Phase 2

Whew.....It's been a long summer, and the coolness that fall is bringing is much welcomed. The last few weeks, a month almost really, have been insanely busy at the farm. The last 4 weeks have seen us rushing against all the rain that we have gotten to get walls and a roof on the additions. My poor house was literally plastic wrapped with tarps and plastic sheeting to try and keep the water at bay. We were mostly successful, but there was more than one occasion where the sound of a stream of water upstairs has us scaling a ladder to the second story and fixing whatever piece of plastic had become dislodged by the wind.

Wrapped in plastic, it's fantastic (sorry....that has been stuck in my head all summer looking at this place and it just had to come out!!) 

Then picture a group of people with bare minimum construction experience building second floor walls, putting sheeting on second story walls, and putting sheeting on a second story roof. Oh yeah, and then putting in windows in the second story. As a voice of reason quipped up, for a bunch of people who have no business doing what we're doing, we're doing a pretty good job (and it's not very often I call Troy a voice of reason!)  The days are getting noticeably shorter and it has rained basically every weekend since early August (remember the weekend of the tornado....it has rained almost every weekend since.)

But, we have finally gotten ourselves mostly closed in to the elements. The roof will be done on Wednesday! The siding has been ordered and should be here late this week or early next week. The furnace and duct work installation is starting a week from today.  These are all HUGE steps!! Oh yeah and there should be a new stair case in by the end of the week as well. Once we get insulation in 2 weeks, it's dry wall, paint and flooring. It doesn't seem possible. We never would have gotten here without so much help from family, and for that I am so incredibly grateful! I owe countless hours and weekends to siblings and cousins and new found friends. And when this place is all finished, one really big feast, not cooked in a barn on the grill!!

We rented a lift to reach way up high!

 

We found the original cedar clapboards. They unfortunately had to come down :(

We do a little bit of everything!

So, phase 2 will be a final button up before the weather really changes, then we can rock and roll on the finish work. The house has never had a furnace, so obviously, there is no duct work either. To get that installed next week, the ceiling over my"bedroom" has to be removed to supply the upstairs with heat. So this little update is brought to you during my break from moving my room from the living room, to what has been called the "cat room". I am going to share the small back "bedroom" with my kitties, their food bowls and of course the litter boxes. My hope and prayer is that we stay on track with phase 2 and I am only in here until the insulation is completed and I can move into my real bedroom!!

There are still 3 more window to go across the second story, but they are currently installed elsewhere in the house, so once we take those out and put in the replacements, the upstairs will look a bit more complete! (Then we cut out a front door and add a porch!)

The new upstairs. You are looking through the bathroom and into my loft!

Old "bedroom'

New "bedroom" -thank goodness it's only temporary, right?

If last post's lesson was that barn doors swing, this post's lesson is a reminder that ladders tip over if you reach to far, saws with automatic shut offs are good, two trips to the ER in as many weeks are bad, and dogs are man's best friend! (oh yeah, and he was a bit sore, but thankfully ok!)

Almost there...

Quick update....busy busy weekend. Luck would have it that there was torrential rain the morning we were going to take the roof off my house. The house has been wrapped in plastic and tarps since last Sunday.  After having a builder out for a day and half Monday and Tuesday, the new roof and the old roof are half a story away from being level, leaving a large open gap in what can currently be described as the path from the living room to the bathroom (eventualy my dining room and staircase, but currently, the big wide open space in the middle of the house).

 We survived the storms last weekend without any trouble, praise the Lord. And then it rained Wed with only minimal dripping in the house. Saturday's rain was not to much for the plastic wrap to handle, but delayed our work a good 4-5 hours.

We have been so fortunate to have family and friends who been so willing to help out. With a huge crew again yesterday we made great strides through the rest of the day to tear down some more roof, and get some walls built. With more help today, we got some trusses set, new roofing on, and some old roof off.  It's not completely done, but we're getting close.

We also had planned to sheet the front of the house with its forever wall, instead of more plastic.  We tore off all the old lumber that was left on the front (a poor renovation years ago means we have stripped half if the front of the house to basically nothing....) However...we found a little surprise in the form of a rotted out exterior floor beam.

Yeah, it's really bad! It all turned to sawdust when we touched it!!

 So, what should have been a job that we finished today, ended up with a chainsaw tearing up part of my house so we could replace the old rotted beam, with new lumber. We were able to replace half of the parts that need to be replaced, and still don't have the OSB in the outside if the house.  Up went more plastic wrap. The bonus is the entire south end of my house is how covered in clear plastic giving us excellent lighting and a fantastic view. And potentially a greenhouse effect given full southern exposure on that wall... we'll have to see how "wonderful" it is tomorrow! Little setback, but we have full confidence we can get a major portion of that exterior wall in tomorrow (I say hopefully!).

