Home improvement

For the last few months, Mary and I have been doing some major renovations on our duplex. We've done a lot to the duplex, both upstairs and down, and it's taken us quite a long time to do it. It seems like practically every evening we've been over there working on something. Danny has been harassing me for a while about updating my blog. I'm going to blame my lack of blogger-tivity (copyright me) to this project.

The main improvement on the upstairs apartment was the bathroom. It started with a layer of linoleum. Beneath that was an older layer of linoleum. Beneath that was some rotted sub-flooring in the form of particle board, that had some serious water damage. I was hesitant to dig any deeper, but I decided to risk it. And what did I find? Perfectly good original wood flooring! I was very shocked, cause it seems like whenever I go poking around in this house, I open up a can o' worms that adds to my plate of things to do.


Mary had a great time painting, or we may have been delusional. I think this picture was taken in the wee hours of Sunday morning. We were trying to finish painting the bathroom before we went home, which happened to be at 3 am :) You can kinda see the good-condition hard wood flooring, too.


We enlisted a lot of slave labor over the past few months.


Katie was excited to come help Aunt Mary and Uncle Rusty. Or she was just excited to get away from her brothers for a few hours :) She helped us do lots of sanding and painting in the bathroom. Not pictured is Jaden, Katie's brother, and my Mom. Jaden came to help us a different day, and honestly probably got the more fun job of demolition when we were tearing up the bathroom floor and the walls. After all the painting and whatnot in the bathroom, Mom did a superb job in putting in ceramic tile.


No, I'm not spelunking. I'm playing with pipes in the attic. There was this one rogue pipe that came through the bathroom ceiling and hung down about two feet and then was capped! It had no purpose whatsoever. I crawled up in the attic and looked around. I found a second water pipe that (sort of) ran along side the first one but was capped in the attic. So I got a cut-off saw from Andy, the Power Tool Sugar Daddy, and hacked that thing up in the ceiling and put a new cap on it. So now I don't have this utterly ridiculous pipe hanging down in the bathroom.

This was a lovely task. The floor in this bedroom was a nightmare. It was squishy and sagging in the middle by a good three inches. Placing a level on the floor was a joke. We decided it was time to replace it. We tore up the carpet and and carpet padding. Beneath the carpet was a layer of plywood, two layers of linoleum, particle board, 1940's linoleum, and then the original (and completely rotted) wood flooring. In the picture above, you can see the flooring is a joke. The wood flooring was supported by 2x4s, which were also rotted.

Dad helped me clear out the old flooring, which wasn't hard to do, just a lot of work.



The end result: dirt. No kidding. The basement floor is not cement, at least not in the front half. The back two bedrooms have cement floors.



So this is what that bedroom looked like after we were done ripping the old flooring out. It kind of reminds of this cabin up in the mountains that had a door to a non-existent porch (anyone in the family knows what cabin I'm talking about). We decided the best long term solution was to pour cement in that room and give it a proper floor.


So we did. Andy, Dad, and Hans came down for the morning and helped me get the cement poured. Andy and his quick thinking devised a make shift chute to assist in getting the cement through the window. The chute on the cement trailer didn't quite have the angle.


If you can see, it was a very tight fit getting that cement trailer in between the house and the bushes. But we got it done.



Once that bedroom floor was finished and the framing/sheet rock was done, we had tons and tons of painting to do. We found two more slaves in the forms of Katie (above right) and Chris (below).

Chris and Katie came over and helped us a couple of times with the painting the basement apartment.


Papa Bear has been a huge huge help throughout this entire process. He's been there nearly every day I was and helped me with some of the most ugly and tedious tasks we've encountered. He even showed up a couple of times unannounced and worked on stuff alone while I was at work.

So the end product?

Yes this is the same bedroom. It looks livable doesn't it! After the cement, we redid the sheet rock on the walls and got new carpet, and of course, painted.

Another shot of the bedroom. It's hard to imagine that we were pouring cement through that little window a few weeks ago.

We are so thrilled that this project is over. We really want to thank all the people who helped us with this project. Hans, Jaden, Katie (the younger), Chris, Katie (the elder). A big thanks to Andy, my aforementioned Power Tool Sugar Daddy. Andy went through all of this (though on a much much larger scale) a year ago. Also a super big thanks to Dad, who offered a ton of help and sacrificed a number of weeks his golden years to help out a son. And also a big thanks to Mom, for lending Dad to me for so many hours.