Father's Day

I hope everyone reading our blog had a wonderful Father's Day.  I've had a Father's Week.   Last weekend Cole, Deb and Tea (Cole's girlfriend) got me a set of metal shelving/workbench frames and a corner yard tool organizer.  Sam stopped by Sunday and brought me a beautifully wrapped (rolled up in a plastic bag) Yeti Tumbler.  All of it will be put to use for a long time to come.

Last weekend, Deb and I finished removing the fireplace and dad came over and helped removing the slab of concrete the fireplace sat on.  I really wanted to keep the fireplace in the bedroom, but it just wasn't going to work out.

 

We used 2X4's to support the beams just incase something went wrong.  Turns out we probably didn't need them.  This house is built like a fortress.

 

 

Fortunately, the gas pipes in the fireplace weren't hooked up, so we didn't have to mess with capping the pipes off before removing the slab.

 

I didn't get any shots of Deb running the air chisel, but she had fun busting the bricks loose.

 

 

Testing the waters trying to figure out how to get one large chunk of concrete out of the house.

 

We found a stress fracture and used a hammer drill to drill holes along the crack.

 

No pictures of it but after drilling about a dozen holes in the slab, dad tried lifting the slab with the tractor while I hammered away at it with a sledge hammer until it broke free.  Once it was in two pieces we were able to lift the pieces out and haul them away.

 

We ran low on time, so we put up a temp wall so we could turn the air conditioning back on.

 

 

This weekend was supposed to be my Saturday off work, but I had to work the In Woods Forestry Expo outside of Hot Springs Saturday so that day was a bust as far as the house is concerned.  After standing out in the sun and heat, I came home and spent what was left of the afternoon relaxing in the pool.  Sunday, however, Deb and I busted our tails getting the floor and wall prepared to put the exterior door in our future bedroom. 

 

You might remember the chimney had settled and was leaning away from the house.  When the chimney pulled away, the slab had pushed the wall out from the house.  I had a 6X6 laying around that we used to push the wall back in.  We set it on top of some bricks where it would line up with the wall and used Daddy's tractor bucket to push the wall back into place.  Surprisingly enough, it actually worked.  I nailed the base plate to the header joist and backed the tractor up and it stayed!  I was pretty excited because if that hadn't worked I had no clue what to try next.

 

Once that was done, we had to tie the original joist headers together.  I used two 2X8's to tie the original joist headers together.  One extends from the original joists on each end.  The other one meets the original joist headers.  After that we cased in the rest of the hole with 2X8's and install joists to support the new subfloor.  We used joist hangers to help keep the new and old pulled together.

 

 

Once the subfloor was measured and put into place, the wall was pretty easy to frame.

 

 

Here is the outside. We still have to fill in the roofline, take out some more of the brick from the chimney, put new siding up, and install the door. 

 

Deb and I have tossed around, for quite a while now, refinishing the hardwood floors ourselves.  After getting a quote from Joe's floors, we decided we could probably do them for roughly half of what Joe quoted me.  THEN, Deb got in one of the bedroom closets with her hand sander and did some experimenting.  After some quick calculations, we came to the realization Joe's floors was the way to go.

 

They got started this morning  And we can already tell we made the right decision.

 

Here is a shot of work in progress.  ( I guess they are all work in progress. But, this one shows two or three steps in the sanding process.)

 

 

This is a nice comparison shot of the sanded red oak floors against the original finish.

 

This is Deb's sewing room.  Having a crew that can work multiple rooms at once really speeds up the progress.  One worker was doing the edges of the sewing room.

 

While another worker was running the big drum sander in Cole's room.

 

Another comparison shot in Cole's room.

 

There were a couple of boards that had to be replaced in the living room.  They will blend in nicely and no one else will notice them, but they just don't make wood floors the way they used to.  The grain in the old boards is much more beautiful than the new ones.

 

Here is a shot of the darkest corner of the living room.  It's amazing to us how much brighter the house is getting.