Well we pushed off sheetrocking another weekend (per my dad’s request) and since we had enough flooring (we noticed after we moved it and organized it) AND the playroom emptied out – Ryan decided to lay the flooring in the playroom this weekend! It looks awesome – same cherry as upstairs.
Saturday progress (1/2 day)And finished up early Sunday afternoon!
I’m so excited – 1 more project done and a big pile of wood removed (mostly) from the hallway! On Sunday while Ryan was laying the floor and the kids were at Grandma’s house I did some electrical and then did our final kitchen design.
In the afternoon we went to home depot and ordered our cabinets and counters for our kitchen!
Kitchen colors
The main kitchen cabinets (around the fridge, and the outside walls of the kitchen) will be Dover (off white). The island cabinets will be the Bali blue color! The granite is white with grey/black speckles. Below is a rendering that is pretty close to what it will look like. We can’t fit a cabinet above the fridge so ryan will build a flat piece to make it line up with the cabinets and we’ll paint it to match. The island will also have an overhang towards the window side of the kitchen that we can all sit around and eat if we’d like.
3d view of cabinetsFinal cabinet layout
Fun stuff! Now i’m really excited about the kitchen renovation – it will be a lot of work though and I’m just ignoring the fact that I’ll have to feed the family some how without a kitchen 🙂
It’s been a LONG while since I did a house update – we really took most of the summer off of house renovations but we are gearing up for a busy fall/winter!
The big project right now was emptying out the ‘office/craft room’ and the ‘playroom’. The playroom was already sheetrocked but not taped so now that’s ready to be taped -toys are distributed throughout the house (bedrooms and livingroom and diningroom) – nice and cozy ..ugg!
The office we had to do electrical (install lights), add strapping to the ceiling, build the walls in the closet for the washer/dryer, install the dryer vent and electrical for the washer/dryer (to be finished tonight actually). Sheetrock is being delivered today! To be installed next weekend and then hopefully start taping shortly after.
We built some shelves in the basement to hold the tools that were in the officeStrapping and lights added – we have temp lights strung right now to help work at nightNew wall and vent for dryer in the closetThe other thing that was being stored in there was our leftover flooring – we’re hoping this is enough we can floor the playroom with it and get that room finished next!
Ryan really wants to get our kitchen renovation done soon so our current plan is as follows :
Sheetrock office
Tape/Spackle office and playroom
Prim playroom and office
Set up and use office as is (move my office and maybe toys in there to unclutter diningroom)
Add flooring in playroom
Add doors and trim to playroom
Finish floors
Paint playroom
Set up playroom!!!!
Demo kitchen… yikes!
We’ll see – i’m thinking we’ll do kitchen after xmas – ryan wants it done before xmas … i just don’t see that happening!
I think I’m 2 weeks behind – so let me catch up. The weekend before last Ryan and his dad sheetrocked the master bedroom (yay!) – i think we have 1 piece left that is waiting on me re-wiring the switch because they cut out the sheetrock that had the switch installed (it had an old work box, needs to be changed to a new work box).
In the meantime I was spackling the bathroom most evenings and finished that last Thursday – plus our tile arrived for the bathroom on Thursday too. So we were thinking – ready for tile prep this weekend but alas Ryan was concerned about the engineering loads to hold the marble tile without it at some point cracking or popping. He did some calculations and realized we had a few issues – a) our floor joists weren’t even 2x10s – they are like 8 1/2″ wide not 9 1/2. Then the subfloor plywood is not structural flooring plywood. Finally the hardi backer we had down which is not structural is also not recommended for Kerdi because they don’t bond well. Plus there’s major sag in the floor towards the middle – and leveling would just add more weight. The hardi backer we put down and it was glued so taking it up was no easy thing.
The plan :
Take up all the flooring (hardi and plywood) in the bathroom.
Jack up the floor from underneath to reduce a bit of the sag
Add 2x6s on the flat to the bottom of each joist – making a T beam essentially – they are glued and screwed – we lose 1.5″ of ceiling height downstairs in that room but gain a LOT of strength to the floor
Laminate each side of the floor joists with plywood (we do this a lot to add strength – works great)
Put down 3/4 structural plywood then a layer of 1/2 that we will then use the Kerdi system on – including the underlayment on the floor
This was quite a project and due to the rough in plumbing being done – we had to pull that out and the water lines will have to be re-run. Luckily the drain lines were fine – except for taking out the toilet flange – they were mostly waiting to be installed anyhow. So a little re-plumbing has to be done – but we have a much more structurally sound bathroom floor and our tiles should not crack.
So far we got steps 1-4 done above – plywood isn’t down yet because we have to take down the jacks (so waiting for glue to fully cure) – then they’ll shim the plywood as they install it to get it more level. I assume this will happen a bit next weekend.
In good news the sheetrock held up surprisingly well and we hadn’t sanded yet at least! So there’s a crack over the door – which is very expected since that’s center of the room – which will be repaired once the new floor is in. Then we just have to patch that one crack, sand/prime/paint the rest. Then we can move on to tiling!
