In the closet

While I wish I had a lovely gardening photo to share with you from such a mild, dare I say warm, weekend, most of the weekend was actually spent in a 2.5'x9' closet. It is now 2 closets.

Here's an overview: We had an awkward bedroom closet that was "walk in" but so narrow that we couldn't really take advantage of the space. So, we chopped it in two and have a smaller and shallower closet for the bedroom and a similarly sized little closet annexed to the kitchen. Yippee. And, we also started to rebuild the stairs to the basement to make them a little safer.

Here's Justin removing the final remnants of closet hardware so we can start building a new wall.

Our new wall, making this closet magnitudes better in space efficiency. We'll need to finish this drywall before we can put some function in the closet but this will work just fine until we get to that step.

A little demo to get into our new closet for the kitchen.

A roughed in template for a new closet. We need still need to demo some plaster under the window and we are considering modifying the window configuration too. Stay tuned for more on that in a few months.

A work in progress had us looking before we leaped.

Voila, One solid platform from the kitchen to the new closet! We'll get some new (used) fir flooring to tie this all together.

And the dust has settled

We're into it now! I'm starting to remember the feeling you get when you do manual labor all day. My fingers are a little tender and I'm sporting two new blisters from maneuvering a crowbar for a few hours.

We started out the day with a plan. First up, we visited the lumberyard for materials to build the wall on the north side of the stairs. Next, I demoed the plaster in the stairwell while Justin finished installing the seismic brackets. It it only took minutes before I had a good start to a giant pile of rubble.  Justin and I schlepped the plaster and lath out and Justin got to make a run to the dump. We've got a pretty clean slate now.

Justin has been dutifully installing Simpson hardware every 3 feet. He has a new tool, a palm nailer, which speeds things up but makes a ton of noise.

Here's Justin taking off the first strip of lath.

I took over the demoing so Justin could get back to his brackets.

 And, the clean slate, after the load had been dropped at the dump.

We're at it again!

Justin and I are coming out of our brief retirement from home reno projects to take on the basement. The posts to the blog were getting a little slim these last few months but there should be a more steady stream coming up.

 The useless wall made of re-purposed doors is removed from the right side of the stairwell. In its place is a new temporary wall for load bearing. Ultimately, we'll move this temporary wall up against the stairs but first we need to reconstruct the stairs.

We had a structural engineer come out and look at our basement a few weeks ago to give us advice on how to properly earthquake-proof our house. Armed with plans for bracing and bracketing the joists and columns, Justin and I hit up the local Habitat for Humanity Home Store to search for all of the Simpson hardware that will shore up our home for "the big one". We found about 75% of the parts we need and buying by the pound at severe discounts is a nice perk. I'm really happy we checked out this store first.

Another shot of our temporary wall: probably overkill since there was nothing really holding up those joists before this wall but it is better to be safe than sorry. You can see the area under the stairs is all demoed out.

This weekend, we took on a little demo and some temporary structures and boy does it feel good to have a project and see some forward progress on this basement. It is a little overwhelming to consider removing the insulation and re-routing ducts and piping to allow for an augmented layout for our basement but we'll be taking it slowly since we have no deadline driving this.

A pile of rubble

We wasted no time busting up the concrete in the back yard. See, we need a place to put the dumpster for the concrete and we didn't want to put it on the grass because we are going to need to level it using heavy machinery which we also hope to use to bust up and load the rest of the concrete. Can you believe it took Justin and I less than 2 hours to build this pile? Big changes are coming to this backyard soon!

Demolition Again!

And we're back...After 2 weeks of frolicking in Europe, we decided to dive right into hard labor on our first day back.

Here's our back porch, deconstructed.

And here's a view of the siding removed, and being reinstalled. Check out the cool shadow!

Final Days of Demo

Happy New Year and the final days of our demolition! We wrapped up the major deconstruction activities this weekend. Justin and I both took the 2nd off of work to labor at our "second job". We did a lot of small things that added up to quite a bit. Justin's dad, Jon, came out for an afternoon and helped break down the walls in the basement. Jon's fighting an ugly eye infection and nearly chopped off his hand in the dumpster but stuck in out for the afternoon to lend a hand (thankfully he still had one to lend). We tore out the remainder of the old heating ducting and busted out several studs on the top floor to make room for the new walls. We also cashed in on our boxes of wire and copper pipe at the recycler: $36 for the lot and they took about 100 pounds of sash weights off our hands too. On Sunday, we spent the day cleaning up all of the dust and the photos below show it.

A few of our subcontractors came out to the site to walk through. We had the framers and plumber on site to confer and our window & siding guy came by to take measurements with which to order our new windows. So far, we have these three subs on board. We'll be making some decisions on an electrician, HVAC contractor, insulator and drywaller this upcoming week. Tomorrow, the framers begin and if everything goes as planned (it's snowing buckets right now so this is a big "if"), we'll have our framing wrapped up before the end of this upcoming week.