Oh yeah, and we had another little setback. A bit of a mishap involving tripping over a small child and barn doors that swing resulted in a bad fall and broken wrist. Poor grandma (my mom) landed  on her wrist in the middle of all that and fractured it.  I have one picture of the splint going on but I'm sure she'd quite literally kill me if I posted it. She's in a splint now, and has to see an Ortho doc this week and get a cast put on. The only lucky part is its her left wrist, so she's not totally out of commission, but definitely limited.
Things are finally feeling like they are moving and we can see progress. Hard push through this week and I am excited about where we'll be one week from now!

 I mean, why not play in the mud??!

We're still waiting for some of the bigger construction projects to be finished before we can move forward with the rest of everything. I mean, it's kinda hard to put up walls when the floor doesn't exist, right?!  So we are working on smaller details at the moment. For me, it's stripping paint. Every solid wood surface in this house has been coated with layer upon layer of paint over the last hundred years. The 4-panel doors, the 6 inch base molding, the 4 inch window trim - all solid pine, all poorly covered in basically a million coats of paint. Ok, so the door I'm working on, I could count no fewer than 4 colors. But there has to be more than one coat per color. Not to mention the last person who painted all this lumber obviously paid no attention to dripping paint or direction of brush stroke. I plan to reuse as much of the trim as I can, and all the doors that are in the house. But one more coat of paint on it all, and it will all just look like a sloppy mess. So, my new hobby is striping.

I tackled some door trim earlier last week with a heat gun. Slow process, but it got the job done. The door is paneled though, and there's a bit of detail that a paint scraper just won't do a good enough job on. So I decided to pull out the chemical striper and give that a go. Well, as I started out saying, that didn't go so well. Whatever I bought states it works in 4-24 hours...a slight detail I overlooked when purchasing it. So, I thought I might have a better chance using the bottle of zip-strip Troy offered me earlier. Says it works in less than 60 minutes - perfect! But...the "child proof" cap was, um, well, it must be "adult proof" as well. Far be it for me to ask for help with such a seemingly simple task. I had a tub of striper that surely wouldn't take more than a few hours to take the paint off my door, right?! Six hours later, those storms and torrential rains we got were threatening, and I needed to go to bed (of course I was striping paint outside, it was a million degrees in the house!) So, rushing the process ( the tub says "give it time to work")  I scraped all that gunk off the door. It had worked it's way through probably the top 2 colors. The resulting "finish" was just a dirty sticky mess of partially dissolved paint. So, out came the heat gun again. The door is really beautiful. I have yet to figure out how to extract the layers of paint from the finer details, but I'm working on it. You'll be the first to see the finished product...whenever that is :|

The craftsmanship is beautiful, and the office space is pretty nice as well ;)

Apparently, whoever painted the green and the white coats thought it was a good idea to paint the hardware as well. I heard about this little trick and gave it a try. Found a $3 crockpot at a thrift store, and filled it with water, and tossed the hardware in. Most of the paint peeled off pretty easily, and then a little scrubbing with a wire brush, and they were all cleaned up.

Ta-da!

Trim stripping is only my current hobby due to the slowed pace we have found ourselves on the addition portion of this project. That should hopefully all be changing soon. The guys have been hard at work sistering new studs into the old studs so everything is strong enough to hold up the new second story that needs to go up.  Temporary walls were put up to hold the ceiling up while we cut the true walls away from the roof to get the new trusses up. Yeah, I have a bit of anxiety about cutting the roof away from the walls, but that roof is hopefully coming off very very soon. We have a guy. It's not an easy thing to do right now, but we found a guy, a builder, who will come and give us some of the professional help that we need to put an addition on. I'm hoping at this time next week this place looks much different than it does at this moment! Once we have walls up, I will be very busy drywalling and painting, and tiling and then the next step of demo begins. But, I'm getting very far ahead of myself right now.....lets work on tearing down a roof!

This is holding up my roof right now!!

Cutest little helper!!!!

We plan, God laughs

I have always been a early riser. I was the kid at sleepovers that was up first, and sat talking with the friends parents because the other kids wouldn't be up for a few hours. I still find the early wee hours some of the best times to get things accomplished. There are no distractions, and there is peace and quiet (and around the farm these days, those commodities can be hard to find!) So, this morning, it was laying out my tile pattern. I found an awesome wet tile saw on craigslist for a great deal, and we will get a chance to try it out finally today.

Also, I have always been the one with just a bit of bad luck. Stitches, broken bones, bee hives on the more extreme end of my past luck, I have always been plagued by things just not going quite right (typically through no fault of my own!). Originally, we had hoped to get some tile laid two weekends ago. But, as I am finding out around here, timelines are more of what you'd call "guidelines", or a least a rubric of the order of whats to come. I had been told, and am now seeing, expect the unexpected with these old farm houses. There has been no major issues as of yet, but enough little snags along the way, that we are, well, behind schedule. As it turned out, the professional guidance we had lined up to get us through the addition part of the renovations has turned out to be a little less than professional. Seeking out construction help in the middle of summer in Michigan is not really an easy task. Everyone is booked, and has been that way for months. We have been fortunate enough to have someone to at least tell us what we need to do for the next few steps, but we will be executing a lot of framing work on our own - and a lot more of it than we originally thought would need to be done.

