Paint and Glass

Today I had to work at my Real Job. Jen and her parents painted and removed an ugly glass wall. Once I extract the pictures, we'll post.

Goodbye Walls

Ok, now I got some sleep. Set your wayback machine to yesterday.

The wall between the kitchen and the living room needed to go. We liked the idea of a nice open floor plan. And, as promised, the closet in the dining room was going to go because Jen did not like it. That was fun, because it showed the first suprise. Under the closet is an access area for the radiant heat plumbing for the dining room. The entire foot print of the closet is a hole about a foot deep, all in concrete (of course). There are valves and pipes, this is not something we can cover permanently. So we decided that we will need to put the hutch there. Once we got a hutch. Until then, hole.

Demo work went smoothly. The false ceiling and the wall were added on, and therefore they were easy to remove without disturbing the rest of the house. The previous owner kept ALL of their plans, so I looked them over and was able to safely determine the wall we were removing was not load bearing.

We went to get the header beam at Home Depot. All of their 4x6 beams were warped, so we went to Dunn Lumber and found a bevvy of straight beams.

This beam was actually the first peice of wood I bought for the house remodel. $20. The 2x4's I used to support the beam I already had in my shop.

It is still a very dusty mess, but we are getting closer. A lot of very nasty wiring came out, and before I drywall, I will need to get an electrician in to hook things back up to code.

Too Tired to Blog Tonight

Today I removed a wall, a closet, and a ceilingy thingie, then I built an arch-like entry thingy. Pooped. Lots of pix, but they hafta wait

Back to Wall B Gone

So more thought and thought and thought. Tomorrow we will remove a wall down in the basement that will allow for us to make a home theatre. The house is made of a lot of concrete, so this room has concrete floors, walls and ceiling! That means the noise will stay put, and it also means we will need to make sure the room itself is not an echo chamber. The room will be 10 feet wide and about 15 feet long, so it will be cozy. Of course, the equipment will just have to be my boring, off the shelf A/V setup I already have because putting in one of those insanely great A/V systems is about 1,000,000th on my list of house projects. But it will be nice to have the only tv in the house buried in a concrete box.

We will also remove the drywall of that wall in the living room to take a look at the support system, and if we have the time, we will remove that low-hanging ceiling. We figured that we need to do all the drywally dusty stuff before putting in carpet.

Nope

Okay, no wall out today. I got all wishy-washy on what to do, so all we did was clean.

Wall B Gone Today?

So Jen and I decided that we should do the demolition work of removing some walls before installing carpet, because the dust is going to make its way everywhere and we dont want to deal with dust in new carpet.

There is a wall between the kitchen and dining room that we are going to convert into an arch. There is a low overhang from the entry way into the living room area that we plan on removing. And there is a closet in the dining room (?) that Jen hates and I kinda like. My strategy here is to capitulate on the closet so I can get something I really want later :)

Photos coming and end of day.

Now What?

The fridge was the top priority. Really. The old fridge was busted and has sat empty for a while. No way I am gonna put my food in that. Also, I am so used to super filtered cold water from my fridge (and all I drink is water and coffee), that I needed that shiny new fridge.

We need to get some estimates on a new roof. Hope to have that done by the end of the week. Going to call in Empire Today and see if they really can put carpet in our place fast and cheap.

As soon as the carpet is in, so are we.

The house itself is a Art and Crafts semi Frank Lloyd Wright style house. It has lots of stained glass, angles, and wood. We are trying to figure out just what tweaks to make. We think there is a wall that may go, stay tuned for that.

Also, the house is half concrete. The floors and al of the basement (walls, ceiling, everything!) is concrete. The house is a tank, suitable for shelter during nuclear war. We like that. The wall we want to remove is NOT concrete. Phew.

The heat is radiant heat, powered by something from the Bronze Age that consumes more oil than a Hummer. We are going to convert the heater element to run on either natural gas (cheap, but still uses gas) or geothermal (expensive up front, but FREE forever!).

Day 2

Whew, I am tired.

Did the cabinet work today (more in a moment) and also moved a whole bunch of boxes from "elsewhere" to "here" as well as moved some lumber.

The cabinet work required the use of my best friend, Mr. Sawzall. Removing a lot of screws, cutting some wood, and a few whacks with the hammer and the ugly cabinets are gone, the insanely inneficient washer/dryer is gone, and my shiny new fridge is in place.

Day 1

Today is Day 1. We closed on the house today, and with just 2 minutes until the courthouse closed, the sale was recorded and we got keys. Today was evalulation day, prioritization day, and take down that For Sale sign day! We realized our must-do's are going to look something like this:



1. New. Fridge. Now.
2. New roof
3. Clean clean clean!
4. Get some carpet

The place where the fridge was was too narrow and too short for the fridge we wanted (a Maytag french door), so we are going to put the fridge in a different part of the kitchen.



The fridge arrives at 2pm tomorrow, and I have my first demolition project because there are some pesky cabinets and a rather scary washer and dryer in the way.

Time to break in the sawzall!



First, I sleep.

Welcome to "Is it done yet?"

Hello all!

My name is Dave, and my wife's name is Jen. We just closed on our dream home. It's a 50 year old fixer in the Enatai Neighborhood in Bellevue, WA. This blog will be about our journey towards making it into our home.