Getting things finished

So I've finally finished the kitchen. It's been a long old slog, but we're there bar a few touch ups. But I've got to concentrate on the bigger picture. I've started on the baseboards and caulking in the hallway. There are some big old gaps, so it's going to take rather a lot of caulking, but it'll look good when it's done.

I've also finally got round to putting up the motion sensing coach house style lamps outside.

From Exterior Lights

Time shift forwards

I did say things would slow down a lot after my son was born. We haven't however been that slow.

The wall above the stairs was originally covered with a plastic coated ply board. This was very common around here 40 years ago as it was a way of very cheaply and quickly covering unsightly walls, and give it that wooden walls effect that was very popular at the time.

Underneath we found small holes in the walls from the nails, construction glue used in conjunction with the nails to hold the panels up. So we stripped the wall paper back to the plaster, patched the plaster up, and then skimmed the whole wall. I have to say, I'm very pleased with the results:

Still visible in one photo is the wooden frame I built around the stairwell, with a couple of strut supports removed so we could get access to the upstairs at night. The bar along the wall opposite the landing is screwed into the studs on the other side of the plaster. Whilst I was working, I temporarily screwed some planks over the top.

To do the ceiling in bedroom 4, and other places, I've bought second hand a cheap drywall hoist. Bedroom 4's ceiling was very cracked and uneven, so I've just screwed some gyprock over the top of that:

Of course then the light fitting wouldn't go up, as the box that supports it was now 1/2 inch further away. So a quick trip to Canadian Tire, and I had the parts to put the light back up.

We've also started on the bathroom by removing the horrible wall paper, turning the door round and boarding up the hole in the floor. Mischief the cat still hasn't quite forgiven us for that.

Doors

I dislike doors that don't close, particularly doors leading into the bathroom. It's lucky it's only us living here because the door would stick with at least 3 inches to go. It gets so stuck that one of our friends managed to inadvertently get herself stuck in there one time! Not only have I managed to get the door to close, which is a feat in of itself, but I've turned the door round. This is a major deal as I've had a love hate relation with doors for some time. But I was determined to get the doors right. So I spent two days getting the door turned round. You can see the very large gap above the door in the next slideshow.



Now we have doors that close, shut and stay shut in the whole house. We've even got a door that fits and is in keeping leading into the downstairs office.

We've also all but finished the kitchen floor (during which I had an unpleasant accident). We've found some self-adhesive tiles in black and white, which we really liked the look of. The floor underneath was so uneven and dirty however, we couldn't stick the tiles to it. So we've screwed some 1/4 inch ply board to it first. This gives the floor a nice even surface and it's very clean for the tiles to stick to.

You can see the results here:



Overall, we've done most of the gyprocking we're going to do in this house. We've even managed to get paint on all the walls we've worked on so far - but that's a photo album for another day.

Slow down in the work

With the imminent arrival of our first baby, we've had to slow down the work significantly. So I've been concentrating on tidying up some of the work we have done so far. I've added coving round the room of bedroom 4, and round the top of half of the dinning room. Working on the dinning room is difficult as there is so much else stored in there, and I have to keep on moving things round in order to get to the walls. But there has been progress. I've also done significant work to the hallway, which I'm having to concentrate to get that perfect as that's the first thing potential buyers will see when they come in through the front door. We've re-gyrocked the walls, and I've put coving up high. I'm going to have to decide soon what to do about the decorations round the doors in there. They have some slightly fancy mouldings which has been replicated in the living room which I would really like to keep as a selling feature. However, we removed the window in there and replaced it with a doorway, which means the mouldings no longer fit the door. So do I:

• Replace the mouldings anyway
• Try to replicate the mouldings

I think it's possible to replicate the mouldings. Whether it will be easy is another matter and only time will tell!

In the meantime a minor victory. Whilst taking apart the surround of the window in the dinning room, I damaged the window sill. I've managed to manufacture a replacement window sill, with relative ease thanks to my insanely dangerous table saw.

I think I've managed to re-upload the video of the me taking down the wall in bedroom 4 in time lapse fashion:



*sigh* It's not as convenient as when I was uploading it to YouTube, but YouTube is having a funny turn. Just click on the photo above and it should take you to the video. Email me if it doesn't!

Bedroom 4 continued

So we've finished insulating and putting up the vapour barrier in bedroom 4, and started to gyprock the walls now. We've run out of gyprock so we can't do the whole room, but we are getting a delivery of 30 more sheets on Monday. We had our first visitor over, who helped us put the gyprock in place on the sloped ceilings. We've plastered what we can and finish that side of things once the delivery has arrived. Unfortunately the ceiling got damaged whilst we were taking the walls down, and the cracks in the original plaster have got so bad, I feel it's not salvageable. This means we'll have to take the plaster off the ceiling too. So I'm going to have to hire a drywall hoist to lift the panels up to ceiling level as I can't lift a panel over my head (yet!). This isn't a major problem as such, as there are several other parts of the 2nd floor which are going to need a hoist to get the panels up. So I'm going to have to wait to do that - prep the ceiling in bedroom 4, then remove wall covering and prep the landing.

All this with a baby coming soon. Hmm - not sure how successful that's going to be!

