All it takes is a dollar...

Ooops...that's the lottery.  It takes more than a dollar to go from this

To this



The wall with the green step ladder leaning on it will be removed making our combined kitchen/den. The entire room will be apporximately 28L x 22w.  Off the sliding glass door will be a 24 x 12 deck.

As I stated above it doesn't take a dollar, it takes a lot of antacids and a dream (there's the lottery saying).

Oliver out..........

Classified Ad: Handyman needed, must be able to work in heat and long hours

Well it's become apparent that we need some experienced, knowledgeable help around the property.  Just to much to do and not enough hours. 

We advertised for such as person and had 3 applicants show up for interviews.  The first test we had them perform after filling out their application was driving the tractor cutting the paddock area.

The first applicant was someone that one would expect had experience, simply by the way she dressed.  Yes, that's correct a female. What was somewhat troubling is she arrived drinking a beer.  We proceeded with the tractor test anyway, figuring there wasn't anything to hit in the open acreage.  Please notice the posture

The second applicant was also a female.  Based upon her answers on the application we were afraid she would tend to over analyze her work assignments and then focus on us. Not something we need at this point in the project.  She had a couple of positive points going for her, 1: She wasn't drinking when she arrived and 2: Her attire was more appropriate for an interview.

Problem was she couldn't figure out how to lower the cutting deck to actually cut the field.  Which led us to our third applicant, a male.  Very smart and personable.  Based upon his answers on the application we thought we had a sure thing and couldn't wait to give him the tractor test.  We immediately became wary when he couldn't figure out how to where his hat(s).  Red flags went up as he approached the tractor.

After much debate we decided on applicant number 1.  We plan to give her a call this weekend as it's her

 birthday (that's what it said on the application) and we figure she could use the good news.  Hopefully she'll be able to answer.

Oliver out.....................

It's like paddling downstream

The house is getting easier to take.  I look forward to see the progress at the end of the day when I return from work.  Somedays more progress is made than others, but overall the house is moving forward.  It is mostly painted in areas where all the work is done.

That window literally fell out of the wall when they removed the original trim.  This is the wall where the pipes froze and burst over our "mild winter".  Since I'm a the glass is half full type of guy, that's all water under the bridge, or still drying in the wall..... 

Our way of re-couping funds by advertising for Lowes hasn't quite panned out the way I thought it would but where ever I see Lowes wrapped around our house I know that things are improving and Jimmie Johnson,#48, the 6 time NASCAR champoin, just might get confused and drop by some day for a cold one.

I plan to sit here and spin tall racing tales with him when he does come by.  Well, a couple more posts of the exploits of the external house make over and I'm going to move on to the construction of the garage.  That doesn't mean we'll be done with tales of horror from the house, we have all the unscripted episodes of the internal makeover to put to words. 

Sneak preview:  This is us reviewing plans for the garage with the contractor :)

Oliver, come down off that telephone pole!

The Hughes Net satellite dish by the window

Everybody has high speed broadband service, right?  Wrong! 

When one moves from a metropolitan area such as NYC, one may overlook whether their new address has internet service.  Such would be the case with us. 

After contacting the cable company, Hughes.Net satellite, Fios, UVerse, Knowlogy, the garbage men, and pest control personnel my options were bleak.

Dial Up, a WIFI card, or Hughes Net. 

Hughes Net seemed like the obvious choice, expensive but they offered the fastest service. I just couldn’t go back to 1995 standards of dial up phone service.  56K.  Streaming video, music, Netflix movies, WIFI, Play station upgrades all a thing of the past. 

Hughes Net reps stated several times I’d have no problems with the screaming 1.2 mb downstream speed doing any of the above.  Skeptical, I signed up, 2 years minimum service contract with early termination penalties if I dumped their service after 30 days.

Well, Hughes Net lasted all of 8 days.  The final straw came when I was trying to purchase airline tickets home on Jet Blues website and each page kept timing out.  I couldn’t purchase a ticket.  Frustrated and pissed I opened a chat session with one of their representatives.  The female representative was getting frustrated because I couldn’t answer her in a timely manner (session kept timing out and I’d have to refresh the session).  She started typing in capitals with her questions are responses.

I did a speed check on the service level and it was 8kb.  Even at my age I urinate faster than that for Christ sake.

I opened a new chat session and told that representative to come and rip their system out of here.  The representative informed me that if she terminated service at that moment I wouldn’t have any internet service.  I told her I didn’t have it with their service and to terminate me immediately.

I don’t know if I was ever disconnected that evening or not as the chat session froze in mid word. 

