Category: Building Our Home

Not Quite Dead Yet

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Six months!? It’s been six months since I put a meaningful write up here. Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess.

So, Whats new? What in the hell has he accomplished in six months? Well, like my mom likes to constantly remind me, I am a disappointment. One day though, I had had enough of pulling up to my house and feeling disgusted with how it looked. A man can only take so much visual torture when he pulls up to his house. So, I started tearing the siding off.

And while that was going on I had my friend use his mini excavator to pull stumps out of my yard.

I started playing a game called “How Many Brands of House Wrap Can I Put On This Shack?”

Turns out the answer is 4. 4 different brands of house wrap.

If any of you caught my video updates you might remember I talked a pretty big game about tearing off the back porch. It came off quite easily with a little assistance from our tractor.

All siding removed, time to put some back on.

Looks a million times better, right?

With all of that taken care of it was time to celebrate with my favorite part of Summer, Splash School. You may have noticed the 1993 Ford Explorer I drive. There is a reason for this. One, I can not stand when a person drives a brand new vehicle and their houses look like a piece of shit. Two, I beat the shit out of all of my cars I’ve ever owned. I have never purchased a vehicle that has cost more than $4000 because I like to abuse them and have fun. Case in point :

I love to swim. I especially love cannon balling. There are two types of pool users. Floaters and Bombers. Floaters are the losers who say stupid things like, ” WHY ARE YOU SPLASHING ME I DIDNT COME TO SWIM IN THIS POOL TO GET WET!” I can’t stand floaters. They are fun sponges and deserve every ounce of sweet sweet aquatic justice that I dispense.

Oh, back to the point.

Here is how the house looks as of today, July 16th.

You can see I tore off the front concrete steps. Took me an entire day to jackhammer them apart as they were a foot thick concrete formed over loose chunks of concrete. What a pain in my ass. As you should be able to tell from the trusses, I will be putting a covered porch off of the front of the house.

Here is the view from the back. I blocked in the basement access and will be putting on a wrap around deck in the back once the heat index drops below 95 degrees. How do you southerners work outside? I don’t envy you.

And I didn’t completely neglect my duties on the interior of the house. Here is an older picture of the kitchen.

I know some of you may be thinking, “Why no kitchen window?” The answer for that is simple. Outside of the kitchen is a rental house that always has the police called there. I can’t stand the dirt bags who live there and if I have to see them every time I get a drink of water or a yogurt I will lose what little sanity I have and start using them as target practice. Hence, the tube light and four super bright daylight LED bulbs in the can lights. Tube lights are amazing and bring in a crazy amount of light compared to shitty sky lights, and they flash into your roof easily and don’t leak.

That’s it for now. I’ll post again once I make some more headway!

I was Hoping I Would Find Some Money in the Walls. Instead I Found This.

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I finally am getting over a sinus infection that kept me hovering over a humidifier all weekend long. I was pretty upset that I had a free weekend and wasted it by being sick. I got out of work today and wanted to kick a little ass and finish up some demolition work that had to be done in where the new entry way will be. I took two hammers, my HEPA mask, and started knocking plaster off the walls. I have been hoping to find something, anything, cool in these walls. Up until today the “coolest” thing I found were old Coin World newspapers with a bunch of classified ads for now long deceased people looking for buffalo nickels and wheat pennies.

All that changed today when I found a half pound of arsenic in my walls.

Lucky for me this thing was still sealed up when I came across it. I currently have it double zip locked and will be taking it to the hazardous waste disposal site tomorrow.

I read up on this stuff and apparently it was used as a rat killer in Parisian sewers and a pigment for paints. In some cases it was used to color candy and you can guess how well that worked out. Anyone else out there come across anything cool in their DIY adventures?

Bitchin’ Kitchen

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I’ve decided to use more video walkthroughs to show how far along the kitchen is. With how tall the ceilings are and how small the room is it’s hard to get any good shots without some type of fish eye lens. I’ve taken a few though, but I don’t feel they show the space as well as the video can.

So, here is my future kitchen layout.

Here are a couple snaps of what it looks like now

The doorway will be moved over to accommodate the cabinets.

Eliminating the windows is going to obviously get rid of all the natural light. To counteract this I bought a solar tube which I am going to install over the peninsula.

And here’s a quick 5 minute video walk through of the house and showing the kitchen.

I Should Have Put in a Firepole.. or a Slide.. or a Rope Ladder

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Well now that my fantasy football season is over I guess it’s time to actually work on the house again(Rob Gronkowski broke into my house and raped me with a broom handle).

Before I could decide just what the hell I wanted to do in my kitchen I had to get the stair situation figured out. For reference here is what they used to look like

Going down them was described as “going down a ladder backwards” by a few crybabies. So this weekend I brought in some mexican day laborers and slammed in some steps.

So as you can see in this picture I switched the direction of the steps and since I am moving the door, I was able to cut out some floor to make some more headroom.

And this is how the stairs look from the basement. Much better than what was there. Wasn’t ecstatic over having to put a landing in, but I think they turned out nicely. You’ll also notice that I now have my 200 amp breaker box mounted.

Home is Where the Heat Stays.

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It is now mid November, the height of the “oh shit I should have stopped procrastinating on finishing this house” season. Outside high temperatures are around 30 degrees and will only be falling. So whats new since my last update?

Well, I finally put a front door on the house. It is really comforting being able to actually lock your house instead of hoping that none of your neighbors have a crowbar and a pill addiction. The door is fiberglass, which means it will take stain like wood and is very well insulated.  My parents both came over and just swung it open and shut jealously. That’s what they get for buying a crappy Mastercraft door from Menard’s. The best part is that this door was only $350. The pictures don’t really do the glass in the window justice. I love how it looks.

After the door went on I started to demo the second bedroom. I don’t have a lot of pictures from this part but imagine shit getting knocked onto the floor and me shoveling it into a trailer.

With moving the walls to make the bedrooms bigger I was also forced to move a lot of the ductwork around. Crawling on my back with a spray bottle filled with water, a VOC mask on, then wetting and removing asbestos tape has inspired me to never get into HVAC as a career.

With the ductwork all moved I then ran new ceiling stringers, put in drywall nailers, pulled wire, placed outlets and switch boxes, insulated the exterior walls with closed cell spray foam, insulated the interior walls with R13, and then hung drywall. It all sounds so easy when squashed into one run on sentence.

Yesterday I had my friend come over and help me blow cellulose insulation into the attic. I put in around 16 inches of it, which according to the packaging, should be near an R-60 . I now have the furnace set to 65 and the house holds the heat incredibly well considering the fact that 1/3 of it(the kitchen and bathroom) are still basically uninsulated.

So what’s next? The two most expensive rooms in the house.

Here’s a video with my nasally childlike voice giving an updated walkthrough of the place.