Monday, July 7, 2014

Let the Renovations Begin!

We always seem to save our crazy projects for just before a new baby arrives!! Let's see...with Anna, we moved 3 days before I went to the hospital (3 weeks before she was due!). With Jacob, I don't think we had a real major project-just painted the kids' bedroom and got it set up for a baby AND big sis. With Isaac, Dad worked for like 36 hours straight (no sleep) to remodel our bathroom. We've been talking about replacing the disgusting carpet in the living rooms with wood floors for quite a while (and getting new carpet in the bedrooms). And then we talked about where we would put the baby without losing our guest room. Aaron suggested converting the garage into a guest suite, since it's too small to fit our van and had basically just become a place to pile all our junk! So we decided we would do the garage conversion first!! It's a big undertaking and we're so thankful that Dad is willing to come out weekend after weekend to head up this big project! Of course, this summer we seem to have a whole bunch of things planned already, so that makes it even more challenging  to get it done on a timeline!! A couple weekends ago, Dad came down and got started. Of course that meant  Aaron and I (mostly Aaron!) had to have the garage cleaned out completely. Which meant he had to have the shed cleaned out so we had somewhere to put all the stuff from the garage that we needed to keep! I did a LOT of purging!!!!!
The first step was getting all the floor joists in since we're raising the floor to be level with the rest of the house.


 School Room before demo...

 The school room will be made 2' bigger and will become the laundry room/office/school room. I'm so excited!!!!! Can't wait to get my laundry OUT of my kitchen!! 12 years in the making ;)


 School room after demo...
 Of course no project EVER goes as planned for us. They got the floor in the school room torn out and found out that the floor was built UNDER the wall. So the wall had to be torn out. Ugh. But that means that my laundry room will now be 2' bigger because we decided to move that wall out 2' to make both rooms squared up. And after taking the floor out, it's no wonder why that room was always  really hot or really cold...the floor joists were just laid on the floor and the insulation was just laid straight onto the the cement! 

 Anna was an eager helper, as usual! Anything to spend more time with her Daddy and Papa!




 Of course Isaac wanted to be out there helping, too! So we gave him a scrap piece of wood and a small crowbar. He went to town banging on that thing!! And yes, he's wearing Anna's boots.  :)


 Making progress!


 Thankfully we have nice neighbors...that light out there is the saw! They worked late, trying to get all the floor joists in before Dad left.


 Papa's morning helpers.



 Isaac was pretty excited to use the DRILL!!!




 Anna and Jacob helping Papa measure for the next one.






 Jacob's turn with the drill! It was a little harder on that side for a left-hander! :)




Grandpa was here for a couple days, too and helped. He's planning to help with the project, too. We'd never be able to afford this renovation without "free" labor! I told them we'll pay with letting the kids stay with them for at least a week ;)

No comments: