUS! Most of our garden was sacrificed last weekend due to construction preparation, so we have pickled all of the beets, pulled all of the sweet candy onions and yanked most of the tomato plants.

Look for update from the stone removal on the front of the house tomorrow :o)

Finishing Phase 1

We have been working hard to finish the first phase of our construction so we can maybe have a couple of weeks without dust on and in everything in the house. Ugh! Hopefully we will begin Phase 2 of this project starting the first week of September. Rowan went off to the UK/Wales last Tuesday, Aug. 11 for a family get together and I remain here to finish up the window installation, painting, cleaning up and starting to pack everything in the living room, dining room and kitchen. When Rowan returns on the 26th, we will move everything for storage.

We were able to get everything cleaned up and moved back into the master bedroom before Rowan went off to the UK. We repainted the entire bedroom as it was the easiest way to get rid of the plaster dust. You can see the wonderful light that comes in now from the new double awning window. Rowan and Fergus couldn't wait to have a nap once the bed was in place.

We are in the middle of an extreme heat wave here in Southern Indiana. It has been between 92 and 110 degrees for the past 3 weeks. Some days it is so humid you can't even go outside. It makes it CRAZY hot when we have to knock a window out and there is a big hole in the side of the house. We try to isolate that room and close it off to the rest of the house so we can keep the AC running. All of this makes for a very early start to our day too as we try to have the old window out and the new one in before 1pm.

Here are a few photos of us finishing up the remaining windows.

Steve does some amazing acrobatics while running the circular saw (kids, don't try this at home!). Here he is cutting the cedar siding so the cedar window trim can be installed. I think we need to enter him in America's Got Talent. Maybe I could even be his assistant in my sexy bib overalls. :o)

Steve and Rowan giving it some heave-ho to get the window up on the scaffold.

........and into the new hole.

The last window to be changed in this phase is the bathroom. This is the only window we did not need to cut a bigger hole and add a new header for (all the other windows are bigger than the original windows). We saved the easiest one for last.

Trimming that nasty plaster. Achoooooo!

We had to get really creative about building a scaffold over the new air conditioner so we could get to the window just above there. We came up with cinder blocks, saw horses, some 2x4's, an old door, some shims here and there and a bunch of screws. Works perfectly. Glad my mom isn't here to stress about seeing us stand on it :o)

Here is the FABULOUS bathroom window. We found this retro pressed glass for the window that we special ordered. It is exactly the same glass that my grandparents had in their old french doors in their bungalow house in California. When I saw it, I just HAD to have it. It's called florex.

A close-up of the florex glass

Here is the finished product. I decided to repaint the entire bathroom too since it has been 9 years and it was ready for some new paint.

I'm so happy this Phase 1 window/closet job is done that I could just go ride a hog! :o)

Stay tuned for more on getting ready for destruction coming soon...............