Rear porch demo and beginning on the rear deck

I've started building the deck in the back yard. I'm doing this project now because I want it done before the 4th of july. we're planning on having a big cookout with a lot of family and friends over.

Before I could start building the deck I had to demo the old, rotted back porch... of course. It seems like I cant start any project without a little demo work first. Here is the back porch from an old picture of the house:

First thing I did was rip the screen out, take out all the 2x4 posts and remove the gutter.

Then I got on the roof and removed the shingles.

I then removed about 2/3 of the boards. I'm leaving the rest for now until the deck is built. Then I'll take it down and build another small overhang in it's place.

then I cut the supports and removed them and the 4x4 corner posts. then I cut the stairs in half since I'll be using them temporarily until the deck's built. Then I removed the floor boards and the joists.



It's hard to see from the last picture but there is a very old brick walkway in front of the stairs. I'll leave it there for now, once I find a use for the bricks I'll remove them from under the deck.

Now it's on to building the deck. I made a quick sketch of my idea for the design of the deck then figured out the measurements.

With that done the first thing I needed to do was hang the ledger boards, these are the boards that attach to the house. First I measured and cut out the siding:


Then I began hanging the ledger boards, not a fun task to do by yourself with pressure treated 2x8x12's.


I'm bolting the ledger boards to the house with 4 1/2" lag screws. Left, right, and center are doubled then there will be a single between each joist.



This is a fairly large deck so I want it to be as sturdy and safe as possible. The joists will be 2x8's. The beams will be 2x10's and the posts will be 4x6's. Because the joists will be running from left to right on the left deck I'll be running the beam under 3 sides of the deck with 7 posts. The joists will be running out from the house on the right deck so I'll be using a single beam with 3 posts, and 3 other single posts between the beam and the house.

I finished all the ledgers yesterday evening.


Today I'll be working on the posts and beams. I have 4 days scheduled for the deck, let's see if I can stay on schedule.

Big changes

A lot has changed since the last post. I went back to the bank, got a 6 month extension and also got more money. This will allow me to get all the things I need done quickly as well as add a few other things. This extended my project time by over a month but I believe it's well worth it. A few of the things added to the list is a deck, rebuild of the front porch, painting the house, and plumbing upgrades.

The other day I finished painting the second guest bedroom. I used the same blue that we used in the dining room.




Sorry about all the spots, there was dust on the camera lens. The trim still needs to be painted and we still have to figure out what to do with the fireplace and doors, paint them or poly them.

I started hanging the pendant lights in the kitchen. Only one of them are up at this point, I should do the other one today or tomorrow.


Over the weekend we tackled the front porch. The wrought iron railings were ok but we really wanted wood baulisters and railings. In the shot below you can see the old iron railings, they appear to have been put in sometime in the 40's or 50's:


I removed the iron railings (we're going to use them in our garden) then built and installed the new railings in a day.



The baulisters are $2.29 from Lowes but they didn't have hand rails long enough so I had to make my own our of 2x4's. I put a bevel on either side of the top railing as you can see in the above picture.

The top rails are anchored into the wood portion of the column. The bottom rails had to be anchored into the brick.I used a Forstner bit on the bottom rail about 2" from the edge then used a 3/8's bit to create a channel to the edge of the board. Then I drilled a 3/8's hole in the brick and installed an anchor bolt. Then I brought the bottom rail up from underneath and thghtened the bolts. The hole will be covered with a small piece of board. I forgot to take a picture of this but you should be able to see it in the above picture. If anyone has any questions on it I can take a picture of it later and post it.

I will be rebuilding the second floor porch. We still haven't decided how we want it though. Once we do it will have balisters like the 1st floor just a bit thinner though.

The next project is the shutters. We decided on board & batten style since it's easy to build. I'm using 1" thick 1x4's and 1x6's to build them.


Once we paint the house the shutters will either be black or dark green. the house itself will be some type of pale green or olive and the trim will be an off white.

Next I'll be finishing off the shutter for the front of the house, painting the Foyer, installing the other pendant light then starting the demo for the old porch so I can begin the deck.

Foyer update and guest bathroom demo

The second guest bedroom and the foyer have both been scraped, sanded and primered.



None of the trim has been primered in the foyer because it will all be stripped and stained instead of painted. We had been thinking of wallpapering the foyer with some type of Victorian pattern but I may just paint it for now.

Next on my list was the guest bathroom. When we moved in it was being used as a kitchen for the upstairs apartment, here is what it looked like:

and this is what it looked like once I removed the kitchen:


As you can see in the above picture the plaster was in terrible shape and couldn't be saved. I wanted to tear the walls down months ago but I had to wait until I put the kitchen ceiling up so I didnt have a huge mess in the kitchen below. so yesterday I finally got around to tearing the walls down.



