Knocking Out Stairs...

It's some dirty work. With a 3 day weekend, why not tear something up? The furnace guys are supposed to come sometime next week, and the contractor is going to start running water lines on Tuesday, so we decided this weekend would be the time to knock down the attic stairs. We finished most of the demo work yesterday, and today we are buying the pull down stairs, and we'll try to get it put in. We also pulled up a lot of the masonite in the hallway, which means we only have the front loft bedroom left to do upstairs, and then we will begin to patch walls in the 4 bedrooms.

This is what the upstairs hallway area looked like before. The attic stairs are above the staircase, where the smoke alarm is hanging.

 This is what the attic stairs look like. No thanks, those things bend every time someone steps on them. Super creepy, and they look to be original to the house.

Here's the hallway area after knocking it all out. We still have a stud hanging out, and there's a wire running there as well. We need to figure out what that wire actually runs and get it moved!

 

Of course no attic is complete without finding some curse in the stair walls. We found a Christmas ornament or two also, but yeah, napkin curses and a snake drawn on leather/suede. Fun times!

Hopefully we can get the pull down stairs done this weekend, and rip out more flooring. I'd love to have the upstairs finished except for lighting fixtures and sanding/staining floors in about 2 weeks. Let's see if we can get it done!

Floors and Fire

The past week has been filled with work and Christmas preparations. It just doesn't feel like Christmas this year. We don't have a big tree here in Tiny Barn, our decorations and stockings are in storage, everything we bought is hidden over at dad's house, and we are going to shove the majority of their presents in bags because wrapping would just take up so much time right now!

We had a few very cold days before it warmed up this week, so Luke wanted to play around with the fireplace and see if we could make it work. It has a wood burning insert that was basically rusted shut from sitting so long, so he worked the controls loose, cleaned out the old ash, and we ripped up some newspaper and collected some pine needles to burn. After successfully seeing smoke come out the chimney, he bought a few firebricks to replace a missing one, and built an actual fire (small one) to make sure it was drafting right. So far so good, although we won't make anything too big until we do get the chimney inspected.

 

We focused on the floors upstairs, pulling the fiberboard and plywood off the floors in the back loft, and finishing off Luke's office (the John Deere room). We still have the front loft and hallway to rip up, and then the upstairs will be ready for a thorough wipe down. As soon as the heat works, we can then mud, sand, prime, and paint all the bedrooms upstairs, before tackling the floors.

There was mostly a thin plywood in the back loft instead of fiberboard, but it seems that they decided to use some glue to hold it down, so the floor is pretty messy right now.

The John Deere room (Luke's office) has a nice big plywood section in the flooring from where the chimney came up through, so we'll have to patch that up somehow.

The electrical guys have started working on pulling out the knob and tube wiring, but so far the furnace guys are MIA. We need them there so we can have heat, so the contractor can start his drywall work! We still have light fixtures to order and pick up, trim to tear off the walls, and some downstairs flooring work, as well as the upstairs floors that still need peeled up. We spent Christmas Eve working on hooking up the electrical box in the shop, and driving in ground wires. We had to go look for gifts for the hillbilly gift exchange anyway, and the shop certainly has a lot of junk to sort through. We took the opportunity to burn some cardboard from the shop too, and just enjoy the view since the weather was so warm!

Lazy Sunday, Rainy Monday

Sunday and Monday were demo days 9 and 10, but really, not much happened in the way of destruction. It's been unusually warm in Ohio for December, and Sunday it was overcast and in the low 60's. We spent a lot of time outside, making a fire, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows, climbing trees, and exploring the woods.

The girls put their fire building skills from girl scouts to the test.

 Lexi was trying to pull herself up the tree.

Lexi got to push Lilly up the tree.

And then Lilly's shoe got stuck in between the tree trunks!

They also enjoyed making chalk art all over the concrete. There's a nice patio area, sidewalks, and a concrete front porch to decorate.

Time for S'mores!!

We found a few spots full of these beetles. I did some quick internet looking, and we believe they are pink spotted ladybird beetles. They are good at eating aphids and lots of other insect eggs, so they are definitely beneficial to the neighboring fields and our future garden. 

My brother and dad decided to haul up the lawn mower, just to see how it would handle the long, thick grass that has been left to grow wild for at least 4 years. It clogged easily, so it was slow going, but amazingly enough it did cut it down.

We now have a path to the West field where the R/C planes fly.

We also have a decent pathway from the house to the shop.

 

Of course the planes had to make an appearance since we spent most of the day outside.

