Why Our Demo Timeline was Tripled...

When we originally embarked on our newest reno, we thought we'd be done demo in a day, easily.  Well it quickly progressed into 3 days.  Not for no good reason though.

 

The door on the left leads to the bathroom, and the room you can see into is the back bedroom...

 

 

And then this happened to that room...

 

 

 

Mhmm, when they say that renos tend to snowball quickly, this is what they mean.  We knew we wanted to take about a foot of space from that bedroom to make the bathroom just a bit more spacious, but once one wall came down, the others weren't too far behind.  We didn't start out with the intention of demoing the whole room, just the wall that backed onto the bathroom, but once we got started we figured it was a good opportunity to better insulate at least one room upstairs.  

 

 

Just like we found during our main floor reno, there was zero insulation up here either.  It gets pretty hot up on that floor in the summer with no AC, and no insulation.  So we figured the extra hard work now, would pay off in the long run.

 

 

 

This looks all too familiar.  Funny how it's been a few years since our main floor looked like this, and yet once you get into the demo again, it feels like you haven't had a day off.

 

If you were to stand in that bedroom and face out you'd see the hall, and that wall that attaches to the bathroom. 

 

 

And now it looks like this...

 

 

Wide open spaces (anyone else singing with me on that?)

 

So where are we now?  Well, we're at least a little further along than that picture which I'll share next week but, truth be told, it's busy times over here...Darryl's back to school and has acquired a part time job which takes up most of his weekends, he's also in the thick of midterms so, needless to say, there are bigger priorities right now than finishing our only 3 piece bathroom in our house (now that's a statement!).  But getting good grades is the most important thing for now, then we can refocus our energies back on construction.

 

Anyone else out there have a big project on hold??

 

Bathroom Demo



This post isn't pretty so I'll keep it simple.  Demo started with the fixtures coming out...

 

We are keeping the toilet because we upgraded it to an eco friendly one when we re-did our main floor (full disclosure: the seat lid got ruined during demo so that part will have to be replaced)

We are keeping the tub on hand because we can't bear to part with it and have hopes to one day incorporate it into our "forever home".  I would love to have a shower and this tub just for bathing.  But as far as having it as your only method of shower, it was not practical or enjoyable for us.  It was like suffocating in shower curtains that stuck to you like magnets, no where to put your soaps and shampoos (yes we had a rack that straddled the tub but that didn't stop things from always falling off).  The main reason though, was that this baby's enamel had worn off.  To give you an idea, here is a picture of it immediately after a thoroughly aggressive scrub-down:

The sides are fine, but take a closer look at the bottom...

Ladies, how does one leave a shower (nevermind a bath!) feeling truly clean in that!? (mhmm, I showered in flipflops).  Yes, it could be refinished, that's why we're holding on to it for now, but it was a budget breaker for us at this point.  So it was removed...

Just cause I was curious...Made in Toronto

You know how they say things get worse before they get better?  This was what was behind the tub...

Pa-ukkkkkkke!  Pretty sure that is some mould  :S

While we're on the topic of grossness, when we took the tub out, we found this...

That, my friends, is a Christmas glass half filled with cigarette butts.  Like whhhaaaat!?  WHO was smoking in the bathroom and hoarding their old butts under the tub???  The people who lived here before us continue to amaze.

And since I'm past the point of shame now.  This is nast, but at least somewhat expected.

Once that was all taken care of, I taped everything off...a feeble attempt at keeping the dust contained.

 

Covering the demo process could easily take up a few posts, but I think that could get boring pretty fast so I'll give you the Coles Notes instead.

 

The floor came up...

The walls came down...

The plumbing was exposed...

Et Voila...  a demoed bathroom!

 

 

If only the process had been as quick as that  ;)

Here's to things going from worse to better!

In a couple of days I'll show you why our projected one-day-demo plan turned into 3 days.

Kitchen Demo Wrap Up

On Friday I started to show you the demo in the kitchen and this is the last bit here...

We used to enter the main floor bathroom from the kitchen...

