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.

Kitting out the kitchen

Not much to add really, so I'm going to let the pictures do the talking:

Kitting out the kitchen

In the last week we've hit a couple of very big milestones, which feels great. The major concern the house inspector had was the state of the wiring, so we're spending a small fortune having the house rewired. This included moving over to using a new fuse panel. The old one should only have been handling up to 60 amps, although I'm sure it's been doing more than that. Until now the electricians have been running the power through the old panel and into the new panel. To move to the new panel, the new electrics had to be inspected* before the power company would come in and do the cut over. So the inspector was here for about 15 minutes, before making a call to the power company to get the van over. Once here, the power was down in the house for about 45 minutes before the new cables were up and running. Over all a smooth operation with no hitches. It's been a little frustrating as the power company had to delay this cut over by more than a week - the weather knocked out power for a lot of homes and they had to divert the resources to fixing that before they could come and sort us out.

The other major milestone was moving the water heater in the kitchen. It used to be in the middle of the wall next to the cooker. The kitchen units that we've bought are very low, so I've put in a stud framework to raise them off the floor. The floor itself is not flat nor level, even after sanding it so thoroughly. So this is an opportunity to provide a raised, flat surface to install our new units onto. It is also a convenient place to run the pipes through for the water heater. Whilst we were sanding the floor, we had to take up a couple of the floor boards which took several hours. To route the pipes under the floor would have taken nearly a day just to get under the floorboards.

We've temporarily moved the kitchen into the dining room. We had to keep on moving the cooker, which was scratching the floor. So I cut a hole in the wooden cladding, and fed the cable through.

The pipework was a bit of a challenge. I'm used to using pre-soldered joints, so I had to learn how to solder the hard way. We were only without water for a day. The pipes were only 6 foot long, but the stud work is 14 feet, so there were a couple joints in the middle of the runs. Turns out that one of the joints in the middle, and the two elbows coming out of the floor were 'dry' - not enough solder in the joint - and leaked spreading water all over the floor. We had to drain most of the water out of the system again, cut the pipe, solder in new pipe and some interconnect pieces and fill the system again. Eventually I managed to get all the joints soldered properly.

Finally, all the stud work is done including the cupboard round the new location for the boiler, boiler's working just fine and we're onto the next phase of the kitchen.



* I have to say, I don't have much faith in the inspection process. The inspector has considerably less experience than our electrician and assumes no responsibility if it's not right - it's still on the head of the electrician. What's the point in that?

Decorating the Nursery

We've spent the last couple of days beavering away on the nursery. The skirting boards (known over here as baseboards) were very boring, so we've added some beading to the top of the skirting board. And that's when we discovered one of the fun things about old houses. Despite the brand new 'gyprock' on the walls, they aren't flat. There's a gentle undulation. So our nice straight pieces of beading aren't flush to the wall. The ceiling is also not entirely flat. So the new coving (aka crown moulding) around the top of the room has had to be modified to take this into account, which then had to be backfilled with dry wall compound. We got a little inventive to do the back fill. We copied the idea of an icing bag used to put icing on a cake, and were able to inject drywall compound into the crack with ease.

The moulding around the centre of the room is there to accentuate the size of the room, which is in fact very small. We got the idea from a DIY program we saw. This was particularly difficult because the room slopes where the building has settled over the last hundred years, but the modern moulding is square. We lined up the first piece with the most difficult part to get right, the sloping ceiling. After that, we worked by eye to try and keep the moulding roughly level and in line with all the other pieces. Doesn't look bad, even though I say so myself.



The icing on the cake is that we've finally managed to get some primer on the walls and ceiling - we'll be ready to paint the walls in the next couple of days!

Kitting out the kitchen

Having hung the plasterboard on the wall, we've put the window frames back in place. Then spent three days sanding the floor. It seems that the previous owners had at some time glued previous coverings to the planks, which is a shame because as you can see from the photos, the pine has come out almost white. We now need to varnish the floor, which will probably take the best part of a week to do the three layers.



As you can see, we've had the worktop for the kitchen delivered, but as the units aren't built yet, we've had to leave it on the floor in the dining room. Of course, it's not flexible, so we've had to put wedges underneath it where the dining room floor isn't flat. To try and keep it clean, we've put some plastic over the top and posted a sign reminding people not to walk on the plastic. The cat clearly needs to learn to read!

We've finally stumped up the cash and got someone in to plaster the very awkward corner in the ceiling of the nursery. More photos soon.

Kitting out the kitchen

With the door sill finished and in place, it's taken me a couple of days to build a brand new door frame and put in place a temporary door - the one from the kitchen. It's been very difficult and I've decided it's something I'm not very good at. Perhaps some practise is needed, but as I've haven't got any more doorways to build, I'm not going to know. It didn't help that (as with most of the house) nothing is square, nor are standard measurements used - inches or centimetres. A day or two of frustration however means that the doorway is complete, and once we have a period door to match, we'll be able to set that part right.