Below are some photos of the state of bedroom 4 as it stands.



Still to do in bedroom 4:

• Remove the ceiling
• Add vapour barrier
• Insulate the ceiling
• Re-gyprock the ceiling
• Finish plastering (aka mudding) the room
• Add a closet
• Add coving round the room. This might involve moving the light switches too.
• Prime and paint the walls
• Add cubby holes above the stairs?
• Replace the bannisters
  
  • Work out how to replace the small square spindles with more attractive spindles so the railings aren't at a dangerous height.
• Sand and varnish the floor

Bedroom 4 - the beginnings

One of the problems with gyp-rocking is the 4ft by 8ft panels are heavy, too heavy for me to lift over my head on my own. The pitched roof invades the bedrooms and landing space. The pitched roofs are difficult to gyp-rock because it involves holding a panel over my head whilst someone screws it down. So I've been delaying approaching these areas - until now. We have our first visitor from England coming over, and with it the opportunity to get these areas - particularly the high areas, done. So I've started removing the old plaster and lathe from the walls in bedroom 4 - currently the only room which has no real purpose, and has two long areas needing covering. The video below is about an hour and a half of me working away on the wall. Unfortunately I didn't adjust the camera angle, so you only get to see the bottom of the wall, so I've cut out the end of the video. YouTube limits the time length of a clip to 15 minutes so I've upped the frame rate significantly to make the whole thing shorter.

You can see day light coming through the wall. The previous owners have removed the exterior shingles covering the outside wall at some point, but didn't realise this compromised the air tight spaces - so I've filled them with expanding insulating foam. It shouldn't get wet at all, because it's below the drip line of the roof.

Not sure what happened to the videoclip I uploaded, I'll try again

Tomorrow I'll finish stripping down the room. Then the insulation and vapour barrier go up. I'll try and get as much of the gyp-rocking done before my friend arrives so we're not wasting time. Hopefully I'll have time next week to start work on the landing - although we have a midwife's appointment, ante-natal classes as well as a visit to the Obs/Gynae facilities at the local hospital. No rest for the wicked.

Kitting out the kitchen - some more

With the counter top on, and all the cupboards in place (bar one little one), we've put the doors on the cupboards. Just got to fit a few handles and box in the vent pipe going up the wall (almost finished that anyway). Then we've got the decorating to do, and we're done.



On Tuesday last, we took a trip to Halifax to have a meal with friends and go to the cinema. Whilst we were there, we took some time to go to Home Depot, one of the largest hardware stores in the province. They normally order in appliances like dishwashers, but they had a delivery of a number of cheaper dishwashers in. So we picked up a dishwasher. My wife also spotted a shower stall for $100 cheaper than we've seen anywhere else, so we bought that too. It almost didn't all fit in the van. We also got a replacement tap (also known as a faucet over here - how quaint)

Having got the dishwasher home, we discovered two rather odd things about it. Firstly, it doesn't heat the water itself, it uses the hot water from the hot water tank. I only discovered this after I'd pulled the sink apart to put the replacement taps on. It means we've had to do some major reworking of the pipes at the back of the sink to re-route the hot water into place. The second thing we've discovered is that it has to be hard wired into the electrical system. This is a particular annoyance as it means we've had to go another week before we can put the dishwasher in place. *sigh*. It would be nice not to have to do the dishes by hand - especially as I have a dishwasher sat in my kitchen looking at me every time I walk through the door.

Kitting out the kitchen, and starting on the dining room

The cabinets are all in place, and the counter top is on. We had some difficulty getting it in place as the length was a few millimetres too long. We also had the forced air pipe to deal with. I had to cut a slot in the back of the piece, and there was a window frame at the other end of the top. Thing is, we could have avoided a lot of the problems. The company that made the counter top can only make them in 10ft sections, and ours is 14ft long. They offered to join the two sections together, an offer I took, but I wish I hadn't. It made it very difficult to get in place, especially when we found it was just a fraction too long. We've put a bit of a dent in couple of the walls doing it. Shouldn't be too difficult to fix - bit of drywall compound and it'll be invisible. We've also got the power cable for the cooker moved, so we can complete the cabinet installation.



We've also got a lot of the lights put in around the building, replacing all the older fixtures. All the lights were at least 30 years old - some older.

The dining room

We've started work on the dining room. Not much to do in there except remove the walls, insulate and re-gyprock.

Stripping walls is time consuming, but we've managed to cut that time down by being a little more violent with the wall. When we started, we were quite gentle with the plaster, picking pieces of lathe off one by one with a wrecking bar. We've learnt not to go too close to electrics, but otherwise you can be a lot quicker with piece of 2 by 4. Open up the wall with the wrecking bar, or drill and reciprocating saw/circular saw, then slide the 2 by 4 in and pull back. The plaster peels off the wall in sheets, and the lathe just pops off. Now all we've got to do is work out a quick way to make sure all the nails come out of the studs. Currently we're taking them out, one by one with the wrecking bar or claw hammer. Using this technique though, we managed to strip, insulate, vapour barrier, and started to gyprock a 16ft wall in two days. Considerably faster than the week it took to just strip the walls in the nursery.