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Progress On Our House

June 26, 2018

Everyone keeps asking what is the progress on our house. I keep telling everyone, just go by and see it for yourself!! It is really so amazing to see the house slowly come back to life.

As you can see from the headline picture that I have taken the doors down and stripped them of their hardware. All of the hardware will be paint stripper dipped and cleaned up a little. I am going to have all the doors sanded down, primed and painted. Then I will put all of the original hardware back on. So we are making some progress on our house.

I took one of the doors myself and stripped it. I scraped, sanded and sanded some more. One door was enough for me. I had my guys do the rest of the doors upstairs. They should be painted this week and be back on the hinges.

The trim upstairs is also getting scraped and painted this week. I almost forgot, the little cracks in the ceilings upstairs have been taken care of also. We should have the 2 bedrooms upstairs almost complete in the next 2 weeks, except for the beautiful hardwood floors. They will be done at the very end.

If you saw the house or have read about our house, you will know that the addition to the house was used as a den, bedroom and bath. My lovely wife wanted a larger bedroom and bath so we reconfigured the whole addition to the house.

The framers came in and shored up the foundation a little more for our big whirlpool tub. They also framed the walls for our bathroom and HUGE walk-in closet. I told my wife, just because the closet is going to be big does not mean that she needs to fill it up with more shoes!!

Framers also enclosed a part of the porch for the laundry room. The laundry room and the rest of the addition should have new siding in the next couple of weeks.

Plumber and electrician should also be in the house in the next week or two. Once they come in we can get the insulation put in and then it is just a matter of putting it all back together again.

So what have I done all this time? I have done the meticulous items. I took the hinges and cleaned them up. They were coverd with paint from over 80 years of painting over and over and over again. The doors had some funky lock sets on them. You can see them on the left and top of the picture. That is why there is such a big hole on the sides of the doors. The whole lockset is enclosed.

I took apart the whole lockset and cleaned up each part. Skeleton keys are what open the doors. Now I find out that there are several different types of skeleton keys that open these locks. I thought they were all the same, but the parts in the locks were just a little different. I soon realized that meant I would need to go and get several keys for all the different lock sets.

The framing around the upstairs windows has been repaired or replaced with like items. The actual windows have been fixed, patched or remade. I say remade because my uncle is a great carpenter who took all the windows apart and created new ones to match exactly. There were a few that were completely falling apart. When you look at the windows now, you will not be able to tell which ones are brand new and which ones are 80+ years old.

Some new hardware and some new springs are on order to really make them look like new and work 100%. By next week the upstairs bedrooms should be looking pretty good. Doors should be painted, walls and ceilings should be painted. Once that is all done I will put the hardware back on the doors to finish them off.

My wife and I are so excited to see the progress on our house. We are hoping for a September 1 finish date. That gives us a little over 2 months left to finish up. Not much time. Right now we are living at the shop. Gloria’s hair salon has a little apartmet in the back. It is an efficiency at about 300sf. Thats right, not 3000sf, I said 3-0-0 square feet. This soooo makes me want to see progress on our house.

Hopefully soon I will have more progress on our house with more pictures. If we can get in early September like we want we will be having a Halloween Party at the house and everyone is invited. It will be our house warming party and costume party all in one. Since Halloween is on a Wednesday we will have our party on the Saturday before on October 27th. Everyone is invited!!!