So today I’ve decided to give you all a little insight on what Eric & I are going through on the home front!  As most of you have heard….we are still remodeling our home.  YES.  I know.  I hear you shouting right now ‘When are you gonna finish that dang thing?!!!!!’. Well…there’s good news! Actually fantastic news.  We are going full force again come August.  YAY!!!  We honestly we’re quite burnt out for awhile from all the demo & stress & pure clutter.  We are sooooooo crazy for living in this house while it gets put back together….so there may be times where we need to have a slumber party at your home to get away from the madness. Eventually we will have brand new plumbing and brand new electrical installed.  That’s when we’ll be bunking up with anyone…LOL.  Maybe we should just get a tent and camp in the dirt pit out back?. NOT!!!  Ok so I’ve been rambling on about our project and I need to show you exactly what we’ve been describing to ALL OF YOU these past months.  Prepare yourselves there’s a lot to look @…

 

Some quick facts:

We purchased the home in May 2005 from my mom Martha (Casia’s mom) & I’ve lived in the home since the 8th grade . 1995

Home square footage is around 1,140 (small and cozy)

Lot size is around 8,000 sq feet (HUGE for the neighborhood)

Built in 1954 out of slump block & thick ass plaster walls with a pitch roof

Original floor plan consisted of 3 bedrooms, 1 3/4’s bath, and a laundry room

We started the demo September of 2007!!!  YIKES…

 

This first image pretty much showcases the original layout of the main living area. I photographed this angle from our front door.  So what you’re observing is our living room (which is closest to the foreground), then the wall that used to separate the living & kitchen/dining area.  Off to the left is our carport door and then a laundry room door.  Off to the right is our 3rd smallest bedroom that we decided to expose to the newly open living area.  You can see the studs behind the tarped off area.  Also the most extreme change is the very low drop plaster ceiling.  We decided to expose the pitch roof!!!  Also notice the nasty grey clumps of insulation that was in our ceiling.  This image can’t even express what we went through while we had to dispose all that fiberglass crap!!!  I called it the ‘rats nest’…cause that’s basically what the texture consisted of. Luckily NO RATS were found!!!

 

 

This is shot from the opposite side of the house.  I’m now standing in what was the dining area. Off to the left is our poor little kitchen.  Upper cabinets removed & dated lighting fixtures gone!  Down below is the southwestern-like ceramic tile my mom installed a long time ago which was a vast improvement from the retro shag orange carpet & grimy mustard yellow linoleum tile.  Not restorable!!!  So don’t get all bent out of shape since she removed something vintage.  It was ugly…trust me.  The only thing was that the linoleum tile pretty much made it impossible to rip up the tile all together.  In the living room it wasn’t there so that took about 1 hour to pull out and would pop up like a domino effect….stacking on top of each other in a row. But the kitchen/dining was glued together and rock solid since it now had 3 layers of history.  You can see in the middle of the photograph the tiny pieces of tile…that’s because it wouldn’t come up or break apart in big chucks.  SO FRUSTRATING YOU HAVE NO IDEA. We now have large divots in the concrete slab from the jack hammer.

 

 

Now back to the 1st view from the front door.  More plaster ceiling is striped away and so is the rats nest insulation!!!  Now exposed are the really cool cherry wood beams that held up the plaster ceiling…we recycled the wood into trusses (you’ll see Eric’s design shortly).  Oh and our lovely flat fire place…used to have a block edging/step up thing-a-ma-bobber around it.  Weird.

 

 

Pretty much the same view only a few feet over from the front door.  Now you can really see that 3rd bedroom we exposed to the new entertaining space & our pristine wood ceiling.  Shockingly there were no signs of water damage or roof tar that ever leaked through.  We contemplated on whether leaving the wood planks exposed since they were sooooo beautiful but then we would have had to sacrifice no insulation. Unless we did it on the exterior of the roof under a metal roof top?.  After viewing it for quite sometime we decided it was too much wood and it felt very cabin like instead of cozy MOD!  Don’t hate us.  I promise you’ll LOVE the solution.

 

 

View from the center of the house.  All tile is removed…you can sort of see the light vs. dark spots in the concrete slab…YEAH those are the divots I was telling you about from the jack hammer.  You can also see lighter grey lines in the slab where the base of the walls used to be.  And up top are those AWESOME ‘mouth dropping’ recycled cherry trusses.  Eric designed and built all of them while I stained the wood.  We used a mixture of pine & cherry wood.  The pine are the new vertical beams attached to the roof and the old cherry wood are the horizontal lines.  He also mixed in heavy duty industrial bolts/nuts/washers and a center metal suspension rod to square it all off.  Sort of gives it that old vs. new feel. By the way…we installed them OURSELVES!!!  The wooden platform in the distance is what Eric built so we could rest them on top as we lifted the trusses into place.  Talk about ‘back breaking labor’.  Plus it was really much hotter up there so close to the roof without insulation.  I wanna say 10-15 degrees difference from the floor level.  Also off to the further right is that 3rd bedroom that is clearly open to the living area. Now the whole area is HUGE!!!

Oh don’t cha just love all the taped up electrical wiring and exposed plumbing going on?  The old rectangular air duct going down the hallway is also getting a big make-over…think industrial warehouse circular ducting!!!  I believe it will also be raised up quite a few feet giving the hallway a more open feel instead of this dark closed off tunnel which it used to be.

 

 

A view from the kitchen of the newly opened space!

 

 

Welcome to our ‘Cotton Candy’ world!!!  Lovely insulation is installed and the temp is more controlled.  You can see where the old ceiling used to rest and how low it really was compared to the space.  We also flipped the insulation while installing since the wood plank ceiling kept grabbing/tearing the sheets as we slid them along the panels and in between the metal drywall brackets…normally you see the paper backing and the pink side is up towards the roof.  We had to do this only where the trusses existed.  There’s also our fabulous MOD couch that we never got to sit on.  Now it’s in the new office and is getting lots of attention…FINALLY.

Our next projects are finishing the house plans, framing, plumbing, electrical, drywall, and putting everything back together!!!  Oh also that dining room window next to the kitchen is transforming into either a piviting glass door or some sort of stacking door so we can completely open it up to the back yard!!!  Fabulous for parties.  Same is going to happen with the large front living room window to the front yard. YAY…can’t wait to keep you all up dated on our ENORMOUS remodel!  Wish us LUCK!!!