Salmon Rolls & Surprises

When last we left our intrepid young destroyer (Brad the Demolisher), he had successfully ripped out the drywall and insulation from the living room, and removed the carpet from upstairs. In the meantime, we met with James again for some good news/bad news. The bad news first - due to Brad's master plan to insulate the living room ceiling, we now know that the flat roof leaks, and will need to be replaced. We're still waiting for that number, but bye bye contingency budget.

The good news is that the drywall number came back and if we re-drywall the entire dining room and kitchen ceiling, it's actually going to cost $600 less than trying to patch the holes and match the sand texture. Woohoo!

So, all of the temporary walls are down. And, we finally get an idea of what the space is going to look like. It's awesome. First up - the view of the dining room and future island from the laundry room.

 Next up - the kitchen and dining room from the corner of the living room.

Another view of the kitchen and dining room from the front of the living room.

The view from the kitchen/future pantry area to the living room. You can clearly see Brad's insulation rolls. James called them Brad's salmon rolls, which immediately made me hungry for sushi. Yum.

So, Brad's next tasks - pull the kitchen and dining room ceilings down and remove the insulation in the laundry room ceiling. As Brad has pointed out previous, the ceiling in the living room addition was woefully under-insulated. Not the case in the laundry room. It had a layer of the crappy pink stuff, as well as a nice think layer of yellow insulation.

He did, however, find yet another mouse house. Not as cute as the Mickey kind. And, whichever mouse currently lives in our house is quite smart. I can eat the peanut butter off of the trap without snapping the trap. Brad has tried 2 different trap types, with no success. Sneaky little mouse.

Next up - the kitchen ceiling. Brad hacked away at it and found a surprise. You might see it hanging down in the next picture.

He found a hidden drywall saw. Check it out. Not expected, but not a terrible surprise. Good thing it didn't fall on his head.

Now, onto the bad surprise. Under the upstairs sink, which has been leaking for a while, Brad found some nasty mold. He's found a fair amount of the black stuff throughout the house.

But, what was new was the fuzzy white stuff. Yuck, yuck and yuck. We are really glad we're replacing the whole ceiling at this point. Yuck!

We then met with the painting consultant, who gave us some wall prep tips. Zinsser Cover Stain Oil primer for the walls downstairs after cleaning with plenty of DIF and some scraping. He also left me with a color deck. I guess it's time to pick some colors! I don't know how people live without a color deck. It's my new favorite thing. Think you like that color? No! Too pink! What about the color next to it? Better! Instant gratification. I love it!

I then forced Brad to take me out to lunch at a sushi place (I need some shrimp tempura rolls!) before going to finalize our appliances and get our sink. I'm very excited by the sink! This isn't the exact one we bought (ours is a bit bigger), but the shape is the same. We have even picked out a faucet that's similar to the one in the picture.

Then, we went tile shopping. Which, it turns out, wasn't as difficult as I figured it would be. We even agreed on what we liked. But, we need to go check out another tile place before we finalize our tile selection.

Until next time!

Brad's Sunday is funday activities.

Took out the insulation in the addition ceiling.

And stored it, temporarily.

Anyone who does this:

to this:

should be put in jail. So, I removed the carpet and tack strips in what will be the guest room. Also took out this old chimney hardware

and the awesome patch they had over it. Oh, and that closet shelving went bye bye as well.

I had the house opened up since it was nice and the screen on the screen door on the front door not being seated correctly finally drove me to insanity, er, motivated me to fix it. No pics, but I had to remove the trim piece and adjust the screen insert and then tap the trim retainer piece back into place. Didn't take very long, but it was just another thing that needed attending to.

Also took out some of that trendy brick tile near the garage entrance.

Had to give up on the underlayers. They were nailed in about every 3". It was frustrating.

The misadventures of the I-beam

Hello again!

So, this all happened last Saturday. Brad has been fairly annoyed with me, as it was my job to get the pictures off of the camera and then post them. He has another post from Sunday of last week all ready to go, and that one is now published below.

So, Brad arrives and sees the prep work for the I-beam, as shown below.

Brad went inside to see what James was up to. He was cutting out parts of the beam so that he can slide the 350 lb I-beam into place.