Lesson learned:             1)Don’t assume your new address has high speed broadband.

                                    2) Dial up  is a better service than Hughes Net.  Ughhhhh

Oliver out

More progress on the exterior of the house

We continue to pleased with the progress on the exterior of the house, the siding is going up quickly and we have decided to expand the front porch by wrapping it around to tthe north side of the house.

Spare bedroom front wall waiting for sheathing

Living room front wall waiting for sheathing

North side with primed hardyplank and new porch

Wrap around porch in process

I'm almost not embarassed to call this our house anymore, gottaa lose those blue tarps.  I've just about forgotten the house looked like the below image 7 weeks ago.

Like I said, just about forgotten.

Oliver out







4 feet on center?

These two gentlemen are trying to figure out what has kept the roof upright over the years, studs are 4 feet on center on the gable ends

North side gable, living room

South side gable, bedroom and dining room/bedroom

Interesting things happen when you remove the exterior wall, in this case heart of the pine planking, and reveal what is underneath the planking.  Or in some cases what is not under the planking.  In certain sections we had insulation and others we didn't.  Regardless, the batt insulation was being removed as it had been comprised by rain, critters and plants.  Yup plants.  In some areas there were very mature vines that grew between the individual wall planks and seemed to thrive living amongst the Owens Corning.

The plywood sheathing on the house is significant.  It means the attic area has had all the blown celluous insulation removed, studs were added to bring the roof support to every 16" on center, and new open cell foam insulation coats the entire attic roof and gable end exteriors.  5-6 inches thick on the underside of the roof.  This is just a beginning but I had a smile from ear to ear that day.  No more winter days of only getting the temperature up to 58 degrees inside the house.  Bring on winter, I'm ready.

This is the fnished product, sans paint.  Primed Hardyplank covering Tyvek, plywood and open cell insulation in the wall cavities between the studs. 

When the crew spraying the insulation started around the window to the left, dining room/bedromm, we literally had a snow storm in the room.  It was "snowing" foam insulation acroos the room as the gaps and wholes in the wall allowed the foam to enter the house until the foam set up.  A frigging mess but an even bigger smile as I knew we were improving the house and my disposition towards life.

Oliver out.

Guess which door we're hiding behind?

Door#1

Door #2

Or Door #3

Actually this is the door we hide behind.  These pictures have been taken over the last 4 weeks.  The house really is being transformed.  This entry way shows the foam insulation that went on today.  Door number 1 was taken about 4 weeks ago, my next post will start back then and work towards today, and including photos of the house and it's improvements.  Door #2 was also today and represents one of the porches off the kitchen. We have a lot of structural damage in this area and the wall under the blue window of shame is being moved out 8 feet to sit on top of the foundation wall (being worked on). 

Oliver out; until tomorrow.

Not to feel left out

With the construction going on outside between the build of the garage and renovating of the house we felt motivated to do our part.........so we started to give the spare bathroom with the non-functioning bath tub a face lift.  This way our guests would have a nice working bathroom.

We started by removing the tub, sink and toilet which then left the tile floor.  We had decided the claw foot tub would be put up for sale and replaced with a corner shower.  This would entail moving the toilet, changing the door around and re-wiring the electrical in the space.

The removal of the tile was going to be interesting as there appeared to be many layers of "stuff" under the tile, so we proceeded to remove one layer at a time in hopes of finding the original hard wood flooring in fair to good shape when we reached that layer.

We found several interesting things about our renovating efforts:  The first layer was tile.  Under the tile was 1/2" concrete backer board (duro-rock).  Remove that. The 3rd layer was 1/2" plywood. Remove that, being careful not to cut into the original hardwood.  The 4th layer was linoleum.  The 5th layer was 3/8" plywood and we very carefully removed that to reveal.......the original hardwood floor.  Much to our dismay we uncovered the reason for the 6 layers of flooring we had just removed over two days, termite damage and lots of holes where the plumbing locations had been changed to/from over the 100 or so years.  The next layer to come up will be the majority of the hardwood flooring as we need to get a sub floor down.

Next step was to open up the walls to figure out where we could route the lines for our new shower, unfortunately the first section of sheet rock we removed revealed and receptacle for the spare bedroom at the base of the wall.  Not running water in that cavity, so lets move to the other side of our corner shower and remove that section of sheet rock.

No electrical, but a massive 8x8 carrier beam under the flooring in that location.  Plumbing will be a challenge to route there.  You know what, it's Sunday, 95 degrees out, and I've got a bathroom that works at the other end of the house, it's a nice blue color

I'm done for the day. Oliver out.