Josh the Destroyer

Ever since we first started looking at houses to buy last year, Josh made it his mission in every house we looked at to imagine ways in which he could tear out a wall or two.  Necessary or not, the man wanted to demolish something.  "We don't really need that wall, do we?... You know, if we took out that wall there, it would really open up this space... I don't like the way this looks,  should probably just remove it..."  And so on and so forth.

Last week, he finally got his wish.

First off, we have this massive office room in the new house that was converted from the original garage.  It's a great space, but when we got the house this room was covered with nasty old wood paneling, and had really awful ceiling tiles.  The built-in shelves were not terrible, but in order to remove the paneling behind them, the shelves had to come out too.  In a matter of hours, this room went from this:

To this:

And the ceiling came down in one fell swoop, like this:

In the next few weeks we hope to finish this room with new sheetrock all around, and eventually we'll rebuild some of the built-in shelving (but probably not the whole wall of it) for office purposes.  The closet at the far end may or may not get re-built, we haven't decided yet.  My plan is to also have a corner of this room for bike storage, with a standing bike rack and some shelving for our gear.  Eventually I would love to have an extra exterior window or two in this room, but I think that is a project that will have to be put on the back burner until some other more pressing things can get finished.

Josh was pretty happy with himself after tearing apart the office.  And THEN he got to work on the real demolition project.

It's hard to explain without actually seeing the house, but we have this big huge bathroom in the middle of the house which used to actually be a bedroom.  Because of it's former function, this bathroom had a huge walk-in closet attached to it.  One of the walls of this big closet was shared by a nook in the hallway out of the kitchen, and this space was where the previous homeowners had kept their washer/dryer and water heater.  We decided that by removing the wall between the laundry nook and the closet, and closing off the closet door in the bathroom, we could create a very nice, open laundry room.  Thus, last week Josh got to tear out a wall.  I wasn't there when it happened, but I can only imagine there was a decent bit of evil laughter between sledgehammer swings.

This was the hallway nook, previously used for the appliances:

Here's what a wall looks like after you knock it down:

And here is how this space looks right now:

(As of today the loose stuff has all been cleaned up and the jagged bits of walls are now flush- 

so really, it looks like a real room!)

This is still very much a work-in-progress, but hopefully you can get an idea of how much space we've created by removing the wall.  The pipes all need to be rerouted to the back wall and walls obviously need to be patched up and re-plastered   We're going to replace the water heater with one of the new, small tankless heaters and this room will be tiled with the same Saltillo as the kitchen.  I'm hoping to find a decent deal a nice front-loading washer/dryer, and I'll engineer some nice cabinets or something once we get the appliances in there.  I'll update on the laundry room project when we have it closer to being done.  And of course, the floor tiling project will be a doozy.  Stay tuned for that one.

Carpet crazy.

First week of home ownership: success!  We're waist-deep in repairs and refinishes right now, but things are coming along really well and we're hoping to be able to move into the new place in a few weeks.

We got the keys to the new house last Monday, and immediately starting ripping out the wall-to-wall carpets.  Maybe I didn't mention it before, but this ENTIRE house was covered in wall-to-wall carpet.  As in, the kitchen was carpeted.  As in, the bathroom was carpeted.  Who does that?!  The carpets came out way faster than I had anticipated.  As it turns out, removing the tack boards around the edges of the rooms actually takes way longer than removing the carpet.  But it's all done!  No more carpet!

Luckily, we had some pretty awesome wood floors under a good portion of the carpeting.  We're having the wood floors refinished later this week and then Josh and I are going to tile the rest of the house ourselves with Saltillo.  I cannot believe how different the whole house looks without those nasty, 30-year old carpets!

In addition to flooring, we spent time this week generally trying to freshen up the house.  We replaced all of the knobs/deadbolts/locks on all of the doors.  I took down all of the old-lady, knick-knack shelves and wooden bathroom cabinets.  We removed the awful metal backsplash in the kitchen.  Josh fixed the sticky front door.  Josh got to use his demolition skills on the horrible wood paneling in the office and we took down all of the built-in bookshelves.  I painted a few patches of colors on various walls so we could begin to decide on how to paint the interior of the house.  There's still quite a bit we want to do, but it's a good start!  Here are a few 'before' and 'in-progress' photos.  ("After" photos won't come until later.)

Next up: taking down a wall to create a new laundry room, tiling the floors, painting the walls and cabinets, installing a fireplace, hanging sheet rock in the office, redoing the kitchen countertops, gutting and refinishing the backyard workshop, a new ceiling in one of the bathrooms, replacing the horrible old-lady light fixtures around the house, re-routing some electrical wiring, weather-proofing the back porch, replacing some drainage pipes, installing a new water heater, adding some height to the backyard fence, repainting the wooden beams around the front of the house, installing a new bathroom vanity/sink, building closet organizers and built-in shelves, getting the hot tub up and running... 

Oh you know, just a few small things here and there.  No big deal.

SOLD.

Yesterday we closed on our house.  Closed!  As in, I own a house!  The wait is over!  I don't have to go through the horrible process of home-buying again for many years!

(I was admittedly very sad that the selling realtor did not put up a "SOLD" sign in front of our new house.  They simply took down the sign.  I really was hoping to have a photo of the house with the sold sign.)

We get the keys Monday morning, and Monday after work we'll start tearing the place up to get some things done before we can move in.  I'll post updates as we get some of the work done.  Today we went to the hardware store in preparation and I was giddy with anticipation.  Bounding from aisle to aisle wanting to buy everything for every project I could dream up.  Josh reeled me in and we only bought supplies for dealing with carpet removal for now... and then I took about 1700 paint color cards home with me.

In other news, we just returned from a fantastic Hawaii vacation.  We spent more than a week between Oahu and the Big Island, and it was amazing.  I'll get some photos and stories from the trip up here soon, but between getting over jet-lag  closing on our new house, and trying to clean the current house, I haven't exactly had a lot of time in the last two days.  This month has already been insane, and I don't foresee it getting any calmer!