 







Now, before everyone claims that I have a thing for the contractor, I want it to be known that BRAD took all of the pictures of James. So, if anyone has a crush - it's Brad. It was then time to get the beam into the house. All 4 men (including Brad) loaded up and headed up the front stairs.

 

Then, it was time to put the beam onto the lift to get it into position. After some false starts, they finally got it up there. 

They jammed the temporary column supports in and Voila! A beam!

One beautiful, flush-mounted beam, at your service!

Bye bye ceiling

Took out the rest of the carpet, pad and tack strips.

Then, replaced that carpet with some drywall.

Meanwhile, uncovering some wildlife refuges.

and

Next, was the laundry room.

Next on the list is to take down the kitchen ceiling and a few things upstairs (closet and carpet removal). If I have time between helping/watching the beam installation, some of this will hopefully be done this weekend.

More beam goodness happening!

ItsweepingSweepingOur cute little steel beam showed up today. It's not even a wide-flanged I-beam. Disappointing.

The laminated wood beam is up. Well, sort of. It's still missing its support columns.

Finally, the plumber was there to cut stuff out. No more pipes or random hot water runs.

We also learned that Sydney doesn't like the dust. So, she was sweeping It All up. Well, attempting to at least.

Day 3 of the contractor

Just a quick update... James had been at it for 3 days now. He's put in temporary walls and removed the old bearing walls. It looks pretty exciting! More pictures later this week with the better camera, bit here's a few from the dining room towards the living room to tide you over.

Some more progress, inside and outside the house

We spent some of Saturday looking at appliances and meeting with the kitchen guy and our contractor. Multiple thousands of dollars later, we have signed a contract and put a deposit on the kitchen cabinets. Woohoo! Progress.

I spent some time today pulling up carpet.

I was working towards pulling down some drywall from the ceiling in the addition. This will allow the contractor to start on the beam installation this week.

They had some insulation in there, but it looked like only 3.5" R11 batting. Not sure if they had multiple layers in there or not, but it didn't feel like there was much behind that first layer. Also, this was a little gem I discovered.

Yes, that's the vent from the first floor half bathroom. Why am I not surprised...

A significant amount of progress since we last posted...

It's been a while...

So, we've accomplished quite a bit since we last posted. Here is an attempt to catch everyone up on that progress.

In the midst of this:

We are also doing this:

Getting rid of the backing that was under the tile layer and under the vinyl floor in the kitchen. Meanwhile, while catching up on some sleep...

For that backer board, they used some staples to attach it to the sub subfloor


to hold it in place. Needless to say, those weren't coming out without a fight. So, we chose to leave them. They were coming out when we removed the next layer of sub-sub-subfloor anyway.

As we know, the kitchen had vinyl floor on top of a backer on top of other vinyl floor (the original to the house) because who doesn't like to put crap on top of crap?

So, when removing the refrigerator, there was this little gem. The new vinyl floor piece I pulled out is at the bottom, that's the backer board you see. Well, the water line to the fridge was plastic and had disintegrated into more than half a dozen pieces. Not sure how long this leaked, but it wasn't a great find.

Working through those layers brought me to this. Clearly the sub subfloor was water damaged, but was it damaged through to the subfloor? We'll have to wait to see. (SPOILER ALERT!!! Yes, it was a little)

Next, I took out the wire shelving in the laundry closet that we don't like. It was functional, but more than a bit crooked and not at all appealing to us.

Then, it was time to take a break. By that, I mean have to work a Friday, get sick, not do any work at the house, etc.

Now, it's late February and I've been able to get back to the demo work. It's time to take out the tile and all the layers in the laundry room. But, first there's a bit of lint to attend to.

You may wonder why there's so much lint under the washer. Yes, under the washer. Well, it's kind of everywhere. First, it appears that some water connection leaked (are we getting the sense of a trend here???). Then, you'll see they connected the dryer via solid ducting straight through the floor, like so:

There's so much to talk about with this picture. If only I could do it in under 1000 words... First, you see the hard duct going through the floor. They had the dryer connected via a 90 degree elbow and just set in place on that pipe. No clamps. No Screws. Nothing. Hmmm, wonder why it leaked a crapload of lint everywhere... Well, that hard duct is replacing the other, original flexible duct (wait for it) that's behind the square of duct tape, yes, duct tape, on the wall at the top of the picture above.  You'll also notice an outlet, with an oddly placed junction box, none of which is actually attached to the wall. Building code? What's that?