Here's a less than clear photo of the most disgusting ducts you've ever seen. They were growing fur! Justin is wielding a long pole to pry down the sheet metal. Lots of dust in the air!

Our new closet, minus a few studs.

The hallway and master bedroom and future linen closet. Our new bedroom door is moving over a couple of inches to give a more gracious opening.

Check out the 7 studs on the back wall! We tore out several of these to allow for better insulation.

Notice any less dust? This is a photo after we swept and vacuumed.

Bye Bye Chimney

We're not sure how Santa fit his fat little self down this chimney throughout the years but he was decidedly happy that we left it up until the 26th so he could make one final delivery: a rotor-hammer that came with a free 4.5 inch angle grinder. We didn’t need to use either of these fancy new tools to deconstruct the chimney however, because it was held together by habit, not by mortar. The first 5 feet came down in 15 minutes and the last 25 feet were out of the house, cleaned and stacked in a tidy row in under 3 hours. Thanks to our work crew, Jill, Heidi, Aaron and Scott, many hands made light work (it was still heavy work but it went super fast!). Now I have all the makings for a new brick patio but we’re a long way off from a project like that.

We wrapped up the day by tearing out the drywall from one room in the basement—mostly Justin did this since I was pooped (that’s why this post is a day late). We have one more room to go in our deconstruction in the basement plus a good clean-up of the whole house before our demolition is final finished. Well, maybe there are a few other odds and ends but for the most part, that’s it.

Here's Jill chipping off the "mortar".Scott posing in a very dusty room after the first floor of chimney was deconstructed.

Here's the work gang posing in front of a very organized stack of bricks.

No more chimney!

Here's Justin tearing into the drywall in the basement. Another dusty shot.

Another day in demolition

The snow has melted enough now that we were able get up on the roof today. Today's project was tearing down the chimney below the roofline and patching the roof. This is our last big demo project to complete before we can start construction. Justin scrambled up there and had the chimney knocked down below the roofline in about 15 minutes. That was the easy part because the mortar was so loose that it really wasn't doing anything. Too bad though because earlier we had stopped by the Home Depot for a fancy new tool, a roto-hammer, for busting up the mortar. After we had the big hole in our roof, we went back to the Depot for roof patching materials. Of course, they didn't have the shingles we needed and couldn't get them anytime soon.

Here's Justin up on the roof with the chimney liner pulled out.

Yeah! Waste Management finally came to pick up our dumpster. We got to meet our neighbor Brett who lives in the house just behind this truck. He helped up shovel the alley a little to get the WM truck into our driveway.

A shot of our hole before the patch.

Here's Justin cutting up some new framing for the rafters to fill in our hole in the roof.

Bid Day Redo

It is so nice to snuggle up with warm bodies and a blanket and warm cup of tea. It's even nicer to do this after spending the day in a house with no heat. We were up at the house at 9 am to meet the parade of subcontractors lined up to bid on our job. Today was a big success. Nearly everyone on our bidding list showed up and walked through and promised to send their bids in next week or sooner. While Justin talked and walked with the subcontractors, I spent the better part of the morning pulling out the bottom piece of lath from the studs. This last piece is shoved down below the flooring so it requires a lot of prying and wiggling to get out. I was nearly finished when Justin asked me to go run copies of our work scope and pick up lunch.

Seattle is still snowed under and the neighborhood streets are now all rutted out and very difficult to drive on. I didn't feel too great about driving up the street to run this errand so I walked. It was only a few blocks, but it was raining and the sidewalks are in sorry shape. I stopped by Delite Bakery for lunch which was the highlight of this cold and miserable day. The staff helped me pick out some delicious pastries for lunch (hombow, ham&cheese croissant, & empanda) and welcomed me to the neighborhood. I'll definitely be going back because their food is great and very inexpensive.

In the afternoon, Justin and I were both shivering in our boots and Justin got this great idea to build a fire in the fireplace. We have no shortage of kindling and dry, clean wood and we had a rip-roaring fire in no time. I figured if I pulled the nails from the trim pieces, I could sit in the living room in front of the fire and stay warm. The fire didn't heat up much of the rest of the house though. Justin got into the demo action a little in the afternoon as the stream of subcontractors slowed and pulled out a lot of the electrical wiring in the basement between the floor joists.

We're still waiting for it to warm up enough to melt the snow and ice on the roof and let us get up there to deconstruct the chimney. We want to be done with that by the 6th of January so our framing work can start. Tomorrow we'll have another big work day and hopefully even get onto the part where we vacuum up some of the dust. The dumpster is still full and the message is that *maybe* it will be picked up on Saturday but we aren't holding our breath.

Snow Day!

Ever wonder what your pets do when you're not home? We came home to this evidence on Monday night after spending our evening at the new house and not with the kittens. When the cats are away, the mice will play...

