Two Blogs in One Day?!?!

I'm not a happy camper. Actually, I am, but I'm disappointed in mankind -- or maybe just the previous owner(s) of this house. We just finished demolishing the bathroom (for the most part.) Guess what we found? I'll tell you. A nest of wires, a nest of mouse droppings (several actually), enough black mold to take over, slime mold (SLIME MOLD!), rotten wood, and hollow wood, courtesy of termites. AND an unsupported header above the bathroom window.

Some people say the inspection process is too intense. I say it should be! And whoever did the work in our bathroom before we bought the house SHOULD have been inspected up the wazoo. Because they pretty much got it all wrong. Grr. Grr. Grr.

Okay, I'm off the soap box and onto the captioning of pictures! Yay!

The lovely nest of wires -- most of them are hot.

Starting to really get into the demolition.

Progress.

More progress.

A bathtub full of moldy tile, backerboard, and plaster.

More progress and Jesse gets the tall-person parts.

A bathtub really full of moldy tile, backerboard and plaster. Did we mention the dude(s) used maybe five screws per sheet of backerboard. Maybe. Also, no mortar bed.

Midnight -- Time to start cleaning up the mess.

Clean clean clean.

Jesse thought we would only have six bags of debris. We have 78. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but you catch my drift.

Time for bed!

When it came down to it, we worked our buns off and got a whole lot accomplished tonight. This summer seems to be going a lot easier and smoother than last summer (even though we're only a week and a half into it...) This could be due to any of several reasons. I'll brainstorm some here:

• I've gotten more relaxed.
• We've gotten used to dust.
• We're more solid as a couple.
• We have something to look forward to (wedding and honeymoon!)
• My dad came to help.
• We rented a dumpster.
• We have a fully functioning kitchen with indoor plumbing.
• We planned ahead.
• We could start when we wanted to (no wait on permits.)
• We purchased everything we'd need all at once.
• We have had a LOT of help from friends.
• Any other ideas?

Open Floorplan

A lot has been going on in the last few days. We had to take a mini-break to celebrate my birthday. Work was still happening, just at a slower rate.

Here's a picture of the window in the master bedroom that Jesse and Tanner framed in on Wednesday. There was a larger window there but it would have been in the way of the new bathroom wall...so bye bye old window.

Jesse worked on demo-ing the wall between the bathroom and the master bedroom -- He did half of it then I started working on the second half. Oooh! Open concept floor-plan!!!

I have to say that it felt pretty good to knock that wall down.

Jesse cleaned up after me. Here you can see the whole wall and linen closet have been removed. Pat stopped by around this time to give us a hand.

Here he is doing tall people work. Woo hoo Pat!!!

I worked on the details.

Who needs walls in their bathroom anyway?

Next up (hopefully finishing before tomorrow night):
Finish demolishing the bathroom
Build a temporary wall to support the load
Frame in the new bathroom walls and pocket door
Drywall one side of the walls for privacy

Next two weeks:
Plumbing and electrical

Then our first inspection on the new stuff!

Deja Vu

I worked from home yesterday since it was my dad's last day in town. Thank goodness I did because I was able to see (and capture for posterity) what I missed last summer: Davidson coming through the ceiling. Here it is:

I wasn't able to take any pictures of the process, unfortunately. Here is the finished product of the day's work, though. The header is up, the wall has been removed, the temporary wall has been taken down and the closets are ready to be framed in.

On a sad note, my dad had to go back to New York in the morning. Last night we went and celebrated a great week of hard work at Longboard's in Pacific Beach with fish tacos. The Discovery Channel filmed their follow up to the Deadliest Catch ("After the Catch") there last season, and all the captains had signed a table -- I wanted to show it to my dad. And they have the best fried fish tacos in town. We stuffed ourselves and came home and went to bed.

We saw my dad off at the airport this morning; I was crying like a baby. It was amazing to have him here staying with us and helping us. We were able to get a huge jump start on the summer's work because of him (and Derrick and Tanner.) I just wish he could have stayed longer.

Today we got a late start, mainly because we were so pooped from the late nights and early mornings we've had since my dad got here. After a nap and a trip to Home Depot, Jesse and Tanner started working around 12:30. Tanner worked on getting our old bedroom window out of its frame and creating the new frame for the new window (the new master bedroom/bathroom wall came wayyy to close to the old window -- so we downsized and moved the window to the new center of the room. Meanwhile, Jesse worked in the garage on some fixes that are required for our electrical meter inspection. Believe it or not, someone in the past removed the bottom four feet or so of six studs in our garage. We think they were trying to make more room for a work bench -- but nothing was supporting that side of the garage and our inspector didn't like that so much.

