Demo

It has been a while since my last post, so I figured I'd share a couple of updates and photos. Not a lot has been going on as of late, other than starting to demo the inside of the cabin. So far we have one room done.

Lower level demo. Sorry for terrible cell phone quality photo!

Since ripping out the drywall on the ceiling we have learned that the upper floor joists are mostly rotten because the previous owner failed to fix leaky pipes from the upstairs bathroom. Some of the joists are even cut through as much as 75% to make room for bathroom piping.

View of the rotten upper floor joists

We came to the conclusion that the huge steel I-beam that runs through the middle of the room probably was added when plumbing was introduced to the house because they needed to cut through some of the floor logs to make room for piping, thus creating an issue of structural instability. The I-beam hangs very low (Jeremy just fits under it and he is around 5'10") so our plan is to remove all of the old floor joists and the beam.

We have been tossing around the idea of turning the log section of the house into a large one story room because of the limitations with the ceiling height (6'6"-7' at best) and the rotten joists. Possibly a living room like the one pictured below:

But, we will cross that bridge when we get to it. For right now we are just tearing out the house when we have free time and saving some money to get the shop finished up. In order, our plans are:

1) Parge the entire exterior and paint
2) Dig around the foundation, lay drain tile, and re-grade
3) Built the portico for above the door
4) Metal the inside

Parging & Porticos

In my last post I mentioned that we had a mason coming out to reinforce the back wall of the shop, fix the chimney, and parge the concrete block. Here are some photos of the finished product!

One of the pillars on the inside of the shop (they added two on the back wall)


The other pillar. When the parge dries it will look like concrete. The mason was also kind enough to finish the hole in the wall for our corn stove pipe :-)

Back wall of shop with a coat of parge. See that stump beside the chimney? That thing's roots were the culprit of the leaning wall!

Chimney reattached to building

Overall we are really happy with how it turned out. The parging was done as an added layer of strength but we liked the look so much that we are getting a price to do the entire outside.

On the inside you can notice the color difference between the block and the parging. This will be covered up when we paint the inside white. The only noticeable difference will be in texture. Speaking of colors, here is the color scheme for the garage:

Tan: Outside  |  White: Trim & Inside  |  Charcoal: Roof  |  Copper Penny: Portico roof

The copper penny color is hard to show, but it is very beautiful in person with a hint of shimmer. We decided to dress up the front of the shop a little with a portico above the man door (example below) and are going to use standing seam metal in the copper penny color for that.