It was a busy week this past week! The project progress is moving right along at a quick pace and we’re all getting really excited about making this house our new home. It was a flurry of activity for the contractors this week and for us over the weekend. I’ll do my best to summarize what all went on.

The roof was worked on this week. So far, this has been the first hiccup of the renovation. We believe that a combination of rain & cold weather, and a rush to get things done on a warmer day contributed to the roof simply not being done correctly. The main part of the house looks good. However, the roof over the attached garage just looks really bad. The roof decking was in bad shape to begin with. We knew that. But it should have been given closer attention than it was. Our contractor is making sure that it’s done right, and, until then, I’ll hold off on posting a lot of pictures (maybe until the gutters are installed).

The upstairs bedroom, which started off as unfinished space on the second floor of the most recent addition to the house, was roughed in. This will be Meagan and Savannah’s room and it will be the nicest bedroom in the house! It is a 19 1/2 ft. x 13 1/2 ft. room with a walk-in closet, and a double window looking out onto the back of the property.

The contractors also started in on the 2nd floor bathroom. This will be one tiny bathroom! They got the space ready to finish, and I was able to run water lines to the bathroom over the weekend. The toilet will fit fine next to a 24″ W vanity, which was no problem to find. However, the walk-in shower that we’d like installed has its limitations. The overall space that we have for the shower is 30″ x 54″, which doesn’t seem to fit any standard shower sizes. So we’re reaching out to our contractor to source and hopefully he’ll be able to find something.

One of the tasks that had to be completed, especially before furthering work on the two bathrooms, was leveling the floors on the first floor. At one point, HVAC was added to the house (not yet available in the 1920’s when the home was likely built). In order to run ductwork, part of the cinderblock foundation at the center of the house was removed. At the time, this probably wasn’t much of a big deal. However, over time, it caused the floors to sag in two places: underneath the stairs, and at the entry from the dining room to the kitchen. The sagging floor under the stairs needed to be leveled immediately (or at least flattened as best as we could) so that the finished bathrooms wouldn’t be affected. The other part can be done later on.

Eli had experience leveling floors from a high-school internship that he had a few years back when he renovated an older house in Indianapolis. Basically, the approach was this: use a 12 ft. long 4×6 as a header to lift the floor joists into place and permanently install the header, lifting it with 4×6 posts sitting on concrete footers. Thursday night, Eli and his friend Nick cut holes in the floor decking for easier access to the crawlspace and then started digging holes for the footers. We decided to use concrete blocks as footers instead of pouring concrete into the holes like some do. When digging, they very quickly reached hard ground in probably 12″ or less. Friday night, Eli dug out the 3rd hole and then he and I maneuvered the 12 ft. long 4×6 down into the crawlspace, which was no easy task; we ended up going through the 1st floor bathroom floor which had recently been removed by the contractors. We borrowed a couple of bottle jacks from a friend, putting those at the ends of the header to bring it up to the house, and then started off using a 3 ton car jack to bring up the middle of the header. The car jack ended up being very difficult to work with in the crawl space, so we went and bought a 3rd bottle jack, which worked just fine. There were some difficulties along the way, but we were eventually able to get the header fairly flat (flat enough to make a 90+% improvement, which was good enough for us).

In order to make the desired modifications to the upstairs bathroom and the kitchen, the chimney, which wasn’t any longer being used, had to be removed. The contractors removed the chimney from the upstairs bathroom, and it was on us to remove it from the 1st floor. There’s a remnant of chimney that will be left in the basement. Eli started in on removing most of it as his last task on Friday night, and Sonya finished off removing it on Saturday.

With the floor installed in the upstairs bedroom, we now had the option to raise the ceiling in the back family room to where the new floor joists were for that room. This is part of what Seth and I did on Saturday. It was somewhat difficult to remove those ceiling joists, but we were able to get it done and it made quite an improvement!

Our day Saturday started off with Sonya and I going shopping! We had to buy the furnishings for the two bathrooms since much of next week’s work by the contractors would be focused on that. Toilets, faucets, lights, all the fun stuff.

We’ve had a blast taking this old house and giving it new life. It’s been fun knowing that this house has a story of its own and uncovering that story. We’ve found old newspapers referencing “President Roosevelt”, old wallpaper, solid and true 2×4’s and 2×6’s. Giving this old house another chance and having it be a part of our family going forward is now part of our own family’s history.

We also had quite a few visitors stop by this weekend who were curious to see the progress we’ve been making. Sonya’s brother and family came by for the weekend and came by the house to see how we were doing. And Eli’s girlfriend’s parents and family and friends came by on Sunday afternoon to see us as well. We’re so very happy with the pace of the project and can’t wait to make this our home!