Not to worry, we have our muscle lined up and ready to work with us next weekend. Big push this week to get some more demo done, and put up a temporary wall, so that next weekend, with a generous time donation from family, we can work towards getting things back on track.

 We picked up 2 gallons of paint to cover the laundry room/half bath/ pantry area. I've done my fair share of painting, but never over new drywall. We primed the drywall, but it still soaked in way more paint than I anticipated. So, a few days later, I went back and got 2 more gallons to finish the job. I gave the lady at the paint counter the exact same paint chip I had used the first time. I went home and started touching up areas that needed it, and painting the walls that hadn't be started. Everything looked great. Felt good to see some progress. Until the next morning - when we could clearly see that the new paint was just a shade lighter than the old paint....  So, everything gets a third coat! And I make a call to customer service Monday morning to get some free paint.

I know, I know, extremely hard to tell. But this was the best I was able to do at showing the difference in colors. There is a vertical stripe next to that hole in the wall that is lighter than the rest of it. It is far more noticeable in person.

And, if I needed a little more bad luck, it came in the way of a little bump. What started out looking like a bug bite on Rudy's eye, grew over a two week period into a "mass" next to his eye. I use that term lightly - we don't have a biopsy back yet, and it likely benign, but poor Rudy has been forced into the cone of shame. Little guy has not gotten used to the new size of his head, and runs into everything - including our legs. 

On the bright side, I found a killer fridge at Lowes on clearance. It looks good as new, but they were clearancing it at half price due to the fact they had had to fix/replace a water line. This beast is 35 inches deep and has the showcase door on the fridge. It's amazing! Then, Dad found an entire kitchen at the ReStore including a stone counter top for less than the builtin stove it includes originally cost. The cabinets were all custom built and are beautiful. And for now, it is living in the chicken coop :(.  Back to work!!

There are 3 toilets in my car!

I admit, that is not something I ever imagined saying, let alone be excited about. There are multiple levels of excitedness to that statement. 3 toilets in one car...not the Focus!  I got myself a little Subaru Forester (actually slightly older than the Focus and has slightly more miles, but this car can fit 3 toilets in the back!)

Shameless plug....

( also, if you or anyone you know is looking for a reliable car with lots of great features like heated seats and remote car start, and gets about 30mpg, let me know!!).

 Anyway, the toilets!  The only reason to buy a toilet is that you have a place to put it, right!? We are at the point that we are ready to install a new toilet!  

I know, it's been a while since my last update. But, we were busy for a few weeks moving mom and dad here and cleaning out the Northgate house. We took time to enjoy the 4th of July holiday and show off the farm to family and friends. Then, we had to wait for an inspector to come check out the new floor and plumbing we put in before we could cover it all up with walls. Now that that is all out of the way, we have started putting drywall up in the half bathroom, and can actually do laundry (I'm beginning to get super excited about little things being able to do laundry, it's a big step people!!) 

So when you have a coupon for 10% off at Lowe's, and a house that needs 3 toilets, why would you not buy all three at once?! The plumbing guy at Lowe's thought I was nuts, and he wasn't too thrilled about helping me lift them onto my cart (and getting paged to help me get them into the car), but when the toilet is on sale and your coupon expires tomorrow, you get matching toilets all at the same time. And then you get oddly excited that you have 3 toilets in the back of your car. The next big step is finishing the drywall, painting, tiling the floor, and....getting that toilet installed.  With 5 people sharing a bathroom, I am just a bit excited to get that half bath finished! We are a little behind schedule already, so with the next few days off of work, Carla and I are gonna rock out the drywall and get us back on track. We are down to just a few short weeks until the second story is going up and we have plenty to keep us busy in the mean time.

Oh yeah, and, we planted raspberries!  Before moving out of our respective houses, we dug up raspberries from our gardens.  Those poor plants have been sitting in pots for the last 6-8 weeks and were starting to look to pretty sad.  Problem is, we don't have the means to till up any sizable portion of land. Sure, we bought a tractor, but we don't have a tiller yet. I tried valiantly for all of about 10 seconds to sod bust an area, but the ground was so solid, and so thick with roots, it was not gonna happen (and I did my whole garden by hand at the old house).  Luckily, we have neighbors!  The nearest one is about half a mile away (I'm guessing really - there's a corn field, a small forest, and more corn, then his house - we can't see it from here. But his family has been on that land for 100+ years).  Well, he stopped over and introduced himself, and said if we needed anything, let him know.  Later that afternoon, he came over and roto-tilled our little raspberry plot for us.

Raspberries!! It actually looks a bit better than this now, I just don't have a picture yet to prove it....

This little boy LOVES anything with a motor! The tractor is probably his favorite.










There's always time for entertaining guests, and we love showing the place off. We had such a great time with Grandma and Ari!