Grand Tour - Interior

Since winters get cold here in the Midwest, we chose to do the outside work in the summer hoping that we'd be able to continue on the inside work during the wintertime. It hasn't been going as quickly, but we've done a lot of really important things.

The previous owners and builders of the property cut a lot of corners when they initially made the house, so most of the work that we've done on the inside is repair work. When we first got the idea to remodel, D.Burnett started by painting the upstairs bedroom. The walls were covered in so many layers of wallpaper, the corners of the room had rounded!




Our first big project indoors was the downstairs bedroom. We started with this room because when they were installing the sliding door upstairs, we saw the decking they had added wasn't properly sealed, allowing water to get in and seriously damage some boards. But, when we opened up the walls and ceiling, only one or two boards actually needed to be replaced due to rot. We did find that the weight of the upstairs had basically been caving in on the downstairs bedroom and bowing the boards underneath. So, we jacked up the second floor; added LVLs, a man-made material, to help support the top floor; and lowered it back down. Also, the studs were set at 24" instead of the standard 16", so we added one in the middle, making it a 12" interval.

They also replaced the sliding glass door and demolished the closet between the office and the bedroom.

There were mice climbing through the sloppy construction before our remodel. Yuck!

The electrical was pretty screwy, so we decided to redo and improve the electric wiring. We went pretty custom, adding extra outlets and things that go way beyond my level of understanding. D.Burnett has tried explaining it several times, but apparently it's not my strong suit. He says the contraptions below are called ballasts and if I tried explaining it, I'd be making it up.

This is the electrical voodoo (and a heater) that runs our plant room.

Wiring in the bedroom.

We noticed the house seems to be shifting, so investigating into that issue we found that the foundation was pretty flimsy, set on a hill made of sand, so D.Burnett framed and poured concrete slabs in the basement to help reinforce the foundation. We're not done with that particular issue yet, we still need to take off the siding in our living room to see just what the issue is with our load-bearing structures.

Also, D.Burnett did some work in our plant room, which I've already told you about. He took out old, nasty insulation and used new spray-insulation to fill in all the gaps in that room. Before using the spray insulation, once you had taken out the old, nasty pink stuff, you could see straight through the back of the house to outside. Needless to say, the room is a lot warmer.

Now we're waiting for the weather to warm up so we can get the bedroom put back together. We're also tearing down the wall in the living room to see if there are any load bearing issues. I'll be doing several posts soon; I still need to show you our property, I want to tell you about the chickens we ordered and how we're going to take care of them, and I need to show you some of D.Burnett's chainsaw carvings!

So, since there's still a lot of house that we haven't seen, I'll take you on a visual tour of the place.

Top floor.

Main floor.

Here's a quick sketch of the house to get your bearings.








When you first come into the main entrance on the side of the house, you have the living room to the right.

The kitchen is on the left of the main entrance.

Our roasted chicken dinner, yum!

The laundry room is to the right of the stair case and the hallway to the bedroom and bathroom to the left. We keep the bathroom warm with an extra heater! So warm, in fact, this is where we'll be keeping our baby chicks when they arrive in a couple of weeks!!

Downstairs bathroom with baby tub.

Upstairs we have three bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms. I decided it was too messy to take pictures of yesterday, so you'll just have to imagine. Thanks for stopping by and stay tuned for everything we have coming up!

See you soon,
B.Burnett