I'll post pictures of the window and the new studs in the garage tomorrow -- none were taken today.

Tomorrow, Tanner and Jesse should be able to start the demolition of the wall between the bathroom and the master bedroom. Things are moving right along!

Buttoning up the roof hole

Let's take a look at where we started:

Now here we are at the beginning of Monday. It was shaping up to be a beautiful, sunny, San Diego day. Jesse and my dad had to finish sheathing the gable and wait for an electrical meter inspection from our friendly city inspector.

Here it is right before I left for work, around 9AM.

My dad and Jesse were hard at work while I was still drinking coffee.

My dad put some finishing touches on the porch ceiling.

Here he is cleaning up for the day before we went out to dinner.

All done! Now we have to finish our interior rough framing, electrical and plumbing before getting the inspection that will allow us to put the roofing materials on.

Lastly, a reminder of what we had envisioned the exterior looking like back before we bought the house:

A roof! (almost)

I'm too exhausted from the series finale of LOST to write tonight. Here's what happened in brief.

Here's a little sunshine for the roof picture as we left it last night:

Dad worked hard.

Tanner is awesome.

The roof took a long time even with four guys working on it.

So close. But an argument about the fascia slowed things down.

Fake smiles (just kidding.) Almost to the last rafter.

"You can do it future son-in-law"

Blah blah blah, my house, my way.

Tanner bestows his wisdom.

DONE (ish)

Still smiling.

Other project happening simultaneously (the artist formerly known as my bedroom wall)

Sometimes I work, too.

But really it was Tanner and Derrick pushing out an AWESOME and DIFFICULT day of work. While Jesse and my dad were all, "blah blah blah" in the sunshine, these two were doing the dirty, yucky, hard work in tiny spaces.

Putting up the temporary wall.

Don't mind me stomping on your bed...

A room with a view.

A view of a room.


goodnight.

A Motley Crew

I got pretty excited yesterday and published the blog post before we finished for the day...about seven hours before we finished. I'll catch you up on what happened:

Jesse and Tanner worked on taking the large beam out that was holding up the roof.

Apparently that's all the pictures I took yesterday...Sorry! I thought there were more. To make a long story short, Jesse and Tanner finished taking out the beam then put OSB (plywood) over the hole in the ceiling. Dad finished building his closet then he and Jesse worked on getting it all sheet rocked until 11:00pm ELEVEN O'CLOCK! They started cutting things wrong and doing things backwards when we finally decided it was time for bed (they started at 7am Friday.)

Cue Saturday! We got a late start -- 9am or so. After realizing we didn't have an extension ladder to frame the gable we had a little tiff but Robert again saved us (you may remember him from his heroic saving of us last summer) and brought us a ladder to borrow.

We got started.

Derrick showed up and was put to work cleaning up the roof cut-out from yesterday.

Tanner was also present.

Notice the ladder. And Derrick's head.

Tanner was put in charge of extending the walls to create a height of 8'3" on the inside. This is the first of three extenders.

The last of the extenders! This was an all-out effort.

Meanwhile, Jesse put my dad and Derrick in charge of building the wall that would create our master bedroom closet. When Jesse told my dad that he needed to cut up some of the oak flooring to put the wall in, my dad nearly cried. They had it out for a few minutes but Jesse won that battle. Here's the cut that broke my dad's heart to make.

All the extenders are in! Now the porch needs to get all new framing and beams before we can start framing the roof line.

Tanner and my dad banded together to build the closet wall. They made a great team.

Derrick migrated to the porch framing team and started assisting Jesse.

My dad eventually got over the cut up oak floor. Here he is framing in the closet.

It took quite a bit of work to get those beams up there. Tanner and Derrick are taking a well deserved break. Jesse's framing in the porch.

You'd think framing in a porch would be easy -- but this framing work needs to support a huge gable. It takes four guys to get it done. Two do the work while the other two provide positive reinforcement. :)

Don't they look cute all stacked up?

Tanner does something other than drink beer!

*NOTE: the beer drinking did not start until after noon, as per safety regulations.

How they got that 4x12x10 up on the roof I may never understand, even though I watched it.

Night came quickly -- if you can see it, the gable is beginning to take shape.

Beer and pizza fuel the workers.

Saturday's work from the inside.

Saturday's work from the outside.

On the docket for tomorrow:
Frame in the gable and attach a temporary plywood roof
Frame in the linen closet
Construct a temporary wall to support the master bedroom wall
Demolish the master bedroom closet opening (eight feet wide)


There's a lot to do!