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!!!!