Thursday, August 30, 2012

Catching Up

Alright, the blog's been a few days behind the renos so I'm using today to catch up! Hopefully this will make it easier to keep things going when I head back to school next week. Have you ever heard people say something along the lines of "It gets worse before it gets better"? That's the theme of today's blog. Our house is definitely looking worse for wear at the moment.

One of the things we wanted to take care of was the upstairs bathroom. Currently, there is a balcony off of the bathroom that's inaccessible as there's no door leading out. We're thinking at one time the balcony was off of an upstairs landing which was then made into a bathroom. A window was put in, but it's not big enough to pass through to get onto the balcony. The bathroom is also pretty small, so we decided that we'd move one of the walls back into the small bedroom (making it even smaller...oops...) and that would let us move the bathtub/shower over, as well as cut a door where the window is. This is what the bathroom looked like before:


Pretty cramped, right? The ledge that's under the window also has a cast iron heater underneath it which would have to come out.

The construction guys came and ripped out the tub, ledge and wall, then framed a new wall for us:


You can also see where the plumber ripped out the fixtures. Now instead of a bathroom, we have a giant mess. Excellent.


Photo on the left is where the toilet and sink used to be. The giant pipe that's running up the wall starts in the basement and goes all the way out through the roof. I have no idea what it's for, but apparently it has to be replaced since it's made of iron or lead or something, and one day down the road, it will rust out and leak and destroy our house. This is my understanding anyway. The same goes for all the lead pipes in the floor. Apparently it's quite miraculous that they haven't done this already. I'm beginning to believe that our house is magic, or maybe a fighter. It's faced many obstacles of being old and having lead pipes and carpets and wallpaper and cats but it's made it through in remarkable condition. What a champ. The second photo shows where the bathroom wall used to be. Now the entire bathtub should fit under the sloped ceiling. The door will be cut back to that line just behind the window.

Want to see something really neat? Check out the old beams!


Pretty cool, huh? Also I was happy to see that we had some kind of insulation, and it wasn't seaweed or woodchips or newspapers. Also, remember that cast iron heater that had to be moved? Now it's going over on the wall beside the bathtub and behind the door to make an excellent built in towel warmer. 


It looks pretty gross right now, but I promise I will clean it. Sometime. What else....oh! The electricians came and cut holes and ran wires and climbed around in the attic. They liked the old fashioned light switches just as much as I did and promised they'd try to keep them functional if at all possible. Here's a terrible picture that shows barely any electrical work at all (I blame this on my photo editor cropping out the wall where they chopped holes), and also a photo of our lovely electricians. One of them appreciates the blog but is shy, and the other really likes cameras. Guess which is which.


We went up to the house last night to find that my dad had been there. And he had done this:


Smell ya later, kitchen! Thanks dad!

Now I bet you're all wondering where all of the stuff went. A lot of ripping out has been going on....carpets, fixtures, cabinets, flooring...

IT'S ALL ON THE DECK. 



Thank goodness for lovely neighbours who don't seem to mind one bit (shout out to Wayne and Eleanor!) Their cat even came to visit last night. It flew out of the basement just as I walked around the corner (like actually flew, it just came right up the basement stairs in the middle of the air) and I may have had a slight heart attack. I think it was trying to be friends. At least it looked that way when it continued flying out the back door. Cats are really impressive creatures. We also had a visit from some neighbourhood dogs that live in the backyard that joins ours. They were not shy at all, one of them even gave me a "welcome to the neighbourhood!" nip. Thanks, dog. This neighbourhood actually has lots of dogs, which is just fine with me. I may have dog plans of my own for next summer. Until then, I'll have to be satisfied with the 500 squirrels and chipmunks that live in our chestnut tree. We are actually passing out free squirrels to every visitor over the Labour Day weekend, make sure you show up early so you don't miss out!






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