We also got the boat out of the water for the season and cleaned off really well – I think the weather is warm and sunny tomorrow so once the rug dries we’ll finish winterizing it and cover the boat then move it to store it over by the driveway (it’s by the hose right now) 🙂
Finally some pictures of what our office ceiling looks like now – and you can see through the floor joists to the bathroom – nothing like going backward in a renovation to move forward in a better direction!
2x6s along the bottom of each joist and it’s still jacked upYou can see the bathroom upstairs – spackling done – and the plywood laminated on the sides
We will continue this across the rest of the office – to support our bedroom floor which we’re not actually worried about but for consistency. We are going to pull up the 1/2 inch particle board in the master bedroom and replace with 1/2 or 3/4 plywood as a better subfloor for our hardwood.
We also purchased another 750 board feet of Cherry lumber – milled 40 years ago – going to have it turned into flooring for our bedroom and the playroom! That should be getting delivered this weekend and we’ll take it next week to the mill for planing. We need to get more still – for the rest of the downstairs but when you get a deal on good Cherry and we’re going with Cherry throughout – we had to jump at it!
We took our annual ‘birthday week’ off between Ryan’s and my birthday. It sure is a bit different having kids though – and not living in the house we are renovating yet. I haven’t updated in a while so let me just update by project.
We’ve been working on Siding before this week off … the dormers got new siding – the fronts and one side. No progress over our staycation as we had inside projects to focus on but it looks great!
Siding matches the old stuff great!
Sheetrock – Alex and Bella’s rooms are both almost done with hanging sheetrock. They both have small sections that need rock and then all the taping/spackling. We held off on totally finishing as we knew we had to jack up Alex’s room and put in some better supports under the floor (we’ll do the same to the master). So over staycation we did the jacking up part but before that we made good progress on the sheetrock:
Alex’s room has 2 pieces of sheetrock left to do (small sections)
I don’t have a picture of Bella’s room but hers is done except for her closet!
Over vacation we focused on some more heavy lifting type projects. Kitchen ceiling project – jacked up and added to the main joist holding most of the weight …
Jacked up
New blocking and supporting that one floor joist and the floor upstairs is MUCH firmer! And raised up quite a bit.
Blocking
Another project as the washer/dryer closet. We had to widen the opening on a load bearing wall as well as build a new bathroom wall since we’re pushing that back to make room for the washer/dryer. This is in what will be my sewing room/office.
New openingAnother view
All that demo (which was what we did on Monday) – also got trecked over to the dump – no dumpster this time around. Cleanup is done though and looking good. Not too much left to demo in our house – just a few ceilings, the rest of the kitchen eventually and the livingroom when we get to that.
Since we demo’d the kitchen ceiling and I had to move a bunch of wires around anyhow – I installed some new kitchen lights – functional but not pretty 🙂
Much better for cooking though!
Thursday was sheetrock day – the little bathroom! Ryan and his dad got sheetrock hung on all but 1 small section that we are waiting on plumbing on (just moving the tub spout);
Bathroom rocked
We are in pretty good shape. A tiny bit of sheetrock left to hang then taping time. I’m hoping to start taping this week. Our big goal is now to finish the 2 kids bedrooms and the small bathroom so we can move in to those and finish the rest once in – no longer trying to get the whole upstairs done. Things will move faster once we move in (and slower too). We’d really like to move in for memorial day – not sure if it will happen but hoping 🙂
Ryan took Friday off last week and we spent the day at the lake house. I had the girls so didn’t do much myself but he got the insulation all removed from the basement ceiling!
On Sunday I did the final basement cleanup (sweeping and bagging up the tiny things – mostly mouse poop) and vacuuming. The basement is ready for the next step next weekend!
On Saturday Alex went up to camp with her grandparents so we had just Bella which meant I had some time to help out a bit when she napped. I got the tack pieces and trim out of the back room downstairs and Ryan and I started taking up the particle board in that room – upstairs we plan to leave it but in this room it was gross and had to come up – it’s not an easy project! We got about 1/2 done.
Ryan also got some trim removed upstairs (no pictures due to lighting). On Sunday we went around and removed all the window trim that we needed to so we could take measurements and get windows ordered. We didn’t plan to order this early but we already picked out the kind we want (Anderson 400) and they are having a 10% off sale this week so we decided to put the order in and we’ll have them when we need them. Always good to save some money.
Evenings and weekend work has continued at the new house, we have a dumpster now so it’s a bit easier to cart everything out. All the doors have been removed, all carpet except for a few stair treads has been removed. 2 walls have been removed in the bedrooms where the dormers will go.
Master bedroom – dormer and closets will go here.Downstairs smaller room – carpet removedDownstairs larger room carpet removed and evidently we’ll be removing this particle board stuff too!Staircase – carpet removed from most of it.
Last weekend was busy as we had a family pig roast to attend out west and then we spent sunday with family and out buying a boat (lots of driving!). Next weekend we should have our new (to us) boat and we’ll also be spending the night at the new house, and a 3 day work weekend on the house. The basement work will get started next!
