Sheathing, Floor Removal, and French Door

Okay, let's do this!

On Valentine's Day weekend, we finished reframing the den wall and installed the last of the sheathing. We did a double check on the rough opening measurements for the French door, too.

Valentine's Day weekend was followed by President's Day, which I had off. The extra day off was spent pulling up the old floor. My brother-in-law was available for the three day weekend, too, so we got a lot of work done. When we pulled up the old floor, we found more newspaper. This time the newspapers were from 1937.

It's hard to see, but here's the date.

And here are some photos of some of the papers that we found.

And here are some more photos of the floor demo.

As my spouse mentioned in the previous post, our French door came in. The brother-in-law and I went down and picked it up, brought it home, and installed it. It was really heavy! I spent some time reading the instructions and getting the required tools together. The install went pretty smoothly. Having a big helper to lift the doors, hold the doors, and push/pull the doors into place was great! Too bad he had a cold. Still, he was willing to help out, and he was much appreciated.

The French doors open to the outside and have a keyed lock. They're going to come in really handy when we want to get large things into the house in the future. We'll also reuse them when we enclose the carport (in a few years).

Door has arrived!

You won't be hearing much from me, since I'm not directly involved in the actual work on the ol' rat hole these days. Being pregnant will do that to a person. So, the posting will be mostly left to my spouse, since my brother prefers to just do the manual labor and steer clear of blogging.

But, I wanted to give a quick update, as it's been a very busy couple of weeks and blogging time has been scarce. The outside wall (facing west, into the carport) has now been reframed and sheathed. Happy day! And the french door arrived today, so this weekend we'll pick it up and install it. We have a couple of guests in March, so it will be nicer to not have a gaping hole to the elements.

The floor has also been torn up down to the subfloor, and with that demo came the discovery of more old newspapers. We didn't take as many pictures as last time, but the papers (this time from about 1937) were just as interesting as before.

This weekend, aside from the door installation, an assessment of the floor levelness will be done, and steps taken to correct whatever we can.

My spouse will update with more info and pictures when he has a moment. I think we're making good progress, though.

Stud by Stud

As many of our readers may remember, when we worked on previous exterior walls, we supported the roof and completely removed the walls. Well, we didn't really have a choice back then, but we did have a choice this time. The game plan for the den section of exterior wall was to add the new studs as we demoed the old ones. The reason we're removing old studs is that we're removing old windows and adding a new French door.

We started on the south end of the wall. We used the best demo tool ever invented (the reciprocating saw/sawzall) and removed 2 to 3 studs at a time. Then we (my brother-in-law and I) added new studs in the proper locations, taking into account the new closet wall.

We worked on both Saturday and Super Bowl Sunday. Towards the end of the day, we were going to make a dump run. We made our way over to the truck in order to tarp it and were stunned to see a visitor!

The hunt was on! Who was here? When did they get here? The vehicle parked behind the truck was not familiar and was very much in the way. After a visit to the neighbors in front of us, the owner was found (a Super Bowl party guest). Our neighbor was very embarrassed. The vehicle was moved and there were no more problems.

The transfer station wasn't any different than the last time we went (last week).

The weekend's work took its toll on us. Ice for sore joints was in order and very much enjoyed!