It took a little over a month, but we are finally making progress on the house “remodel” effort.

ENDLESS CLEANING

Most of our first few weeks were simply spent on cleaning out he space to be “remodeled.”  I keep putting that in quotes because it is only partly accurate.  We aren’t technically remodeling the house, we are actually finishing it.  The space we are primarily focused on has never been completed.

For years it has served primarily as a storage room.  Things put into there were neglected and forgotten.   I’ve found countless items I had forgotten I owned, and so have my parents.   I’ve posted several humorous lists about it that you can read here, here, and here.

Here’s a quick glimpse into what this room was when we started.

As you can see, there was a LOT of stuff to go through.  Much of it went into the trailer and was hauled off to the landfill.  Some of the items were good and useful and were moved to a different location in the house.  And some of it is needed to finish this space.  But first it was the cleaning, and it took us a seemingly endless period of time.

I may or not have noticed in the video, but there were open access points directly to the outside.  These allowed birds to almost freely come and go from this room.  This meant that along with dust, we were also cleaning a fair amount of birds nests and feces along with our own possessions.   For the first month we did nothing but cleaning/organizing.  But as I say, it finally feels like we are really making progress.

MAKING PROGRESS 

Insulation

This space is a bit over 1200 square feet.   In the end it will turn into 3 bedrooms, 1 bath, 1 full kitchen, a laundry room,  and a living room (which will likely be filled with that pool table you saw).

A big portion of our cleaning was dealing with those big piles of insulation blocks.  This room is over the garage and needs insulation from that space, and those blocks were always intended for that purpose.  Because the space was never finished, the floor boards were never screwed down and were easy to lift up.  So up they came, and that block insulation went down below it.

This week we were also able to get additional fiberglass insulation blown in on top of those blocks.  This was done to fill in gaps left by the block insulation and to provide the appropriate R-value.   We were able to do this ourselves and was a fairly easy process.

Plumbing

The plumbing for a kitchen was already in place, but we needed to add plumbing for the bathroom and wash room.  We started that last week and are almost done.  A good competent professional would probably have been done in about 5 hours, but we’re all either old (Dad), broken (myself) or in need of direction (Julie/kids).

As an aside, Julie has repeatedly proven herself as the best worker amongst us.  She doesn’t always know what to do, but she is the most capable one to do it.   She has definitely been held back by Dad and I because we can’t keep up with her.  Absolutely completely awesome!

One of the challenges slowing us down is the fact that we need to get the plumbing done before we put the floor down, and we need the floor down to build walls, but it is nice to have walls built before you do the plumbing.   We’ve spent a fair amount of time discussing the best order to do things in, and another longer amount of time going back and forth to Home Depot for supplies.

But we’re making progress.  We have the rough plumbing done except for vents that need to go through the walls.  For water supply, we only need to connect to the house water lines AND pray that where we brought the supply through the floor is in the right locations.

NEXT WEEK

Next week we will hopefully be making progress again.  We think that on Monday the HVAC guys will be there to install the gas line for the furnace and to the oven in the kitchen.  When they are done we can start building the interior walls.  We’ve bought the electrical wire to run from the meter to a separate breaker box in this space.    And if all of that gets done we’ll start running the individual electrical lines for outlets and lights.

I won’t hold my breath for all of that getting done next week.  We are painfully slow.  A competent craftsmen could build the walls in half a day.  I think it’ll take us three at least.   Dad used to be more than competent, but 70 is just around the corner for him.   I’m young enough, but just unable to do more than about 30-60 minutes of real work a day (broken into 5-10 minutes segments).

So keep watching and I’ll give you more pics and fun stories about what we’ve got going on.  If you notice the countdown timer at the bottom of the page we are now under 2 months before school starts, so any day we aren’t making progress is a day driving me nuts.