More pictures

At long last, I've uploaded some of the other pictures from the recent projects, including the spray foam and the new oil tank. Nothing earth-shaking, but at least moderately interesting!

Another wall is done

With the spray foam insulation done, the next step is to redo the stairs. We're not quite ready for that, so work on the house shifted back outside. We had started the second floor wall outside the guest room previously, and this weekend, we got the rest of the wood reinstalled and painted. Slowly, we're getting closer and closer to finished. (with the repainting of the outside, at the very least)

As usual, I took a bunch of pictures, but haven't done anything with them yet.

So much progress!

Well, I haven't been doing updates because I haven't been bothering to process the pictures that I've been taking (you know I've been taking tons of pictures) but figured at least a text-only update is better than nothing at all.

This past weekend was *very* productive. I took Friday and Monday as work-from-home days because we had contractors onsite to do some work. Friday, we had the heating folks in to pull our nasty old oil tank and install a nice, new one. The old tank was 270 gallons and standing on rusting legs. The new one is 230 gallons, and standing on shorter legs, so visually takes over the basement far less. We had discussed converting to a gas boiler, but when we had the heating folks out to maintain the boiler, they checked it and said it tested at 85% efficiency... which is very high for an oil boiler, so there wasn't as much reason to go to gas. We did, however, need to replace the tank.

Saturday and Sunday, we cleaned up the first floor in preparation for the spray foam insulation, and did even more demo, clearing plaster and drywall off of the walls on the stairs going up to the second floor. Although it's a dusty, nasty mess, it seemed to be not as bad as in the past, I guess I'm getting used to it. Don't know what I'll do when all of the old plaster and drywall is gone -- beyond be VERY, VERY HAPPY.

Monday, the spray foam folks showed up. Now, we had already insulated with fiberglass insulation, but in discussions with John Gemmi, decided to pull that down and go with spray foam. If you don't know, spray foam is a rigid foam, much like the stuff that comes out of a can of Great Stuff, which seals everything up and actually lends structural rigidity to the house. It doesn't compact like fiberglass can, all in all, aside from the price (2-4x fiberglass) it's really, really good stuff.

However, it's a bit messy to apply, so the first thing the contractors did was mask off the entire first floor and the stairs going to the second floor. Made the house look like it was the set of E.T. (who remembers that movie?) with everything covered in semi-clear plastic. Then, they sprayed the foam on the walls with a spray guy which mixed the two parts as it blew it on the wall. The foam then expands, and dries in a couple of minutes.

As for the siding, we removed all the siding from the second floor wall outside the guest room, and stripped the good pieces. The idea being, the original boards were never back primed, and this way, they were easier to strip and sand, and we can back prime and paint them, fully sealing them against the elements. A little more work in some ways, a little less in others, and ultimately it'll be a better job. However, we last worked on that before we went to San Diego three weeks ago. Maybe this week we'll get back to that and finish it up. After that, it's only the front of the second floor and the bumpout of the master bedroom which need attention, and we'll be effectively DONE with the repainting outside! We'll still have a patch on the office (that we don't see) and the third floor, but for now that'll be good enough.

First floor project on hold...

Well, according to our plan from earlier this year, the First Floor project is now on hold. Of course, we had hoped to be much farther along at this point, but that's always the case.

The reason for our pause on that project is we slated July and August as the time that we would pick up last year's project, namely repainting the house. We've started, breaking out the Silent Paint Remover and the scrapers. This weekend, we'll get scaffolding, but so far we've already done about 25% of the large wall we finished off with in November. Grace runs the heater, and I scrape. I've picked up a 6" variable speed grinder, so I can resharpen the scrapers at the end of each day, so they're good and sharp for the next day's work. I can even give them a quick resharpening when we break for lunch.

Only problem is the SPR is heating unevenly. I contacted the manufacturer, and they replied very quickly with some possible problems. I looked, and discovered we're still within the 1 year warranty - by exactly one week! So I think we'll be using it this weekend, returning it first thing Monday morning, and hoping for quick turnaround. We might have to find other stuff to do, but there are two windows on that wall (possibly three) which will need reframing, so we'll stay good and busy if we can't be scraping paint.

This weekend, electrical work.

With the cedar for the outside casing on the windows still drying this weekend focused us on electrical work. I transferred switches from an old metal triple-gang box into a nice, new plastic quad box, ran wiring for the light in the dining room, and moved the location of the smoke alarm.

The quad box comes from our plan for the wiring. Two switches control lights in the kitchen, because there's no room for them by the kitchen doorway. Then, we have one switch for the chandelier over the dining room table, and one which will control the lights on the stairs to the second floor. The wiring for the kitchen circuits is already existing, since it was all redone during the The Big Project (which is starting to seem like not such a great name because our current first floor project is also pretty darn big) but I had to transfer it out of the nasty old metal box. The wiring for the dining room was all removed during demolition, so that's all new, and I'm also taking the opportunity to split the first floor into a 20-amp circuit for outlets and a separate 15 amp circuit for lights.

While we've got the ceiling off, I'm also going to redo the circuits for the second floor, and I got a start on that one, replacing fifteen feet of cable with 6 feet of new cable. For some reason, the old wire ran several feet out of the way, extending the length of cable needed. Very odd.

The nicest part is having a real light in the dining room area. It lights the area up far better than the 100W floor lamp we've been using.

Demolition's done!

Three weekends of work, and our living room and dining rooms are both gutted down to bare studs and joists. We've even removed a wall, joining the two smaller rooms into one larger room, getting over a foot more floor space. (it was a thick wall!)

I've got a bunch of pictures... 342 raw pictures so far - and at the moment it's just too much to dig through and get posted in the gallery. I did find two that are very representative of the change we've seen in less than a month... one before the work started, and another as of tonight:

Before:


After:

If you don't believe that the pictures are the same view, notice the white radiator on the right side of each picture. Same radiator. Also notice in the "before", the chimney is behind the vacuum cleaner in the background. On the floor in the "after" is the shadow of the wall that we removed, which thankfully was not load-bearing, and was quite thick! As you can see, even with bare walls, it really opens up the space! On the left of the "after" picture is the first of two plastic walls which seals the first floor from the second, to keep all of our stuff up there from getting covered in dust.

We're really excited, although immediately, the most exciting part was having the demo area clean enough to unseal the kitchen. Previously, in order to go to the kitchen, we had to walk out the front door, around to the back of the house, then into the kitchen. With the recent winter storm, that's even less entertaining than it had been. The other night, Grace was hungry but almost decided against dinner just because she didn't want to go outside.

Until I get more pictures posted, I offer you this demolition video:

I realized that hammers and wonderbars just weren't fast enough, and since we didn't need to be fancy (it's demolition, after all) I grabbed a fiberglass sledgehammer handle (just the handle) and used it as a big lever to forcibly rip the plaster, lath, and drywall off the wall. Here you can see me rip up several layers at once. You can also see the dusty, dusty mess it created. Grace washed our clothes *every* night.

Thanks for reading, hopefully I'll have the pictures and more soon!