In the mean time, I've put the studding in the old doorway, and secured a piece of drywall inside. The wall inside the office doesn't appear to be parallel to the wall in the kitchen. To complicate things a little, the wall between the office and the kitchen still has the old wooden shingles and the wall boards on the studs. I've screwed the piece of gyprock in place in the office. The electricians haven't quite finished in the kitchen, so although I've cut the gyprock for the kitchen side of the doorway, just not screwed it in place just yet.



In the meantime, my wife has spent quite some time putting new trim around the small window in the kitchen.

The whole process of putting the kitchen in has been slowed down significantly by removing the door. We've put in the order for the additional wall units, and put in the final order for the counter top which should arrive before the new year. It seems companies round here take a rather extended Christmas break, so this was the last opportunity to get the counter before early January. We've also bought a small fridge to go under the counter, and we've ordered a sink to go under the small window. The hot and cold water shouldn't be an issue, as we can take the feeds from the water heater we're going to move. I'll put the pipes in before the water heater's ready to move. All we need is a waste pipe fitting - we'll be getting a plumber in for that bit!

We've removed the the plaster around the stairwell, which was flaking off the wall all too easily - probably got very wet at some time. Once the gyprock is in place, we'll put up the plaster (also known as drywall compound) on the seams, and over the screw holes.

Kitting out the kitchen continued

The next step is to get a door in the wall in the office. We've not got one that matches the rest of the house, so for now we're just going to install the door we just took out of the kitchen. To do that we needed to remove the window. We've finished taking the window out, and removed the wall below the window frame - still some work to do but it's nearly there. We're reusing the window sill as the sill to the new doorway. We've cut off one edge to square it up. The floor in the hallway has two layers of floorboards, and the lower layer sticks out by 2 cm. So I'm going to have to route a grove out of the edge of the sill so it will sit flush with the floor. We've started that process, but I spent most of the day trying to level off the area where the sill will end up.



We've been in a building site for a month a half now, surrounded by plaster dust and a mountain of plaster lathe and wood. The electricians began working on rewiring the building a few weeks ago. The electrics are so old they were probably original to the building - so they could be 100 years old. We've been moving forward slowly, but we feel like we've not had a huge amount of success until today. It's amazing how much of a sense of satisfaction you get from just one thing getting installed just right:

Kitchen design rethink

Our electrician, Quentin, has pointed out the obvious solution to our dilemma over the layout of our kitchen. The kitchen is a terrible lay out:

• 5 doors, one on each wall, and an additional one on one of the longer walls.
• The staircase going up into bedroom 4
• The water heater next to the cooker

One of the doors leads into an office space at the front of the house. The office only has one other door, which leads to the front of the house and the outside world. The office is an addition to the house, and there are two windows leading into the space, one from the dining room and the other from the hallway. We'd always intended to take the window out of the hallway and put a door in its place, but the plan was to do that further down the line. However, Quentin pointed out that if we did it now we'd be able to fill in the door in the kitchen creating an entire wall to put counter top and cupboards on. It also means we'll now have space to put a sink in. It will also simplify moving the water heater, as it means we'll be able to run the pipes round the wall behind the cupboards rather than under the floor.

Before we could change our plans permanently, we had to check out the space around the window. The wall in the hall used to be an exterior wall, and therefore is load bearing. We were warned to look for a plinth in the wall cavity that shouldn't be removed. Luckily, when we opened the wall below the window, it appears the plinth is at the level of the floor in the hall.

So we've removed the doorway in the kitchen and made a start on removing the window. Removing the window was very hard work, clearly very well built. The original wooden shingles were still attached to the wall and in very good condition, which made them difficult to remove and we had to break most of the to get them off the wall. We're hoping we can use the old window sill at the bottom of the door as a step as it's a good solid piece of wood.

Square peg, round hole...

As we are discovering the Canadians (and Americans) really do like to do things a little differently. The screws need a different driving bit - a square hole???

Kitting out the kitchen

Taking a brief respite from the nursery to allow the plaster to dry, I've started to tackle the insulation in the kitchen so we can move the water heater. The sparks are using the power cable that was attached to the tumble dryer to temporarily power the new fuse board, which frees up the corner. Same old trick:

• Tear down the lathe and plaster (a very messy job, which isn't helping my cough/cold)
• Adding some noggins between the studs so I can attach the vapour barrier at the top and bottom
• Add insulation between the studs
• Stapling the vapour barrier to the studs
• Finally screwing the drywall to the studs, and plaster over the cracks and screws

In a more modern construction, we wouldn't need to add the noggins between the studs. Insulation has a way of drawing water in, and once wet it stops being so good at insulating. This in particular causes a problem in a wooden building as the water can start to rot the timbers.