This was as far as I got because I had to get ready to go out of town in the morning. I'll be out of town for work for the next few days so unfortunately noting will get done on the house. Hopefully I'll be ready to tackle the rest of the house when I get back.

I'll leave you with a picture of me after demoing the bathroom:

Second guest bedroom update

I finished sanding the walls in the second guest room yesterday. Then I primered. I'm not completely finished primering yet. There are still 2 small areas that I have to patch before I can finish. I also have to scrape and sand the baseboards and window and door trim then primer them.



Still not sure on a color yet but I'm thinking some type of gold and maroon. I should finish up everything except the small areas that need to be patched today then I'll be finishing off the kitchen cabinets and starting on the Foyer.

Breakfast room paint

Not a whole lot accomplished yesterday. I painted the breakfast room walls. It was hell painting them too. It only took about 10 minutes to go over them with the large roller I have but the grooves in the beadboard weren't getting paint. I was using the coarse roller too. I got my paint sprayer but it broke when I tried to install the nozzle, I guess a little bit of paint was left in the nozzle which didn't allow the plunger to move against the spring causing it to break. So I was forced to paint the entire job by hand... with a 2" brush. I had to dip the brush then paint along a groove only going about 1 1/2' before having to dip the brush again.

I finally finished the walls around 1am. And of course now that I see the walls with paint on them I can tell that the larger cracks are going to need to be filled with wood putty. It shouldn't be too big of a deal to paint over those areas once it's done though.





I still need to add 1/4 round to the corners that I took it out of, install the baseboard below the corner cabinet, put the door frame back up in the entryway to the kitchen, then paint all of the trim.

The colors for anyone that's interested are from Valspar. The walls are Homestead Resort Tea Room Yellow and the trim will be Bellegrove Antique White. Both are Historic Trust approved colors.

The only other thing I accomplished was to finish installing the Breakfast Room vent. I'm sure that will come in handy today as the high is supposed to be 91.

Kitchen cabinet crown

I didn't get as much done yesterday as I'd hoped. We had company over and also had to run a few errands.

I've almost finished sanding Guest bedroom #2, I'll finish sanding and primer it this afternoon. We haven't picked out a color for the room yet. I may do that tonight.

I started installing the crown on the cabinets. I was really nervous starting this project because the pieces are so expensive ($35 for an 8' piece) so I went online to make sure I did it right. I found a really good site on cutting crown here. There are 2 different methods for cutting it; flat, and in position. In position is easier because you only have to cut on one angle as opposed to the compound angle needed to cut it on flat. The fence on my miter saw wasn't quite tall enough to cut it in position though.

I also had to figure out the spring angle of the crown. The site recommends using a protractor but I dont have one. I figured it out by tracing the crown angle on a piece of paper, extending the lines, and using my speed square. Good thing I didn't just assume it was 45/45 degrees because it wasn't. It ended up being 52/38. They have a really good angle generator chart on the site so you know what angle to cut. My miter saw happened to have the correct degrees for 52/38 highlighted in red(31.6 for the miter, 33.9 for the bevel). When cutting crown for an outside corner, one thing to remember when marking your measurment for cutting, you need to measure and make your mark at the very edge of the crown, almost on the back side. Then when you cut it you need to make sure that you line the saw up so that you hit the mark once it passes all the way through the wood. If you just mark it on the face of the crown once you make your cut you'll end up about 1 1/2" short because of the bevel. I know I'm not explaining this very clearly.

Anyways, I got 2 of the cabinets finished, I'm going to finish building the last cabinet and hang it before I put the crown on the last 2. Here are a few pics of the 2 finished cabinets:


I still need to add a thin piece of plywood above the crown so we can set things on top of the cabinets. Once I've finished building the last cabinet and installed the crown I need to paint all of them. I'm still up in the air about painting the entire cabinet white or if I should leave the doors and shellac them. Now that the crown is installed I think shellacing it too would look good, so the crown and doors would be shellaced and the cabinet itself would be white. Any comments on the idea are greatly appreciated as I need to get this done ASAP.

Kitchen ceiling done!

A lot was accomplished over the long weekend. I didn't quite get everything done that was on the schedule but it was still a very productive weekend. Scheduling the project out has really been a fantastic help. there is no way I would have gotten as much done as I did without it.

Guest bedroom number 2 was first on the list. This room was easily in the best shape of all the bedrooms. That's not saying that there wasn't a lot of work to be done though. First I had to move everything out of the room. Both guest bedrooms have been storerooms for the last 9 months. Instead of just dumping everything in guest bedroom number 1 I decided to organize it first. There was a lot of wood scraps and trash in there from using the room as a woodshop. Once it was organized and everything was moved over I scraped and sanded the walls. Once that was done I patched the bad parts of the walls with my usual mixture of drywall mud and sand.




I still have to patch a few small areas and sand. Hopefully the walls will be primered by tonight. We haven't picked out a color for the room yet either. We hope to have this room, the breakfast room, the foyer, and maybe the laundry room painted by this weekend.

