Hi! I am going to show you some older pics of some, well a lot of, roof work that was done. I don't have the finished picture for you yet; as it is covered in snow right now, but it is just black rubber on there. This past Summer, Cliff worked very hard for a week to get this all torn up and finished. He did. He only had a few finishing things to do after that. The entire week was sunny and perfect! I say that is pretty good for having never redone a roof before in this manner. This work BTW had been done on the lower roof. The upper roof has yet to be done. That section is in OK shape so it will be refinished in a year or two.

First picture is the contraption Cliff built to get the roof items up there. It worked out pretty good. Zack was pretty interesting in seeing it work.

This is after a lot of the crappy rubber, old insulation from ages ago and siding were removed. He shoveled it all off, and it was soaked under all of those layers due to leaks in the rubber. Our chimney on the right of the pic, which leads down into our kitchen.

View of the cleaned off roof toward the house. You can see now what I mean by "lower roof?" The slate was unfortunately cheaply repaired with tar instead of fixed correctly.

This picture was angled away from the house. Flat top and underneath it all are boards, which were still OK to use thank goodness. Just needed to be aired out.

So our house needs a nice paint job. It SCREAMS for it. The trim needs to be repaired in spots also...no surprise there? As a little bit of advice from me...when you have problems in your home, if you do a "temporary" fix, let it be that. TEMPORARY. Fix it the way it deserves, so in the long run you, nor the next owner, have to deal with it in worse shape later. DON'T BE LAZY. It's not worth it. 

Before...

And after. I think we will keep the grey-ish color and the off white. But the third color for the ornates (purple) will be darker I think. And maybe even a whole different color.

 This home needs some life as well, so I am going to plant a rose bush or two, and some other flowers here and there outside. We want to plant a little garden also - I miss having one.

Getting an old house like this needs a lot of time, and patience. You need to go in accepting that things won't be perfect. You will live out of your comfort zone for a little while. During all of this, anger management is a must! ;)

For example. See the seriously outdated and horrible wall paper? The geeky linoleum on the floor? Not our thing, not one teeny tiny bit. But the time will come where it will all be gone. This is our computer room BTW. Walls will be torn down, new outlets/electrical done.

It's been a while! We decided to take a break from major projects during the Winter. BUT, I do have pics of some things that we DID do, and a few other things I had never shown anyone once it was done. A friend reminded me that it's time to start this blog thing again! ;)


The first two pics are of our torn apart bedroom-to-be! It is pretty good size, but you can't really see that from the pictures here.

One end of the room. Yes, there is a door in there! Leads to a small "room." The boards there are shelves we are putting in the bathroom. Repurposed from the floor trim in one of the other rooms.



The other end of our room. We plan to put up the walls up soon. And we can have our bedroom upstairs!



 

The latest update we have!

We are getting very close to putting up drywall for the kids' bedroom on the third floor! We have all of the nails out of the 2x4s, and Cliff is now running electrical through the walls (there is currently knob & tube wiring), and ordered the insulation. We decided that he take this trip alone today since dealing with the possibility of being zapped is there, and not having the kids running around during this time would be ideal.

Well, this is a close-up of those "2x4s" with no nails in it. And why yes, there is a chimney hiding behind there!

This is one of the bigger nails we pulled out of the wood. It is not round, not like you see these days. So...I kept it! Kind of like a souvenir.



This is how we left it more or less, yesterday.

I poked my head, and camera of course, out of the window and took a lovely pic of the outside. Those are slate tiles, and water piling up from all the rain we have had lately!

Now, what we are throwing around is the idea of keeping the beams exposed for the ceiling rather than covering them with drywall. We want to put a coating of sealant over them of course so nothing falls on their heads from the wood. There will be insulation on the roof so we will not be losing any heat/cool as the year passes on. I'll get a better picture of the ceiling next time.

AND while Cliff was inside the house washing up, I hooked the Highlander up to the trailer by my lonesome. I didn't bend or break a thing! I had to try and see if I could do it, we don't live in the dark ages anymore. Well...the secret to my success is the back-up camera in my SUV. Shhhhh!

7.3.2013

Weekend Two of Home Project

This weekend was filled with knocking down the drywall and slats. Many many messes and a lot of dust! It is interesting to see the guts of a house, never have before to this degree, but I can tell the house was made to be pretty solid. And that it was built a long time ago, just from seeing the "two by fours" that were inside the walls. They were "logs" clearly that were quartered, the bark is still on them and the nails used were not the type you see today. So, let me get to the point, PICTURES! What you really came for, eh?

Here is one of the rooms victim to our demo. Drywall gone.

Same thing here, different room. The white decorative around the windows will have to stay due to the possibility of it not coming back together well. So I will remove the paint with it as is.

Now this part is interesting. Notice the pic is showing two doorways? There is a little cove between them on the left side, and a chimney to the right.

Here is the little cove, if you will. The chimney is behind the person taking the pic, and past owner must have left this portion open to keep the two rooms on either side the same size. Make sense? The walls on either side of this are now drywall free as well.

And now a couple of random pics. A couple of the drive near the house:

Heading toward the Village. Not too far from the house.

The Village. It is old as you can see.

Driving up to the house. The neighborhood is pretty quiet.
 

And there you have it. Next weekend there will be more work, but I will not be there, nothing new anyway. Same thing. Then a wall will be moved over, electricity updated, and walls re-sheeted/insulated. That will be in 2-3 weeks from now.

New Home Project!

So, we bought a house! A 166-ish year old one to boot, built in 1845. I'll do the math later, ahem... Why you say? The house has a lot of potential, the schools are good for the kids, it was cheap. The place will require a lot of work, but is not too incredibly bad for the age to tell you the truth.

Alright, enough cheap talk! Here are the facts. The house is 2800sqft, 1.5 bathrooms, 6 bedrooms (the  listing stated 9, but not really so), full basement, attic which some of the bedrooms are located. Not much land. 

Pictures will come as we go! How it is now, and how it will be as we go. It'll be messy!

Now, if you take a look at this website about the Batcheller Mansion, which is here in Saratoga, I am throwing around the idea of using these paint colors for the outside.



Here is the front. Looks kind of like a farmhouse, but not really.



The addition that was added many, many...many years ago.



The side, look another door! There are three. Not sure why. There were 4, but if you look at the addition in the second pic, the odd looking window...looks like it used to be a door?, D'oh!

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