So, in keeping with the trend of quality repairs and high end finishes, you may wonder why someone would choose to put trim, vertically, in a corner from floor to ceiling. Here's why:

At this point, it is becoming clearer that the laundry room was original to the house. I found an old window that was removed when they put the addition on the back.

I was a little surprised they didn't just leave the window in place and drywall over it.

So, I continue taking down drywall. Now, why doesn't this bay of the wall have any insulation in it?

Simple. Mice. They love the pink stuff, kind of like the pink panther, only smaller and the chew on wires.



So, the rest of that room soon turned into this:

Once I had taken down the dividing wall drywall and framing formerly known as a closet.

Now, we're into the second week in March. Time is flying by. We still haven't selected a contractor yet. So, demo still continues, unabated.

Now, it's time to get back to the kitchen cabinetry demo and that sub subfloor removal, with a little help from the wife who's on something called spring break. Not sure what that is, but I hear it's some sort of youth craze. I took off a couple of days to take advantage of the extra pair of hands.

First, remove the dishwasher so we can get at the counter and all that wonderfully, hand-crafted, built-in cabinetry.

Yes, the top of the dishwasher is nice and warm and mice love it. Anyone want a dishwasher? I don't think any mice lived "in" it, so it should be ok, right?

In the meantime, taking out some of the sub subfloor that's not covered with cabinetry to see how it goes. It's painstaking, but goes pretty well. I used a circular saw and started in between nails and we pried that small piece out. Then, we worked our way out from there with pieces that were about 2-3' by 2-3'. 

We did a fair bit and then needed to tackle the cabinetry that was left to get at the rest of the sub subfloor.

So, now that that's done... is there anything related to plumbing in this house that hasn't caused damage? I haven't found it yet.



But, at least now we can get at that sub subfloor in the entire kitchen. Spent much of the spring break time getting most of that subfloor out and the remnants of the kitchen cabinetry

Then, we had a dumpster delivered.

And I loaded it with everything I wanted to get rid of... well, except for one thing.

 

Continued taking out the sub subfloor in the laundry room. At this point, it is obvious that it's original to the house. The vinyl flooring matches, it's at the same height as the kitchen floor, has insulation in the walls, an exterior door, a window... you see what I base my conclusion on.

Next, I put some caps on all those open pipes. Gas pipes and water pipes. I learned something about pipes. There are too many variations to plan on going to Home Depot once. Unless you know what you're doing. I'm clearly not a plumber, don't know what I'm doing, and, therefore, needed a second trip. Compression, flare fittings, straight thread, tapered thread, it's not obvious to me.

Gas Pipe that needed a cap to prevent the
leaking valve from filling the house with natural gas

One water pipe that was leaking because the valve wouldn't seal

I'm sensing a theme here... again.

Finally made it to the kitchen drywall behind where the refrigerator and dishwasher were. It wasn't pretty.

I was also able to tackle a good portion of the kitchen ceiling drywall that was going to need to be replaced.

And the drywall that was coming down for the beam to be put in and reworking the wall between the kitchen and the family room.

 Had a chance to get the drywall off the pocket door so we can dismantle that.

 Looks like I'll be getting some help today. Safety first. Where did those extra P100 filters go?

Since we're gutting the laundry room, the rest of the wall, door and door jamb had to come out.

It is now the first week in April. Time flies. So, we're about ready to sign a contract, have been working out the details with the kitchen planner and getting all the details of the scope of work finalized. We're looking at some significant insulation in that addition and laundry room, a couple of beams, some new hardwood floors and refinishing the old ones and plumbing and electrical as well as all the kitchen cabinets.

But, we still need to get a few more things done, like removing the carpet in the addition and one of the second floor bedrooms, removing ceiling drywall in the addition and laundry room for the installation of the insulation, access for the beams and lighting and electrical and we need to take out the rest of the half bath so we can redo the floors and possibly the vanity. Should keep us busy for a while.