Den Ceiling Progress

We've been working on the ceiling in the den for the last few weeks. We've also framed the closet wall for where the washer, dryer, and water heater will live. The ceiling has the same crappy 1/4" drywall board. You just can't see it directly since it's covered with 12" acoustic tiles. We pulled down the ceiling and took it to the dump. This included several bags of old insulation that had bits of mouse and rat droppings mixed in with it. Yum!

Here's a photo of my brother-in-law surveying the ceiling after the drywall was removed. The old cedar joists were a bit warped and we ended up not reusing them as ceiling joists.

After replacing the ceiling joists, we hung on them just for fun. They flexed a little bit. We also found that the north wall of the room had sagged (likely due to the flood from a couple of summers ago). It's about 5/8" low in the center and will require being jacked up from below and having a new post to support it. Can't wait to do that!

After installing the new ceiling joists, we put in some blocking to stiffen the ceiling members and so that we have material to screw the ceiling drywall to.

Here are a couple of photos of us just for the fun of it.

With all the framing in place, we jumped ahead a bit. Normally, we would have started doing electrical and plumbing work at this point, but we decided to install the ceiling insulation instead. We're just so tired of the house being so cold! Good thing we did because it snowed the very next day!

It's amazing how quiet the rooms get after insulation goes in!

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!

Let's see what we find in the walls this time

Two posts ago is a photo of the den before we started the demo. The demo that we were able to do consisted of all the walls. We didn't do the ceiling and will get to that later. We're going to try and not be so cold this time round.

In order to removed the wood paneling, we used a circular saw to cut right across the wall. This made the paneling a lot easier to remove. We found that the paneling was really only attached at the top and bottom, and that there was no drywall behind the paneling. The lack of drywall was nice because that meant that there was less to take to the dump (transfer station).

As you can see in the photos, we found some insulation in the walls! It was foil-backed fiberglass and about one inch thick.

As we were removing the paneling on the south wall of the room, we found a dead mouse. It had been dead for quite some time.

After we pulled the paneling off the west and south walls, we started on the north wall (which will be completely removed and rebuilt eventually). The north wall had 12" square ceiling tiles (painted white) on the surface. Beneath the 12" tiles was a layer of cellulose-based tiles that were about 12" x 24" (painted blue). Beneath the blue tiles was a layer of 3/4" thick sheathing planks.

My brother-in-law's friend came over and helped out with the demo, and his help was definitely appreciated. While I and the friend did demo, my spouse and brother-in-law made three dump runs. Taking the debris to the dump right away paid, off since the garbage didn't have a chance to get rained on and get heavy (the transfer station charges by weight).

Den Update Soon!

You guys are fortunate that I've pretty much already used up all my "den" puns.

Anyway, we'll have pictures and an update up soon. I was doing dump runs all day in my truck, taking away demolition debris, so I wasn't really around and don't have that much to say. Trucking the crap to the dump as it got torn out was an awesome idea. No more piles of garbage in the yard! Anyway, we got all the interior walls torn down to the studs, and imagine our surprise when there was actually insulation in the walls.

This weekend we're going to take out the insulation and the siding and begin the reframing of the wall that's in the carport. That way we can replace the studs that need to be replaced and put sheathing up ASAP so we don't freeze.

Into the Lion's Den

This weekend we begin our push on the den in earnest. Once we're finished, we'll have a place to put a television and eventually a couch, so when people come over, they'll actually have a place to sit while we visit that doesn't involve scarily rickety second hand dining chairs. It will be so nice to not have to hang out in our bedroom anymore. And don't get me started on the pleasures of having a floor...

However, the den is where we had set up our office, and the other half of the room was used for boxes/storage.

We're getting pretty good at moving stuff from one room to the next. It all got moved into the dining room (the one we just completed). We took all the furniture in the dining room, pushed it up against the walls, and proceeded to fill the entire space with boxes. We moved the desk/computer in there, too. It smells better in the new room, but without the plastic cocoon it's not nearly as warm. Oh well, it won't be as cold as it was a couple of winters ago, and it's already nearly February, so we'll be just fine.

This weekend is slated for demo, which should go pretty easily and quickly. We're going to get rid of the exterior wall first, and then throw up some sheathing just to keep it enclosed. No more open walls in the winter for us, no sir. Then we can work on the other walls, get those framed, and finally do the ceiling. We're hoping this will minimize our exposure to the cold, and especially hoping that this room goes far more quickly and smoothly than the last one.

Mini-Project 2: Range Hood of Horror

As those of you who helped us clean the kitchen upon moving in will remember, the kitchen was originally covered in grease. Lots of grease. Big meat-eaters, apparently, or just never cleaned anything. The whole kitchen took multiple scrubbings, and still there was grease. Plus the light burned out a year after we moved in-it was a wiring issue because merely changing the bulb didn't help. We never used the fan because it just blew the air (and mystery crungles) right back down onto the stove, which was immensely appetizing.

Well, the kitchen is dark, and without the light it's even darker over where the stove is. That makes it tough to see while you're cooking (as if I ever voluntarily cooked). And although we don't cook meat or generate a lot of grease, we still generate a lot of steam when we cook, which just fills the kitchen and leaves everything damp. Tired of the damp and darkness, we finally decided we'd had enough and tackled the range hood of horror.

The trick to getting the fan to work properly turned out to be cleaning the vent to the outside. It was so caked with sludge that the vent was actually stuck closed. Yum! We had to use lacquer thinner to get the grease off, since we didn't want to replace the fan. Here's all you really need to see.

That's the brush we used to clean. We had to throw the brush away. And this picture was taken after we cleaned off the brush itself a little bit. *shudder* Here's a shot of the filthy open holes.

After some exploratory troubleshooting and some wrong turns, it became evident that the light socket itself had shorted out. Instead of repairing the socket, we just put a new one in (simple is best, sometimes). We also wired it to the fan switch so that both turn on at the same time, since we had cut all the wires to the original light switch and didn't feel like going back and wiring it all up again.

But, at long last, success!

It seems like a small thing, but we are SO happy to have a fan and functioning light. We'll take whatever little victories we can get.