Demolition is still the number 1 chore and tonight we moved into the basement. This whole event was a bit tricky since it snowed about 8 inches in Seattle and the streets were in bad shape. Justin put chains on his car and we made our way, albeit slowly, over to Beacon Hill for our chance to fill up the dumpster (again!). Tomorrow is a big day for our project: bid day. Weather permitting, we'll have about a dozen contractors from various trades coming to walk through our house and give us an estimate of what it will take to do our projects. Justin is taking the day off of work to lead them through. We xeroxed a bunch of copies of our drawings and marked up the drawings to annotate our electrical outlet desires for the contractors to use in preparing their estimates. Justin has been diligently developing scopes of work for the bidders so we should be in good shape to get comprehensive quotes.

So the progress for tonight: we tore off the drywall (yeah! it's not plaster in the basement) in the front room and found a few surprises. First off, the person that "finished" the room used masking tape to finish the seams on the drywall. Second, we found a secret room. This is our first big find in the house if you don't count the dirty boy's underwear that was stashed in the attic.

Here's the front room with no drywall:

Here are some shots of the secret room, under the porch. Yes, that's more underwear you see. There are at least 2 women's slips down there, a bunch of scrap wood, some old, old boxes, a large basket, and a bunch of other things that I'll term as garbage.

A shot from the other direction:



And here's a less exciting photo of demolition in the back room. Amazingly, we found some insulation. This is it for the whole house and whomever installed it didn't do a first rate job. We found a 24" stud cavity with a 20" batt.

And, in other good news, we got our STFI Construction Permit on Wednesday. So, after we finish our demo, we're free to start construction!

Demo Day IV & V

We made a ton of progress this weekend and are finally on the home stretch of demolition. Michelle & Ryan joined in the fun and helped us out on Saturday. Thanks R&M!

We spent the whole day smashing plaster and hauling lath and plaster out to the dumpster. Michelle and I were the primary haulers while Ryan and Justin got busy with the sledgehammers. We finished clearing the ceilings upstairs as well as the entire stairwell. By the end of Saturday we had the whole upstairs stripped down to the studs and all of the debris picked up and put in the dumpster. It was filthy, strenuous work!

Michelle and I had filth all over our faces at the end of the day. When I got in the shower that evening, the water ran gray through 2 shampoos.

Over night, our first snowfall of the season came and we woke up to about 2-3 inches of snow, an infrequent occurence in Seattle. It made driving from our house in West Seattle to Beacon Hill a little dicey due to the fact that Seattle doesn't own plows or salt the roads. But, we made it over the two big hills and back again safely.



Justin and I spent most of Sunday doing little details that wouldn't generate a lot of waste. I clipped all of the K&T wiring out of the first and second floors and unscrewed all of the recepticles in the living and dining rooms while Justin sawed off and capped the plumbing. We still have a functioning toilet which is mostly all I care about plumbing-wise. Ultimately, we wrapped up those tasks and took to removing the 700 billion nails from the studs. Each piece of lath is tacked onto the studs with two nails on either end and often two nails at each stud it crosses. When you pull off the lath, you usually pull a few nails with it but generally, you leave a bunch of nails behind. So, we spent about 2 hours pulling nails and still have about 250 billion nails left to go.

Here's Justin freezing his tush off extracting nails from the studs.

Demo Day II

With a full dumpster, we couldn't get too carried away with ripping out more plaster but we did our best. Jill and Scott were back for round 2. They came to help after a full day on Saturday and their morning run of 6-10 miles. They're tough! This is a photo from the future master bedroom looking into the future closet & bathroom.


Justin capped off most of the plumbing so we can start ripping out fixtures and pipes and we cleaned out a problem gutter. The gutter was backed up and leaky and after disassembling it, we found a good 10 inches of muck and some plastic pieces plugging the passage. I also got rid of a bird's nest on the porch. It didn't appear to be occupied so I don't think any bird is going to miss it. Plus, I'm doing those birds a favor because my cats are fond of eating birds.

Demo Day I

Today was a big day for our project. We had 6 of our best friends come over and work up a good sweat. Thanks Amy, Brian, Jill, Scott, Heidi & Aaron! We suited up to protect ourselves from lead paint which we assume is all over the house. Here's a group photo before we got too crazy with the sledgehammer.

We had to pull all of the carpet out of the house and pry up the tack strips. Here's Jill finishing up the job.
The kitchen was our first victim to the sledgehammer. We had so much debris that we filled the 7 yard dumpster and had a bunch of the lath left over so we built a bonfire (not really) in the kitchen. We'll get rid of this pile when Waste Management frees us of the first load--thanks Ben @ WM for hooking us up.
Aaron found a really cool bee's nest in a wall. Thankfully it had been long abandoned. This is going to be a treat to clean up!


Here's a view of the kitchen with most of the demo complete. We'll be opening up this wall a bit to make room for a peninsula from kitchen to the dining room but we're going to need some guidance from our architect on how to frame it out properly.
So, we finished up the day around 4pm, just as the sun was setting which was convenient since we were pooped. We accomplished a lot! The kitchen is stripped of its plaster and 2 of the 3 bedrooms upstairs have been gutted, except for the ceilings. We'll need an empty dumpster before we can get too much further and maybe some time to recoup our tired muscles.