I left off Part I with this picture :

This hole in my kitchen wall is a great example of why so much of our remodeling project is stalled right now and how the disease is spreading through the house. It’s pretty obvious how the spreading is working, stairs end in kitchen, therefore the kitchen has been infected. The stalling is a bit more complex.

You might not be able to tell very well from my picture but that wall has no insulation in it, and it is continuing to fall apart. Also the white thing in the wall  is a towel because when it rains really hard the roof leaks and the water comes into the house.  No doubt that has quite a bit to do with why the wall is falling apart.To fix this hole the remodeling disease is going to spread even further.

-There is no point replacing the wall ’till we fix the roof.

-The roof doesn’t just need fixing in that spot, it needs new shingles everywhere. (That project will be a spreading disease of it’s own I’m sure!)

-We can’t just rip out that chunk of wall and fix it without having half the ceiling cave down (it’s all plaster and lath in the kitchen).

-Which would be alright since there is a huge crack across the ceiling running through where the ceiling fan should be.

-I use the word should because I took the blades off when we did the electrical work  in order to access wires.  I had to get in there and accidentally messed with how it was anchored to the ceiling. Worried we would forget it was basically unanchored and turn it on causing it to crash across the room I just took the blades off. But it would be good to have a working fan again.

-There is no insulation in any of the kitchen anyway so after the ceiling comes down ripping apart all the falling down walls wouldn’t be a bad idea.

And all of a sudden we’ve gone from fixing a hole in the wall to re-roofing an entire house and ripping apart the kitchen… and as long as we are ripping apart the whole kitchen… I’m not even going to finish that, it gets too scary.

End result: After two years we still have a hole in our kitchen wall.

In addition to the hole, the pantry is still down to bare studs inside, (but with a working light), the stairs need to be finished, railings need to go up, trim needs to go on…

But lets not dwell on all that unfinished stuff lets talk about Clara’s room.

I had been stubbornly holding out trying to get the trim finished in Clara’s room until she moved in. Some people might argue that I was being unreasonably stubborn about this since it meant that Clara was still in our bedroom, but I had reasons.

You see the summer I was five my parents built a house.  When we moved in that fall we still didn’t have tile on the floor or many other finishing touches. Most of the important finishing work was completed fairly quickly, other things like closets not so much. Tyler and I each had a door-less closet in our room with holes in the walls on either side for a set of drawers to fit in.   My Dad put in drawers in about five years later. When I was in middle school  Dad did the drywall finishing work above them. I  had been used to having the wall open and had been storing things inside next to the drawers so that the finish work walled in one of my Moms birthday presents, but that is another story.  The closets never got real doors.  We begged my Granny for curtains that are still hanging today.  My point is that I knew that if Clara moved in before her room was done the odds of us ever finishing it would plummet. And the odds, lets just say it’s looking pretty ugly…

Trim and baseboards, the final step to a completely finished room, and not just finished completely, redone from the studs on in. Window trim and door casings went up in the last month… …but then we got to the baseboards, which of course led us to another nasty chain of events.

-The old baseboards do not fit anymore becuase we changed from plaster to drywall and took out a chimney from a corner, so we need to cut new ones.

-The baseboards in our bedroom are also off because of the closet work.

-It seems like someone ought to be able to figure out how to make all the baseboards fit on all the new walls  becuase we should have really close to enough and then we wouldn’t have to buy any new ones.

-I can’t figure that out. Math has never been my strong suit.

-One of the reasons I can’t figure it out is because we need new plinth blocks under the casing for the doors. For some reason those have been a favorite of teething dogs.

-The closets still don’t have casings or doors on them much less the plinth blocks on the bottom  making it very hard to determine if my math is right before I start turning 14 foot boards into toothpicks.

-The wood is a hundred years old, weird sizes and difficult to match to say the least.

Needless to say we did not get the baseboards done in Clara’s room before she moved in. Fortunately I don’t think there is any space to hide a birthday present behind them so if it takes us a few years at least we don’t have that to worry about!

Come back tomorrow for The Disease Part III The Sleep Crawler.

Our house has a disease.

It is a remodeling disease and we have been fighting it since July 2008.

Mostly the disease has been spreading and winning but this last week we had a minor victory when Clara at the age of 9 months moved into her own room.

You see in our old house we have some plaster walls. And some of our plaster walls were falling apart, really falling apart. Falling apart so that if you pushed a spot on our stairwell a three foot in diameter piece of wall would move and if you pushed too hard parts would start to fall off.  At the time Ivy was at the age where that looked like a good thing to eat. So we had a family friend (Alec) come out to help us rip out the old plaster and lath and then drywall our stairwell. Just one wall in the stairwell

But then the disease hit.

-So long as we are doing one wall, we should do all of them.

-Now we need to do the ceiling too, that caused John and Alec to look like this:

-Hmm, there is NO insulation in the walls, and the stuff in the ceiling is a million years old and only an inch thick, better take care of that.

-The pantry under the stairs is already half ripped apart and now lots of plaster is falling off the walls in there… rip it out too!

-Well, since everything is torn out should we make new stairs?

-We hit our head on the old ceiling above the stairs so now is a good time to cut it out and change it!

-Oops, accidentally made a hole into this bedroom (now Clara’s room) and look it has no insulation either, well it’s a little room… rip it out!

-There is a part of an old chimney in this room? Rip it out, throw it out the window, and try not to hit the dog!

-Now everything is exposed and we can see the old nasty scary wiring, lets re-wire everything.

-Now that the ceilings are ripped up lets put a real entrance into the attic so that we can use it.

-Can’t use the attic unless it has a floor.

-New lights in the stairwell, because  really at this point, why not?

-New light in the pantry.

-The old duct work is a catastrophe, everything is still exposed, lets do that too.

By the end of the summer we had taken loads of garbage to the dump, and made a lot of progress that didn’t really look like any progress.

It was awful hard to say to people, yes I know it looks worse than before and you can see the insulation but really it’s progress… You see our house was held up by, in the words of Alec, “Hope and Magic” insulated with nothing and powered by old electric wires with the insulation rotting off, and now it’s not. Progress.

One year, later we finally put up the drywall and discovered I was pregnant.

That caused some problems.  You see during the course of this disease Ivy had been moved out of the small bedroom that got ripped apart into what we call the attic room. That meant that all the stuff in our house that was in the attic room got moved into Ivy’s old room once it was finished.  So when we found out Clara was on the way we needed to do some rearranging. The problem was even with the now usable attic, there just wasn’t anyplace for the stuff to go having only one closet in the house and one pantry still in shambles. So John and I moved into the attic room with Ivy and we had two closets built in our bedroom. Hooray! John and I moved back to our room, the stuff was moved into one closet, we got rid of FOUR dressers we had been using and put our clothes in the other closet. The little bedroom was empty

This winter I painted, the little room twice. The first time I chose a god-awful color that looked like scrambled eggs barfed onto the walls. Since then I have gone back to my previous technique of color choosing which is that someone else does it for me.

This spring John refinished the floor while the girls and I were out of the house.

All that was left was left to do in the small bedroom was to put trim back up…

The to do list for the rest of the place is a bit more extensive.

To Be Continued…

The Disease Part II

The Disease Part III