05.30.08
Posted in thoughts at 9:28 pm by Melissa
The next project is the one people have heard the most about. Robert started building the upstairs wall on the front lawn before all the snow was even gone. He used wood and made a level area to build on and then started construction on the super-insulated walls. Here are some pics. Josiah has been very helpful!
Lynn and Emma prepared Josiah for his future construction career by providing him with his first hard hat and really big Go-go’s.
Next we had a Loraas bin delivered for the shingles and as much of the other wood from the roof that we could make fit.
That was some of the prep work that Robert got done before the roof came off on Saturday. We had so much help and support, especially from Robert’s Dad (Harold) who got countless phone calls and made a lot of house calls to consult on all those projects. It has all been very exciting! Thanks to everyone for the help!
I think I’ll have to continue this story later as this week has also been very tiring and I need to go to bed! Check out my parents blog for a couple pics of the roof destruction and the raising of the walls. I’ll continue my house story when I’m more awake. Good night!
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Posted in thoughts at 9:17 pm by Melissa
So in the last post we decided to take on a huge project and destroyed part of the kitchen. During that time we drew plans for upstairs, submitted plans to engineers and to the city, and worked on all the other necessary red tape.
One of the things we learned is that to support the new upstairs bathrooms we would need to update some of the plumbing in the basement. Just a little section….and a little more…and a bit in the walls…and the upstairs walls…..You get the picture.
Here is the trench in the basement suite living room before and after.
Here is a picture of the bathroom in the basement suite. We replaced the main stack and all the drains. The copper coil thing is a heat recovery system. It uses the hot water returning from the shower to heat up other water. You can ask Robert for more info.
We also replaced all the drains in the main floor bathroom.
The bathrooms are finished, but I don’t have after pics to post yet. We only had 6 weeks without a renter in the basement suite last summer and the main bathroom was finished shortly after.
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Posted in thoughts at 9:06 pm by Melissa
I thought about starting a house blog to keep everyone updated, but since I have done such a terrible job of keeping this one updated I decided to stick with one.
About a year ago I had a dream of siding my house so that it would no longer look old and peach. This started as a small dream that grew into the need to retrofit the house and since the roof needed replacing to do this properly then we decided it wouldn’t be much more to add another floor on the house. We have been enjoying having a basement suite and decided that we could keep that if we expanded up instead of down when we wanted more space. And the adventure began…
Here is the before picture taken last summer.
One of the first big decisions we made was to make the kitchen bigger. We expanded it by taking out a wall and the steps inside down to the back door. This works well and now the basement suite is completely separate from the rest of the house. We still need a back door so we will put one where the window is in the kitchen and it will open onto a deck (someday!). Here are the before and after shots.
Before
After
After taking out those stairs we took out the closet to the left of the stairs and replaced it with stairs to nowhere. Eventually the stairs will go somewhere, but for now they are a great conversation piece.
I’ll continue this story on the next post so it doesn’t get too long all at once.
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05.11.08
Posted in thoughts at 8:55 am by Melissa
Today is a celebration of Moms. Robert and I have both been blessed with amazing Mothers! Today we get to go for lunch with Robert’s Mom and the family. Even though most of us live in Saskatoon (at least that’s the idea…) we don’t really get together enough so it will be good to see everyone at lunch.
My apologies to my Mom that I haven’t got your card in the mail yet. Josiah did sign it this morning and he had so much fun I had to take pictures.
Happy Mother’s Day Mom!!!
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