Exciting week this week!

We’d been anxiously waiting to meet the HVAC and Electric guys. Turns out that he is one in the same. Tuesday, he came by the house to meet us and to get started. He introduced himself as Gilberto, and went to introduce the guy with him, hesitated a second, and simply introduced him as “His Helper”. So, Gilberto and The Helper got started on installing the furnace and AC unit, as well as a couple of ducts. It had been getting pretty cold, so having heat in the house was going to be very welcomed. They ended up finishing the job late on Friday evening just in time for it to be in the 50’s over the weekend and us not needing to turn the heat on. Oh well, it will be very nice come January.

Electrical will started next week. We had originally been quoted for a 70% rewire. Gilberto’s opinion (which shares our opinion after further consideration) is that ours is a 100% rewire. So there was some shuffling of the budgeted money in order to make that happen, which caused a delay. But after a discussion about this with our GC, we got back on track.

Part of what Sonya did on Saturday was cleaning all of the vent covers and reinstalling them once the HVAC work was complete. For now we’ll keep the old covers and we may replace them in time. She found this little surprise when doing this task…

With the removal of the chimney from the 1st and 2nd floors came the removal of the vent for the furnace and the water heater. Gilberto’s helper was able to vent the furnace out the side of the house (eventually to the left as pictured in the picture below), and I suspect that I’ll have to vent the water heater out the same wall, which brings up another quandary. The water heater is about 8 years old. It turns on and works (as far as I know so far), but it has been sitting for quite some time and who knows how much longer it’s going to last. They’re expensive to replace. Do I go ahead and vent it to the outside as-is? Or install a new one now? Another option is to install a tankless heater, which would not be that much more expensive to install at this point. Either way it wasn’t really something that I’d planned on paying for. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll end up doing. I do have a plumber coming out to take a look at it this week and give his recommendations. It’s something else I think should be installed by a professional, even though it’s probably something I could do myself, given enough time to figure out.

Seth got him a little closet! The guys were able to build it this past week. It didn’t have to be too big and it can always be made bigger if needed. But for now it will be a nice little spot for his hanging clothes.

This past week we tossed around some ideas for the kitchen. We’d originally had a plan to put the refrigerator in the corner to the right of the entry way to the dining room (pictured below-right). We altered that plan to moving it to the corner of the kitchen to the left of that entry way and free up that space to put a small work station in the kitchen.

We also had the idea to open up that entry from the kitchen to the dining room a bit, so that’s part of what we worked on over this past weekend. We’ll eventually put up a header and bring it down to about the same height as what is between the dining room and the living room (somewhat pictured below-right).

The floor to the kitchen also needed to come up in order to be replaced. This was Meagan’s job on Saturday and she did a great job! There was linoleum tile that was down on a thin plywood subfloor on top of more tiles (pictured). We’re assuming they contain asbestos and we won’t being bringing them up. She pulled up the top tiles and subfloor and we’ll end up putting some kind of flooring over the existing tiles.

Work came to a stopping point this week for the guys while they’re waiting on electrical to be installed and items ordered for the bathroom and windows for the family room to arrive. We got a little nervous on Thursday when no one showed up without warning! “What happened? Did a check bounce?” They finished installing the floor in the 1st floor bathroom which gave us a chance to start visualizing what we wanted to do in there. The plan is to install a tub and shower enclosure and just use a shower curtain in that bathroom. Sonya had gone into Indianapolis to find a vanity and found a really nice one for a very good price that we both thought would be sized right for that bathroom. However, when we got it to the house and started to lay things out, we discovered that it was just going to be too big. So we unloaded it on Facebook Marketplace to a guy from Kentucky who came up and took it away. We then picked up a used pedestal sink on Marketplace to use instead. Overall a $120 mistake.

We also decided to put in a “pantry” (not sure if that’s the right word) in that bathroom for towels, washcloths and such. I was able to find some cabinet doors that were still in good shape, so I’ll just have to custom make the back and sides of the cabinet before hanging the doors.

Work on the family room continued this weekend as well. The contract work called for the addition of the 2nd floor bedroom, which allowed us to raise the ceiling to the joists under that room. However, they weren’t obligated to do anything in that room’s east attic area. That part was on us. A lot of the time on Saturday was spent removing what was originally the roof over the east side of the house in preparation for installing floor joists in an attic space off of that 2nd floor bedroom and continuing on with the ceiling of the family room. This included partial removal of the chimney stack that had been installed for the wood-burning stove that was originally in that room. Pictured below is me taking out the joists. Sonya had posted this picture to Facebook and I got a lot of comments from my friends along the lines of “Uh oh, John is taking out joists with a saws-all.” One friend told me that it looked like I was in the basement with the house about to collapse on me once I cut out the last floor joist above me. We’re just a couple of crazy DIY’ers!

I’m a video nerd, so I shot some video on Saturday morning showing our progress. Hope you’re enjoying the updates! We are certainly having a blast!