Let's catch up...

So, let's catch up. When last we posted, Brad was working on painting the downstairs with the bullet proof oil-based primer of stinkiness. Before the primer?

Kind of gross looking, eh? Well, here's the after.

Looks so much better now. In fact, there is no sign of the green kitchen color anywhere either. 

And, the living room looks so much brighter. 

The mud guy (Terry) came through, and then the sand and prime guys came through. Before

And after?

Next up - tile laying. We managed to get the hardibacker dry fit to living room patio area and laundry room. We just need to thinset and screw that bad boy down.

But, we also have to tile the garage entry and half bath. Well, that half bath? It's gotta go. Plus, we hadn't done any demo in a while. We were starting to get itchy. Before:

During:

Almost after

I do so hope that we are nearly complete with ripping out old subfloor layers. It's getting a bit old.

How about upstairs? Well, the flooring guys finished. Here's what Sydney's room looks like now. Shiny!

How about some new floor in the kitchen? Meet Stuart, the floor install guy.

After day 1, here's our new kitchen floor

Once they sand down the original dining room floor, it is going to look seamless. Awesome. Stuart was back the next day to finish up the kitchen and living room. Here it is before cleanup.

But, before Stuart started, the sanding guys showed up to give it an initial sand so that James could start installing cabinets. Did someone order some cabinets?

 Next up? Installing them. The first ceremonial cabinet.

Next, the rest of the wall cabinets so that the plumber (Dennis, we do love Dennis) can come and finish reconnecting the heat. So, here's the first wall of lower cabinets, including the sink base, dishwasher (hole on the left side), trash cans, wall ovens and microwave.

Since we removed some of the heating, we needed to add some back in. So, just like our house on Springfield Center the toe kick heater is right under the sink base.

And, as I will be saying from now until the end of time... TOE KICK! (Megan will get the joke, maybe). This weekend? Finish removing all of the subfloor and then thinsetting the hardiebacker down.

Until next time (which will hopefully be Monday!)

Post Memorial Day Work

I, Heather, am taking back to blog posting. Brad's are fine, just a little utilitarian. Also, he keeps insinuating that I don't do any work. I've decided to take matters back into my own hands. 

First up on our post-memorial day work week, a big thanks to Tess! As you can tell from the picture, she attempted to take Sydney down the slide. Which, as you might be able to tell from her bootie, is absolutely disgusting. She and Sydney then scrubbed it down and then had some more fun with Sydney.

You may remember, on Memorial Day morning, we worked to clean up the upstairs so that the wood guys could get things going. The flooring guy came to do some of the patch work. So, now this...

Becomes this!

Fancy! What's even more amazing is that the existing wood, once sanded down, matches it perfectly. I guess the flooring guys were right when they said it was white oak, and not red oak. 

You may also recall that the fight against the wallpaper was not going in my favor. The painted over wall paper was going reasonably well. Until, we reached the last wall in the kitchen. I've started to call it my Everest. I had to hand scrape the top layers off. Someone had done something really squirrelly to this wall. They had patched over the wallpaper before painting. I have no idea why. So, our normal method of perforate, soak, and lightly scrape with a flexible spatula was abandoned for the glories of the razor-edged floor scraper. What's even more amazing is that I didn't gouge the drywall more than I did. Once I revealed the backing paper (shown below), I was able to easily get everything else off. Oof. Did I mention that Sydney's room is also painted over wallpaper? Hello new Everest!

Onto scraping the living room wallpaper glue off next. The goopy, nasty, thick glue. Procedure? Hit with chemicals, wait, scrape with spatula, scrape with razor, scrub number 1 with scrub pad, sponge off 1, scrub off with second pad and bucket of water, sponge off second sponge and water. Time consuming, but since you can actually see it coming off, it's not so bad. 

In the meantime, the insulation and drywall guys came. First - the insulation earlier in the week. They spray foamed the ceiling. Then, the put up the mesh and packed in the blown in cellulose. The end result? Puffy pillow ceiling in the living room.

Brad's laundry room sound proofing with spray foam looked a little like this:

I really hope we like where all the AV wires are, because we are SO not changing it now. Now, I posted the nice picture. The first one I took, Sydney was eating puffs standing in front of the wall. With the flash and a puff in her mouth, she looks completely possessed. It's awesome. And, it's my new phone background. Share it with you? OK.

I will eat your SOUL!