The next project and one I've been avoiding for many months now was the kitchen ceiling. Over the last 4 months or so I made every excuse I could think of to not start on it. Once I finally did start it I finished in 2 days and it wasn't all that hard.



There are 2 parts to the ceiling, the part on the left in the first picture is underneath the upstairs guest bathroom. the part to the right is a fairly large attic space. I plan on making an access door from the guest bathroom into the space to use for storage.

I used R-19 for the part of the ceiling under the bathroom. R-30 will go down on the other part after I demo the upstairs guest bathroom walls. The wood is salvaged wood that I got last year before we even got the house. I laid alternating rows of 7" and 9" boards.



Most of the boards are pretty dirty so I'm going to scrub them down and then use some type of wood treatment on them like Murphy's oil soap. I might do a very light sanding and light coat of poly but I doubt it, I really like the patina of the boards as they are.

I also got a lot of small projects taken care of that had needed to get done for a while now. I installed the dryer vent in the laundry room. Everytime we would run the dryer it would become a sauna in the room, great when it's 30 degrees out, not so great when it's almost 90 out.

I installed the HVAC vent in the breakfast room now that the floor is down. Unfortunately I didn't get to hook it up to the system because the HVAC guys left the wrong sized ducting for me. On payday I'll be buying 6" ducting so I can hook it up. The back of the house gets hotter than the front because of the lack of the vent, the lack of the dryer vent, and because we didn't have the ceiling in the kitchen.


I finally moved the stove outlet to where it needed to go. It was directly between the cabinet I built and the stove, creating a large gap between the two. I moved it to under the stove, now both the stove and the cabinet are centered underneath the cabinets above them.


I also painted the little metal bistro set we got for free last year, it was painted some bright purple color. We're using it on our brick patio until we get a larger patio set, either wood or wrought iron.


I even had time to help Heather build her bird feeder for the back yard.


Next on my list will be to finish Guest bedroom 1, finish the Foyer, and finish the last kitchen cabinet then paint all of them. I hope to have all this done in the next couple of days.

Breakfast room update

Yesterday morning I sat down and created a project list. As I've mentioned before we need to hurry and finish the major projects in the house to get a conventional mortgage. Our construction loan is at 9 1/2% right now. In another month or two it will jump at least another point. It's hard enough as it is now making the payments and buying all the supplies for the house. Our construction loan money ran out last month and I decided not to borrow more so I'm having to pay for everything out of pocket now. this is making it hard to stay on schedule. I wouldn't normally do this but because of the situation I'm adding a PayPal donate button to the site. I don't really expect to get much of anything but every penny helps.

Anyways, on to the house. Making that project list really helped, it's easy for me to lose my focus sometimes. This has helped me to stay on track so far. If I can stick to the schedule I've created I'll be finished in a month. On the list for yesterday was the Breakfast room. I finished the floors last week but have been avoiding the walls. They looked terrible as you can see in the pictures below:


The cutout in the second picture is a patch I had to install. It replaced a 1x12 that held the original fuse panel. I scraped and sanded the entire room in a few hours. then we primered the entire room. The primer is a one-coat primer from Valspar. I normally use Kilz2 but this was a little less expensive and it has a drying time of 30 minutes. I think it did a very good job so I'll be using this from now on.

Here are a few pics of the room after primer:




We had wanted to paint the walls today but unfortunately we dont have the extra money right now for the paint. The color is going to be Homestead Resort Tea Room Yellow from Valspar. It is one of their historic colors.

In the last picture is the wall with the back door and two windows. Eventually I'm going to take the entire wall out and install the other set of double french doors I have from the Anderson House. these are 3' wide each. The wall is not a structural wall so it wont be a problem.

Another great salvage find is an old corner china cabinet. It fits perfectly in the front corner of the Breakfast room. It was in awful shape when we found it so it needed quite a bit of work. Here is a picture of it being test fitted in the corner:


What you can see in this picture is the paint pealing off the insides. What you cant see is how bad the frame and shelves were. The bottom of the frame was rotten and the base was missing. I built a small platform for it to sit on and fixed the rest of the frame and shelves then scraped and sanded the entire thing down.




I still need to install a baseboard for the bottom of the cabinet, rebuild the two shelves in the bottom section, reglaze the window panes, and paint it (it's primered right now). In the last picture you can see the shelves have plate grooves.

We'll also be installing an old mantle on the breakfast room/kitchen wall. We have two matching mantles that will go on either side of the wall (one in the Breakfast room, one in the kitchen). They are just for decorative purposes only as the wall is nowhere near thick enough for a chimney. Once the mantles and the metal firebox surrounds are installed I'll be tiling around the firebox and placing a summer cover over it. They will then look like real fireplaces.

Breakfast room mantle

Kitchen mantle