Building new walls

This is an update post from a project that actually happened back in September: it's just taken us awhile to get the photos off his old phone (hence the weird blue quality all these pics seem to have).

Anyway, at left you will see what south wall of our garage looked like. In fact, just to close on our house for insurance, Dusty had to head out there and whack a few nails into the rotting siding to make sure we would have coverage! Aside from being a HUGE eyesore, we wanted to make sure and replace the siding on the garage before the snow hit and run into moisture problems. Ah yes: this was when we thought it would be an easy afternoon project...

What you can see on the right is me and an ax tearing down the boards behind the siding: not only was the siding shot, so was all the wood behind it, including almost all the studs. Yup.

So our quick house repair was quickly turning into an all-day project that would involve the rebuilding of this entire wall.

Thankfully, Brandon came over when he received our distress calls: we were pretty far over our heads as far as building know-how. But after another quick trip to Menards (and a few subsequent visits to Ace Hardware), we had what we needed to get the job done.

On your left you can see the new studs in place. The center of the wall had sagged 2 inches so we had to jack the roof up before getting the studs placed. Then we added our wood sheets and finally the siding. I spend the following day putting two coats of paint on the siding and picking up the lumber scraps around the yard.

Looking back at these pictures, it's pretty amazing to me that we were able to essentially tear-down and completely rebuild a wall in just one day. As a testament to our efforts, we still have a massive wood pile from all the rotten siding and boards we pulled down from the original wall. It gives us a strange satisfaction whenever we have bonfires to exact our revenge for a lost weekend.

Drywall is the Devil

Continued from before, the biggest project we had to tackle over the holidays was the drywall in the computer room. At right you can see Dusty removing the remaining portion of the ceiling. When we bought the house, there was a significant portion on the eastside of this room that had the drywall sinking/falling down. From the look of it, they must have jigsawed together the ceiling using weird-shaped left-over drywall from the walls. Not being achored correctly it was no surprise that the ceiling was falling.

So, we tore down the section that looked least stable and figured we could just get it hammered out in a weekend. This probably would have been an easier task if we knew what we were doing, but oh well. Aside from covering the whole house with a fine layer of drywall dust, we found this horrible mummified mouse in the ceiling (bleck!). After what seemed like forever, we finally got the ceiling peices drilled in, mudded, sanded and textured. What a massive pain in the ass: I can't imagine doing this for a job!

Well, I figured since we had the whole room tore apart for the ceiling, I might as well just paint the walls since I'd been chomping at the bit to do something about them since we moved in. As you can see: who ever lived here prior thought that this fleshy-peach color would be the most inviting color for people when the entered the home.

I went with a nice demin blue color for the room: figured it would work well with the browns in the kitchen and be a nice soothing color for the computer room. As you can see in the photo (Dusty at his desk working on some elctronics), it looks pretty nice! Another idea we had was to take the once peach-colored door (yes, they decided to paint the door the same color as the walls) and cover it in chalkboard paint. We LOVE chalkboards (I think we have 3 in the house) so it will be another great place to put notes and doodles.

I like how you can't even tell in this picture that we had to repair the ceiling! The texture is a bit different if you look, but the room finally looks pretty good! Next step in here is going to be to pull up the gross carpet and hopefully put down some tile: being the high-traffice zone between the entry-way and garage, I think tile might be the smartest choice. Stay tuned for more updates - I've got lots more tooms to paint and make-over ; )

Kitchen Make-Over

I figured it had been awhile since I last posted, and since Dusty and I have been hard at work inside the house, it was time for some recent updates!

I wrote on our chalkboard my "holiday home repair wishlist" since I assumed being cooped-up all winter would mean some great opportunities to hammer out some home-repair projects!

The biggest problems we'd had were in the kitchen and computer room (the small addition room that connects the old part of the house to the garage). So let's start with the kitchen:

Basically it wasn't too bad: the white walls were just really dirty and seemed pretty stark next to the blueish-washed cabinets. I felt like we could make the room feel "warmer" with a nice brown color. Initially, I picked up a kind of sandy brown color which, next the the cabinets felt too close to the same color.

Not wanting to go back to ACE Hardware to admit that I didn't pick a good color, I scoured the garage to see if we had something on hand from this summer's outdoor painting adventures that could work.

Thankfully, we had nearly half a gallon of the dark chocolate brown paint from exterior trim which I thought might be a good fit for what we were looking for. I have to admit: I've never been a fan of dark colors in the home since I think they can often give a room a sort of ominous or claustrophobic feeling, but it was worth a shot.

It took two very solid coats to cover, but the effect really gave the small kitchen a nice cozy, inviting feeling. I ended up using the lighter brown up above the cabinets to continue to emphasize the high ceiling in the room; I also used the same light color to accent the archway into the living room and cover the hideous fleshy-pink color connected to the computer room (see next post).

Next few renovation plans for the kitchen will include new countertop, refinishing the horribly scrached wood floors and possibly some tile backsplash! Got a few more pressing items on my list to hit first ; )