The drywall guys came by and hung the sheetrock up. Very exciting, but also a little nerve racking. What if we forgot something? EEK! But, as fun as those puffy ceiling pillows of insulation look - they leak. I am more than ready for that the end. Bring on the ceiling guys!

It's completely awesome right? BTW- That wall has been scrubbed clean of paste. You can tell right? Yeah. Still looks like crap. But hey, at least it's smooth. Another view of the drywall going up.

Wonder how they get those 16 ft sheets up into place? 

It doesn't look very comfortable does it? Terry, our mud guy, came by Friday morning and started mudding things. I don't have any pictures of that. They also started sanding the upstairs floor. But, I don't have any pictures of that either. So, you'll have to wait for our fabulous weekend activities in the next post after I steal the pictures off of Brad's phone or he posts the update. Highlights: finished scraping the glue off of the walls, purchased materials to start doing the tile floors in the laundry and entryway, sanded the walls, and then Brad painted everything with the world's most awesome, but also noxious, oil-based primer. I think his nose may be permanently ridged from the respirator. Poor thing. 

More of the same... extended Memorial weekend edition!

Screwed down some more of the subfloor in the kitchen, addition and the laundry room over the past few days. All the subfloor that's accessible is now screwed down. I also cut out one piece of subfloor in the doorway to the 1/2 bath so the wood installers could get into that space.

Installed more blocking under the addition to stiffen up the subfloor in there. Heather cut the pieces while I was in the crawlspace. Our first round of this work on Friday used one 8' 2x4. Saturday, we used another three 2x4s. There are still some spots I would like to block, but we'll have to do that later.

So, on to Sunday. We had to tackle the wallpaper residue so we could paint the walls so the drywaller could get in and install drywall and then tape and mud. They can't mud over wallpaper residue. You can't do anything except wallpaper over wallpaper residue.So, we spent about 6 hours there doing that.

Then, we went home to have some burgers. Yum.

Monday, we spent some time cleaning up the upstairs and adjusting priorities. The contractor told us the wood floor people want to start upstairs rather than lay wood on the first floor. This is to deconflict with the drywall work. So, we had to shift and get everything ready for that work. So, I took out the carpet runner in the hall.

And the one on the stairs.

Then, Heather spent a couple of hours cleaning up the upstairs rooms.

She also took out a couple of nails and a tack strip in the master bath and a couple of small tack strip pieces left over in one of the bedrooms.

Bonus feature for this post! We found this under the addition in the crawlspace.

Spray foam and in wall activities

Spray foam guys came and were able to do part of the job.

Thus, we had a window of time to install our in wall cord management system. Heather and I met at the house and discussed strategy, then picked up Sydney and had dinner. I went back over for about 2 hours and completed the work. I also installed that second 2x4 for mounting the TV on.

One long Tuesday night

Prior to the spray foam/cellulose installers, we needed to run speaker wire. We didn't want to run it along the walls or the floors so we ran it in the walls and ceiling.

This only took us about 3 hours to do, but meant that we arrived home about 11pm. Sydney was with us the whole time. I was amazed we didn't have a meltdown. Oh, and sydney was well behaved too.

One long weekend

Brian came up for the weekend and helped with a lot of things.

First, though, the roofers came to replace the membrane roof.

They also replaced some pieces of plywood. It was 1/2" again.

And repaired some of the pieces that were chewed up and/or rotted.

They laid down foam to create a slope so water wouldn't pool in the middle of the roof.

Applying the membrane.

Then, a bunch of fiddly bits. Fiddly bits always seem to take forever.

All this was completed on Friday, except for one piece of trim which didn't get sent correctly.

I spent a bit of time pulling some more carpet pad staples and Heather took out some closet components (doors and shelf parts) to allow access to the wood floor for the flooring crew.

Here is a list of the things Brian and I did:

Installed ceiling fan boxes
Ran new wiring to fan boxes
Installed new switches for fan and fan lights
Changed switched outlets so they were constant hot
Removed the rest of the 5/8" ply subfloor in the addition
Added some blocking under the addition subfloor to stiffen the floor (at the sliding glass doorway and at the walkway between the addition and kitchen - both high traffic areas)
Added some blocking under the toilet since it was unclear how much water damage there might be due to toilet leak
Changed a leaking S trap in the full bathroom
Changed a leaking toilet seal in the full bathroom
Changed the toilet shutoff valve from crappy to a 1/4 turn ball valve