Here's the same view, but demoed



Although we had opened the bathroom up, we knew we were going to close it up again where the wall originally closed (in the first picture the wall that the toilet is up against would have continued to the left for a closed wall.  But they opened it up to include a shower)

So once the demo was done, we Darryl built the new partial wall up.  This would eventually be the wall that our fridge would be housed in.

That view is looking from the dining room into the kitchen.  You can kind of see that there's a bit of a bump out where the heating ducts are on the dining room side.  We had to update the heating to be more efficient - the old heating vents were only in the center of the house which is not how it's done anymore.  You can also see in that picture that there is no longer a bathroom at all at the back of the house.  Here's a hint as to where we're moving it to...

So next week we'll take a look at the kitchen being put back together, starting with some floors!  And in not too long we'll look at the bathroom as well!



Let the Walls Come Down!

Alright - back to demo!  Yesterday I showed you what our kitchen looked like when we first saw it and then what it looked like when we moved in



So after close to a year of living in our house, we finally took the hammers and crow bars to the kitchen for a mega face lift

We started by taking all the doors off of the cabinets and then removing the counter tops

And once the cabinets were removed, we started tackling the plaster and then the lath.  Here's me standing in the same spot as the above picture



From where my hands are and down, the walls had some crazy kind of super human wire mesh imbedded into the plaster which made it so much more dfficult to demo.  At points it was a full on tug-of-war between us and the house trying to rip those walls off. 

So we took all the easy stuff off first and then tackled the mess mesh.

Upon ripping the ceilings down we found nearly a century's worth of spider sacs.....hello heebie jeebies!!!

And yes that is some knob and tube wiring in there too.  It had been disconnected and re-wired in 2004 but obviously no one tore walls and ceilings down to pull the old stuff out....so we did!  It's all gone now.  So are the sacs.

Remember this wall where we uncovered the original entrance (the red lines) that had been covered up?



Here's us uncovering the same entrance from the kitchen side of the wall...

hahahahah I love this picture and I'm sorry Darryl, this is the only picture I had of the entrance!  He cracks me up...let me explain, because at this point he didn't know that huge hunk of film was even on his back (hence the picture!) 

The window on the left used to be in the bathroom and they had put this window film on for privacy.  When we removed the bathroom, we peeled the film off the window and tossed it somewhere. 

Somehow it ended up on Darryl's back, neither of us could figure out how.  So I'm the meany who, before telling him, started cracking up, he's trying to figure out why I'm laughing so hard that I can't talk, I grab my camera and snap away!  It just struck me as so funny because he was going around, business as usual, tearing out walls, demoing a house, chatting with me, not knowing that this huge piece of plastic was attached to him. 

And why I love him even more...

...when I finally showed him why I was laughing, he just flew ran with it.  And yes, for the record that is a dollar store soldier's helmet he happened to come across and couldn't resist the urge to wear.  How can we not have fun working together when I am constantly entertained by this guy?

Anyhoo, back to the kitchen!

So here's the door that Superman took down, now we could see through to the living room

Look at all that dust!  We're still sweeping that stuff up over a year later.  Just when you think you've tackled it all, you catch a dust ball bunny in your peripheral vision and quietly curse under your breath. 

I'm going to leave it there for today and finish up on Monday I think.  Have a wonderful weekend!

Any fun plans or projects for you guys this weekend??

Ever Wonder What's Under Your Floors?

So the floor demo began and this was all on Darryl.  I stayed upstairs and pretended it wasn't happening.  The good thing is that we saved a whole bunch of the wood in case we need to replace anything upstairs.  Here he is preparing for the job...

He started demo later in the day, so he completed it over the course of two days.  He used a crowbar to pull the boards up.  Under the wood was a layer of wax paper.  After getting one half of the room pulled up, he had to go back and pull out the gazillions of little nails that didn't come out with the wood.

Before taking the paper layer up, he swept up.  Look what was under the floors...

How does that much dirt get under there??  Shocking.  Finally, he pulled up the paper stuff and we were left with the subfloor exposed.

You can see in the left side of the picture, that triangle hole, where the subfloor had cracked and fallen into the basement.  So we were definitely in need of some new subfloors - which I'll share with you tomorrow!

Have you taken up any floors?  Did you find anything underneath them?