We did manage to work on the flooring in the spare room for a tiny bit, and pull off the door and base trim in the laundry room. A few doors made their way to the garage from upstairs as well. The doors all need a good scrubbing, and they'll just be in the way when we actually get to the point of sanding floors, so we might as well just take them off now.

Today isn't much of a workday either. We went up to the house over lunch today and pulled a few staples out of the floor, and quickly took off the doors to the kitchen cabinets.

 While we were there the trash guys came by with another dumpster since we filled the first one over the weekend.

The girls threw a few piece of paneling in the new dumpster before we left.

 

Progress is going to really slow down this week. Luke has tons of work to do for both his day job and photography, so he can't keep taking half days to work at the house. Hopefully the electrician gets finished up this week enough to get the power turned on, then we'll be able to go up in the evenings. 

Demo Days 6, 7, Santa, and 8!

Thursday and Friday were spent working on flooring. Thursday we finished ripping out the fiberboard in the living room, and on Friday we finished the library.

Here's the living room. Mopping it over really brought out some of the original stain color.

The girls hung out with us on Friday while we finished the library.

Here's the library. It still has some staples on the floor, but we'll get to them.

Today we had our Build and Grow at Lowe's. We built a holiday train and then got to visit with Santa! This is Henna's first year that she actually spoke to him, although I had to walk up with her.

My dad and brother came up to the house today, which was a huge help! We filled the dumpster with everything we had in the front yard, only to pile more carpet and paneling in the yard while we wait for the dumpster to get taken away and emptied.

Our focus was the upstairs. We got the carpet ripped out of the 3 bedrooms up there that had carpet, pulled out the plywood that was down on the office floor, and pulled out most of the paneling in the hallway and staircase.

Here's the front loft bedroom so far.

This is the John Deere bedroom. It'll be Luke's office, and since it had plywood instead of fiberboard, we got most of the flooring uncovered today.

Here's the back loft bedroom. We may work on this some tomorrow since it has plywood down instead of fiberboard.

And finally the staircase and hallway.

We also had to take a time out and fly the plane a little more.

Tomorrow we will be back at it again. We may try and take off all of the doors upstairs and put them in the garage so we can scrub them down later, but mostly we will probably be working on uncovering floors...

This is what we have to look forward to. Piles and piles of tetanus!

You guessed it! Demo Day 5...

Wednesday was our 5th day of demo work. Our main focus was the library (otherwise known as the fireplace room). We pulled off the rest of the paneling on the walls. It seems like the entire house got a makeover in the 70's.

Here someone drew a picture of the fireplace on the wall...next to the fireplace!

We also worked on the floor. A third of the flooring didn't have that masonite fiberboard. It had some kind of thin plywood instead, which meant the entire sheet came up all at once, making that section of the floor SO EASY to uncover. This room used to be two rooms, but thankfully the wood floor ran underneath of the wall that used to be there, so it looks to continue seamlessly throughout the room. The only issue is that we uncovered a patched area where a furnace vent used to be. Originally it would have been up against the wall that separated the rooms, but now it's just going to be in the middle of the library. Not really that big of an issue though, people have register vents in the middle of rooms!

 Forgive my phone...anytime I take pictures with my flash on it, I get the red lines.

Luke of course spent a couple of minutes chipping the plaster off of the chimney in the kitchen again. I swear he's in love with it! The plaster is in such bad shape, it's coming off a lot easier than anyone expected.

The weather was very overcast, and it actually started sprinkling, so we lost daylight rather quickly inside. We took a quick peek upstairs under the carpets in the front loft and office where they meet the hallway. It looks like the fiberboard covers painted wood floors up there as well. We just aren't sure of their condition. It also seems like the fiberboard is molding in some places. Ick!

Here's the rain clouds rolling in...

On another note, we've had numerous people stop out and ask about the property. Four or five of them were actually interested in buying it, and a few others were from somewhere in the vicinity and came to see what was going on and congratulate us on our purchase. It seems like a lot of people have had their eye on the property for quite awhile. I guess it's a good thing I made Luke contact the bank in California that owned it, because if it would have actually went to market, it would have been sold long before we were able to purchase it!

The plan for today it to continue pulling up fiberboard, and start hauling out smaller debris that is piled up on the floor downstairs. We are hoping to gather up a little more help on the weekend, which will make ripping out the carpets and paneling upstairs a lot easier. My boot for my plantar fasciitis doesn't allow for very good balance going up and down stairs, especially carrying debris, and trust me, those little pieces of fiberboard add up into piles real quick!