The ever growing project#

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve talked about the progress on the house, but believe you me… its going. At this point all the wallpaper is removed and even some of the plaster/render part of the walls too. A contractor we hired has knocked down a wall between the dining room and the kitchen and I’m prepping a room to be turned into a bathroom. Did I mention we were going to turn a room into a bathroom? No? I also missed the memo, because my wife informed me a couple weeks ago that it needs to happen and so just when I thought the decontruction of the house was coming to an end… the demo continues.

Floors#

We have 3 floors and 3 rooms per floor and on the first and second floor (ground and first floor for my EU friends) two rooms have hardwood floor and the third has a rubberish tile pattern ontop of a subfloor. The third floor has carpet in two of the rooms with subfloor underneath and the third has vinyl right on top of the floorboards. The first absolute no go was the carpet. So people don’t mind it and the rest hate it. We hate it, so even when I found out that there was over 1700 nails in the subfloor beneath it, I felt like I still made the right decision. If budget, time and effort were not factors, we’d be installing new flooring before moving in, but alas the third floor is going to be a future work area. The second floor rubber stuff is coming off and the room will be tiled up and converted to a bathroom. The plumbing is not there so I’m going all the way through the floor boards to get that installed (Current demo room). On the first floor my wife and I are currently debating between replacing the flooring in the dining room and kitchen or replacing the kitchen (non hardwood) and having a little spacer/seperator on the floor between the now connected rooms. Not that it matters, but I’m on the side of just putting a spacer and my wife wants matching flooring for the whole room.

Ceilings#

In all the rooms on the first and second floor (ground and 1rst) there is wood paneling on the ceiling. Just today the decision is to have that taken down. Three of the 6 rooms are mostly complete but the removal of the insulation has left me itchy and tired of demo work. It’s not too terrible and it is a big easy win in the long run… I’m just ready to start putting things back together though.

But wait! There’s more!#

For whatever reason there is three electrical boxes and while I initially only thought it was interesting, it turns out it is a little bit of a headache. When looking for power companies, they argue that we need 3 seperate energy contracts and that we probably shouldn’t have the setup in the first place… After a recommendation from father-in-law, we had an electrician give the place a look and estimation. Being an old house and the fact that two of the boxes need to go, it’s basically a full redo. I am not an electrician, but I can touch a wire and tell that it’s hot. After saying I’d give it a go, I was told that it’s basically not allowed to do electrical work as a non electrician. So, while I’m not exactly thrilled about spending more and breaking more to remove/install new electrical, at least we haven’t gotten to the point of finishing up any rooms. PSA, you are allowed to do some electrical work non-certified and if it was just me, I’d do that and more. Unfortunately (fortunately?) I have enough reasons not to do it and while I could save a little money prepping all the parts that don’t require an electricain, I’ve got enough other things to do to justify the expense.

Hopefully the next update is all the trash leaving the house#

With all this demo work, we have created rooms full of trash. We have taken some of it to the dump ourselves, but we don’t really have a proper vehicle for construction junk so we may have to consider other options for this next wave of trash. I’m wanting to do a trash container at the end of all this and purging it all at once. If I’m lucky, that’ll be in a couple weeks.