To Replace or Not to Replace...

This was an ongoing question for many months.  Initially our intention was to sand and restain the floors to bring them back to life.  Who in their right mind would get rid of original, decent hardwood right?  The floors in the living/L-shaped dining room  were alright.  Sure they'd been scuffed up, scratched, dulled and a little warped, but no biggie right?

 Well once we were in full on demo mode, where walls were all down, the full bathroom was removed, we could see what the floors underneath were like.  Or rather, that there weren't any floors there at all...

The above is a picture of where the opening between the living and dining room once was.  You may remember seeing it like this during demo (the part furthest to the right is where a wall once stood and once we ripped the frame out, we were left with what you see in the above picture)

The door in the above picture was not an original fixture, it was once a solid wall.  The door was put in to convert the dining room into a bedroom.  When they opened that part of the wall up, they were obviously left with a gap in the floor like we were.  However unlike us, they decided to patch it in a really shabby way...

And then once we took the tub and flooring out of the bathroom, we saw that the previous owners thought it would be a good idea to cut all of the floor out in order to put icky vinyl flooring in instead.

Then there were a few other random holes like this one, where an old heating register/vent thing was in the middle of the house which = inefficient heating. 

And it's a little hard to see in that picture, but the kitchen side of the house and the living/dining side were two different heights.  We knew that if we put in new flooring we'd have to put a new subfloor in, which would raise the floor to be almost flush with the kitchen side.  So many factors to consider and in the end we decided to put new flooring in.  Not everyone's choice I know, and one that I struggled with, they hold so much history.  But the scale of the project was beyond what I think we could do.  The floors upstairs are better and I hope we can refinish them.

Pop back tomorrow to see the beginnings of the floor changes!

Have you had to replace old floors?  Did it break your heart too??  Or were you able to refinish your old ones (if so any tips/advice is appreciated as we hope to tackle that in the future)?

All Walled Up

Getting drywall up is such a satisfying feeling!  I makes everything look like a liveable space again.  We were so lucky to have a family member who had a drywall lift for doing the ceiling.  Darryl's back was greatful.  Let's take a look at the progress

The guys got this room done in one day and left the kitchen for another day.  Some time later, I can't remember now, we did the mudding (a terrible job to give a detail-oriented person, in my opinion haha) and Darryl's dad came over to start a coat of primer!

One of the most important things I learned along the way when mudding drywall:  whatever you do, do not put your nose up to the wall to inspect for imperfections!  Stand a couple feet away, just as you would if you were casually standing in the room.  Whatever you notice from there, fix.  Whatever you don't notice from there, move on to the first coat of primer.  The primer will really show you what imperfections will stand out once you paint, so do a little patch work if needed before the second coat of primer and you're good to go!  I wish someone had told me this before I started mudding because I was pulling my hair out at the sight of miniscule dings, dots and lines.  Do not obsess as much as you are tempted to or it will delay your progress significantly!  I speak from experience. 

You can see what the living/dining room looked like before here and here.

Next week, some much needed window improvements and floor updates!  Have a wonderful weekend!!

Do you have any other dyrwall/mudding tips?  We've got 2 other floors and a basement to work on so we'll definitely be doing more!

It's Gettin' Hot In Here...

...(not to worry, we did not take off all our clothes).  By the way, please don't use the dates that I'm posting as a reference for how long our projects took!  We demoed for what was way longer than we both anticipated.  With just two of us and sometimes Darryl's dad, it took a while to tear everything down, pack it up into bags or boxes to bring it out to the trailer, and then to drive it to the dump, unload it all and come back to do the next shipment.  Phew!  I'm writing this a little more than a year after we were even in the demo phase.  I cannot even describe the elation I felt when things were no longer coming down, but rather being put back together.  Wahoo!!!

Mhmm that's drywall all lined up and read to go!

I don't have much else to say about insulation and vapour barrier, other than that it is waaaaaaaay more fun than demo.  Mind you, I didn't do any of this room's insulation/vapour barrier, so Darryl may have a different opinion??  ha

Come back tomorrow to see what the living/dining room looks like all opened up and covered in drywall!