Renovation Project 2024!!

 After demoing out the wall on the dinning room side, a hidden chimney brick was revealed.  It was in better shape than I expected and I had been thinking about the aesthetics of having exposed brick in the kitchen.  So... I decided to dive into exposing the brick on the kitchen side.  I knew the plaster was likely directly on the brick, but did not realize how much of a pain in the a%$ it was to get the plaster to separate from the brick.  Perseverance and a masonry chisel prevailed.   I will post more photos of the chimney after the sealant is applied and a metal plate installed over the opening.  

 The next step was the exciting step of seeing actual changes in the house and starting to take out the wall between the kitchen and dinning room!  It was also nerve wracking in terms of what I was going to find under the wall (and how much it may cost to fix an unexpected issue!).  The archways turned out to be inserts that were made out of OSB.   Luckily, no major surprises after tearing into the wall... except my anxiety was building about if I was cutting out a load bearing wall or not so I hired a structural engineer to do an evaluation.  His statement was that the wall was not intended to be a structural wall, but that after almost 100 years of settling and all of the prior renovations that had been done, that it was functionally a structural wall and needed a structural beam in stalled.   So after looking at the process of installing the structural beam and everything else that would be needed, I ended up needing to take out the remainder o...

 The next step was to find out what was hiding above the dropped ceiling in the hallway and the kitchen nook.  Luckily there were no hidden bodies or human remains like we found in the crawl space years ago.  The hallway was hiding a light fixture hanging by the 100'ish year old wires that were still live, as well as an older doorbell.  There was a rat's nest of wires hiding under the ceiling fixture as well... not so ideal.  

 After removing the hardwood floor, the first of many unexpected changes in plans was finding out the subfloor had such wide gaps that using a leveling cement would not be possible adn that leveling the subfloor would be extremely challenging at best.  So... I decided to take the "easier" path and install a new plywood subfloor over top of the original subfloor to prevent the new hardwood floor from creaking and/or cracking.  So, I hauled in 23 sheets of 4' x 8' plywood into the house.  I leveled out the original subfloor the best I could with sanding and laying down asphalt shingles on either side of the high point in the floor to make it a gradual transition.  Henri was not impressed with this step of the process.  

 The second phase was to remove the hardwood throughout the entire 1st floor and the underlying hardwood that is throughout the entire 1st floor (excluding the kitchen and bathroom).  My new best friend was a 3.5' crow bar that I used to remove 650 square feet of hardwood flooring.  The other thing I learned was that a spiral textured nail has dramatically better holding power than a smooth shank nail.  Those spiral textured nails were a pain in the a#% to get out and were used in all of the addition area of the house.  

The idea of this renovation project started with new beginning and a refresh of life starting a refresh of the house.  The original idea was to replace the carpeting in the bedrooms as they were pretty well trashed out after 8 years of use and abuse by the animals living there.  This then expended to thinking about putting a new coat of paint on the walls, then if I going to replace the bedroom flooring, maybe I should put hardwood throughout the entire upstairs (except the kitchen and the bathroom), and I have always wanted to remove the wall between the kitchen and the dinning room and install a breakfast bar, and..., and... And so the spiral of the ever expanding renovation project commenced! Step one was to remove the dated popcorn ceiling texture that was in the guest bedroom.  This was the first step so that I could scrape all the popcorn onto the carpet, rollup the carpet, and throw it all out at once!  I think this step of scraping off the popcorn above my he...