Timber!

Remember this shed that was attached to the house? Well, we are glad to say it is now disassembled and the eyesore is no more!

BEFORE

DEMOLITION

We stripped the salvageable wood off the shed to save for future projects and scrapped the tin roof.

Jeremy prying tin off.

View with tin roof removed. We saved the hand hewed rafter beams to use in the house.

Lee helped us out by pulling nails from the beams.

Check out these cool license plates from 1921-1923 that were patching holes in the roof!

AFTER

You can see the outline on the house of where the siding was put over where the shed was.


Just waiting on a contractor to finish picking up the concrete fill and this project will be complete!

Porch Progress

Happy Memorial Day everyone! Because we both had the day off were able to put in a full days work at the house today. Here is an update on the porch/front of house:

BEFORE

TODAY

Walkway tear-out in progress

Regrading in front of the house

I can't wait until the plywood section is turned back into a wrap around porch!

Most components of the porch will be torn out and replaced - supports, beams, flooring, posts, railing, etc. We are going to try to paint and use the existing porch roof. At least for right now it is looking less like an eyesore. It looks 10x better without the crooked and cracked concrete steps we started with!

Chilly Saturday

We were lucky enough to be able to spend all day working at the house today.

We have had a pile of tree stumps sitting in the yard since we did our first big clean up, so today we borrowed a dump truck from work and finally got them out to the woods. We still have quite a few stumps to dig out but that is for another day :-)

We have a mason coming tomorrow to reinforce the rear wall and chimney in the shop. Initially, we noticed the chimney was separating from the building and were planning on tearing it down and rebuilding a new one, but our mason found that it was actually the rear wall that was leaning away from the chimney. The plan is to add two support pillars to the back wall and reconnect the chimney. I will post updated photos tomorrow!

Anyways, in order to install these new support pillars we had to rip out the back wall of the paint booth, so that was our main goal for today. The paint booth's drywall had become moldy and gross because of the roof leak so it had to come out either way.

Day 1 at the paint booth

Drywall down, just insulation left

Finally down to the concrete block!

While the boys were cleaning out the paint booth, I kept busy hauling dump truck loads and doing other small jobs. I took the door off the outhouse today to save the hardware because the lean-to it's in is being torn down soon.

Here is a photo of our lovely outhouse

Up close

The lean-to

Awesome mis-matched roof with whole timbers!

I am a little sad about it because its a neat old building, made from whole round trees. Unfortunately it hasn't been well maintained and has a lot of rot that compromises it's structural integrity. It's also in a bad spot - right behind the house.

So... bye bye shed. But on a positive note, check out all that awesome lumber I will have for crafts!!

Taming the jungle...

When we first bought the house, "jungle" was a good word to describe the property. It had upwards of 50 trees competing for space on the half acre lot. The first thing we did was start cutting back the forest and opening up the lot.

BEFORE

This is a Google Maps view of the house in "full bloom" in 2013. You can barely see in the driveway!

The shop was being overtaken with vines.

This pine tree took up too much valuable space in the driveway.

Back view of the shop. The trees had actually grown into the roof.

The house peeking through the overgrown trees.

DURING

Jeremy trimming branches.


Jeremy and Bryan chipping limbs.

AFTER

Wow! What a difference!

Now we can really see what were working with.

Back view of shop.

Looking less like a jungle and more like a yard!