In the roof there's an additional problem. The asphalt shingles are nailed to the roof, and a lot of the nails go through the roofing boards. These nails are exposed to the outside temperatures, including the freezing cold, and frost can form on these nails inside which will quickly soak the insulation in the rafters when it warms up. To prevent this, when installing the insulation polystyrene rafter vents, which are stapled to the roofing boards before the insulation is installed. This allows crucial air flow to keep the nails and roofing boards dry, when combined with ventilated sofits and further ventilation at the top of the roof.

Once we've finished drywalling that half of the kitchen, we can start to fit the kitchen cabinets.



Oh yes - and I apparently don't know my own strength. I've managed to snap the bolt on my circular saw that determines the cut depth.

The pink rafter vents can be seen in the photos of the nursery below:

Sorting out the bumps in Bumpkin's room

We've only got one sloping ceiling panel left to do! We spent the day doing a jigsaw of pieces of drywall, trying to get all the power outlets and light switches in the right places. Very time consuming, and surprisingly difficult compared to yesterday's easy 'wins'. We bought a medium sized tub of ready mixed 'drywall compound' (Canada's way of saying 'plaster' - too hard eh?), which we've used about half of already filling over the screw heads, and some of the gaps. I suspect we'll need another tub before we finish the room. I think the bigger tub next time considering this is the first room in the house we've got anywhere near finished.



Tomorrow we've got the electrician's back in hopefully to finish the upstairs. We'll try and work around them. It would be nice to get as much done in the nursery as possible before our weekend off. Yes - a whole weekend off.

Footnote

Err - not entirely a weekend without DIY. Technically we've not picked up any tools, nor done any work at the house. However we did spend several hours in Home Depot and Renovators Resource buying bits for the house. Does that count?

More on the Nursery

We've had a really good, successful day. We started on the wall with the insulation on it. I've cut the left hand board a little narrow which we're going to be to fix later. The board on the right was better, even with the angle cut out of it. That angle cut has been very handy. The line follows down into that right hand corner so we will be able to cut out a square section for that corner. It is also of course a mirror for the opposite wall, which made cutting that board far easier and took out some of the guess work.

The side walls were very easy. The boards are 4ft by 8ft. The left hand wall was slightly larger than 8ft by 8ft. The right hand wall is 8ft by 4ft.

The only complications arose from the wall sockets the electricians had put on the studs, and that none of the walls are quite straight. The first board we put up, we'd completely forgotten the box and we'd made a little bit of a mess trying to find it after we'd screwed it to the wall. We learnt from that mistake and measured up the other boxes. We've still got the last wall to do with the door in it, and filling in the wall with the window in it.

The Nursery continued

With the electricians now finished in the nursery (although not live so we've got no light in there yet), so we've started work insulating and drywalling the room. There were no noggins at the top of the exterior wall, so I added some to prevent air flow through the very top, and sprayed in expanding foam to fill the spaces around to create a more air tight space.

Wikipedia's comments on vapour barrier in construction



Each stud has a bead of vapour retardant adhesive to prevent vapour spreading sideways across the stud once the drywall is in place. I've made a bit of a mess at the top in the middle. The vapour retarder in the first tube ran out, and I only had one tube. When I went to the hardware store they only had larger diameter tubes, which are far harder to use because a greater pressure is needed to get the gunk out. So I was struggling for about 30 seconds with both hands before it would come out - and then it wouldn't stop.

I also got to use my new 'toy' - a compressor and nail gun. Compressors are incredibly powerful. A 6 page manual, consisting of four pages of warnings and two pages of how to use it. Set the tank to 60 PSI, and the inch and a half long staples went into the wooden stud like a hot knife through butter. Much more than that and the end of the hoop would get buried below the surface of the wood and would tear right through the vapour barrier. It comes with a pressure regulator built in to keep it at the right operating range, so although the 2 gallon tank is at 100 PSI, the staple gun is only using 60. When the pressure in the tank drops too low, the compressor kicks in and charges the tank. These compressors are also useful for pumping tyres and sports balls. With the right equipment, you can spray paint too.

Whilst I've been insulating the exterior wall, my wife has been working out the best way to remove the paint from the old wooden window frames. The paint is in a poor state, suffering from age, sun light and damp. Trying just the paint stripper was ineffective and would have turned out to be very expensive if we did the whole house. However using the heat gun to remove the outer layers, followed by the paint stripper got almost back to the wood. The putty round the glass was in a state too, about half had fallen off, but for the most part the rest is still very sound.

In the mean time, the cat inspects the works so far:

Preparing the kitchen

The plaster at the back of the cooker was peeling off the wall in chunks. So we've stripped it back to the studs, and we're going to put up a vapour barrier and water resistant plaster board (also known as gyprock, or drywall) over that wall. We also need to repair the ceiling as that's where the chimney was.

I'll also get to use one of my new tools - a compressor and nail gun. This very scary piece of kit is noisy but should make stapling the vapour barrier very quick. The instruction manual reads more like a "How not to use this tool" than an instruction manual.