Thursday, February 9, 2006

It's been a year

We've been blogging about the house for over a year now. So it's time to look back at the progress; a lot has been done, and there's still a long ways to go. Ah, what can 80 years of neglect/ indifference/ lack of taste do to an old bungalow.

Major Projects in the last year:

- replace old 1950's oil furnace with new natural gas high efficiency model

- Built a fence in the backyard, to keep the little ones from wandering off, or falling off the 5' retaining wall.

- playhouse, we had so much else more important, but if I didn't do it, then I probably never would have.

- Basement floor. We kind of destroyed the basement floor lifting the back of the house. It was only 2" thick, weak and had no gravel underneath.

- Re-plumb the basement. We almost replaced all the sewer pipes in the house, getting rid of most of the cast iron, that wasn't in the greatest condition. We added water supply for the kitchen/bathroom in the basement.

- Parge the foundation and add draintile, and a new footing at the corner. We made sure the basement wasn't going to leak before starting work on it. I've had a lot of practice digging with the retaining wall, so digging for drainage wasn't so bad.

- Stripped half the baseboards/trim in the hallway. This one is taking forever, we've switched tasks to the basement, but will come back to this soon. At least the one door is varnished.

- Basement rooms. We insulated, framed in, wired and plumbed 2 rooms in the basement. As well as drywall and a tile shower. There's still a lot to do, but we're making good progress down there.

- levelled the kitchen/dining room floors. There not perfect, but they're a lot better. I could have done a better job if the basement floor wasn't so weak. In hindsight, I should have torn it out, packed in a couple layers of gravel, then jacked it up. I'm fairly happy with it though, lets just say we can live with how it is now.

- started sheetrocking the dormer. I didn't finish hanging the sheetrock, I was using left overs, and knew I'd have more once the basement was done. It's one of the little projects to complete after the basement is done.

- moved the toilet in the upstairs bathroom and redid the floor temporarily. Deb also did a faux tile paint job, the sheetrock from the previous owner is so bad, that we'll have to gut the room eventually.

I know I must have missed something....

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, I didn't realize you had so many simultaneous projects going. It makes me wish we were moving forward on some of our own basement work (or adding that extra dormer we sometimes fantasize about) but that's a ways off for us. Kudos to you and best of luck for another year of more progress.

Derek said...

Thank you Aaron for providing us with Houseblogs, it's really made blogging a lot more fun! We probably have too many projects on the go, it's difficult to actually finish anything.

Anonymous said...

Way to go- sometimes I feel it's hard to see progress when you're working on so many things- the looking back at the year was fun to read & you've gotten a ton done. Considering the amount of concrete you've poured (and some torn up) in the past year, you've made great progress. Congrats!