New Kitchen

Ok, well we don't have a new kitchen yet.  We don't even have walls yet.  But we do have a proposed kitchen.  Here's what the cabinet lady sent us:

If you were ever at the house before renovations, you know that this triples my old kitchen.  The old kitchen was where the small buffet counter is in picture 4.  Everything in pictures 1-3 was wasted space before renovation, and it will all be kitchen afterwards!  I cannot wait to have this kitchen. 

Other house happenings:  The exterior is also currently being painted and we've been shelling out $ for our clawfoot tub.  The tub just got refinished and delivered to the house.  It looks fantastic!  White on the inside, and black on the outside.  We also just bought the plumbing and faucet for the clawfoot.  The faucet, drain, and supply lines cost over $850!  Oh well, it will look great. 

~Carrie

Railings and Doors

We finally got doors and railings on our porches.  Well, some of them.  It's still a work in progress.  Here's some pics:

New front porch railing. The upper balcony will have a new railing too.



Side Porches:  Upper porch got new railing.  Lower will soon.  Both porches got the french doors installed.  I love them!




Upper porch railing.  We never had railing on this porch, so this is a BIG deal.  I'm not afraid to go out there anymore.




And this....this is gonna be Baby's room.  :)

I can't wait till BIG things start happening.  The exterior is supposed to get painted in the next couple of weeks, and drywall should start soon.  These two things will make a huge difference in the house.  This house is gonna be great!

Bare wood

Side of the house getting ready to be painted.



Front of the house.




Front of the house.  They also filled in a window with wood siding.




Side porches.  Another window was filled in.  We are installing french doors on the top and bottom porches.



Side of the house.



This pic was before the siding filled in the window, but it does show the french door.  Both porch door openings will be enlarged for these doors.  In our house in the early days, there were doors on every room for heating efficiency.  These two french doors closed off the living room.




This photo shows the master bath (near side of the wall) and the other upstairs bath (far side of wall) and some of the plumbing that's been done.


In other news, Gary and I are going to have a baby!

Monday Funday at 900 N C St

I was so excited to come home today and see stuff getting done on the house!  



Scraping the paint off the wood siding.


 

Framing for the master bath and other upstairs bath.





HVAC for the upstairs!



Unit on the left is the new upstairs unit and the unit on the right is the existing downstairs unit.

Spent some time today talking with my friend Lori Posey at work.  She and her husband are doing a remodel to her kitchen and showed me her countertop sample and sample wall color.  It was exactly what I had in mind for our kitchen.  It was a green quartz countertop and a creamy yellow wall color.  I want to do this in our kitchen with off white cabinets and stainless appliances.  That's it for today.  Gonna go "try" zumba with Alisha Scarborough.  Hopefully it will go well...

The Money Pit

Everytime we get frustrated with our house we watch The Money Pit, 1986.  It always seems to lighten the mood.  We would watch it now cause we're extremely frustrated, but our TV is broken too.  Nothing seems to be going right today.  Reminds me of the words of Walter Fielding...

"In spite of all the problems...
In spite of the prospect of indentured
servitude for the rest of my life, in debt beyond
my wildest dreams...I love the house."

Lots of surprises

Gary and I went up to the house today and walked through looking at the skeleton of a house.  We took a tape measure and begun to lay out our upstairs baths.  We also noticed a few surprises.  Some were kinda cool, and some were not so pleasant.  We had the old knob and tube wiring (we knew we had this wiring).  And yes, it was still being used up to the beginning of demo.  Well, with all this old wiring we had two in-wall heaters.  Gary and I were deathly afraid to use them, so we disabled them when we bought the house.  Well, our fears were verified today.  Where one of the old heaters was, there was quite a bit of fire damage. 



Our wiring


There was also some termite damage.  That was suspected though.  And some of the studs were not really supporting anything like they should have been, so we will have to do a little extra framing than we thought.  Neither of these are really a big deal.  We had the home treated for termites several years back.




The "floating wall".  It's not connected to anything!

 Our home has had several additions put on in it's almost 120 years.  We were always curious of what order the additions were added.  Today we figured it all out by looking at how they were tied in during construction.  Super cool.  It's like solving a mystery.

The last surprise was kinda cool too.  In our bedroom over the roof trusses we found cedar shakes.  After we got home and looked at the original picture we have of the house we noticed that it did indeed have cedar shake roofing.  We had never noticed that before!


The cedar shakes



The roof in our oldest picture of the house.

Since I had the camera out taking pictures I decided to take a few of our rental house that's 2 blocks away.

The outside of the house



The inside.  (With Gary studying CPA material on the couch)



Downstairs demo

Few quick pictures from today:

Looking in from the back door. 




Second dumpster is almost full



Looking in from the front door

I can't wait for the demo to be done.  I hate to even walk into the house right now with all the particulates floating around.  This weekend/next week Gary and I are going to start picking out vanities, showers, etc so we can layout the bathrooms for the framers as soon as demo is complete.