I’ve nick named this project “The Money Pit”.
The room we decided to use as our living room appeared to be a den or office or, maybe even a “sun room” of some sort. It was added on after the house was built and did not match the decor (if there was one) of the rest of the house. At first the dark wood paneling and hardwood floor was cool…after a while, it became dreary. It was time for a change.
Before / Planning
The chimney for the furnace ran up through the room and really made one whole wall useless, for anything other than a bookshelf, which as you see in the picture below, John constructed for me.
I eventually convinced John to take the chimney out, but it meant that the furnace downstairs would have to be moved and a different venting system purchased. In addition to all that, heating pipes were going to have to be moved as well. (he wasn’t real excited about this) I was envisioning a whole new wall for picture hanging and furniture.
John then had the idea to remove the wall between the kitchen and the living room. This I wasn’t to sure about; it wasn’t just a load bearing wall, it was one of the outside walls of the house! I also wasn’t sure I wanted to loose all that wall / furniture space. Well I lost out on even keeping just a half wall. Seems EVERYONE liked the idea of removing the whole wall.
We both thought opening up the ceiling would be a good idea, to make the room feel bigger. John’s original thought was to let the ceiling follow the roof line, and then put decorative beams on the ceiling to give it a more rustic open feeling. I wasn’t sure about this either, because it wouldn’t match the decor of the rest of the house. This room it seemed was destined to be different.
Another big issues was the roof line of the living room. From outside you could see it was sagging; that would have to be addressed before a new roof could go on.
John spent some time researching, and then it was time to start ripping.
During
Hoping to be able to reuse some of it, John carefully removed all of the wood paneling from the walls. This is the state the living room remained in from Februrary until early summer. He got laid off from his job then, and after a couple of weeks of resting and recouping, he started working on our living room vision.
After removing most of the paneling over the winter, the next step was to get the ceiling down, the furnace unhooked, replace the gas water heater with an electric one, and remove the heaters along the wall.
We removed the drop ceiling and the insulation fairly easily. However we noticed that there was some rotting ceiling boards that appeared to be from water damage. Luckily we were removing them anyway, but it did mean that the roof would have to be replaced before we could put up insulation and drywall. We weren’t planning on replacing the roof just yet, and this put a bit of a financial snag into the whole project.
When we started tearing down the ceiling boards we noticed that the upper side of the boards were covered with tar and pebbles. Apparently this had at one time been a porch roof and when they enclosed it to make the living room, they just built a peaked roof over top. Let me just say tar and stone roofs are not only heavy, but very messy when tearing them down. This added even more unanticipated cost and effort, as we had to haul all of this away to the landfill. The framing boards were ok and we used them for the wall studding, but none of the decking boards were salvageable.
John also took down the chimney at this time.
After that was all cleared out, it was time to fix the sagging roof. John jacked the centerline up and added cross beams to stabilize the roof line. After doing this, the roof started leaking in two new spots. We also at this point decided not to do a vaulted ceiling, because the crossbeams that were added would make construction of a vaulted ceiling near impossible.
With the roof line stabilized, it was time to take out the wall between the kitchen and the living room. While I was at work one day Brittany came over and moved all of the kitchen stuff from a cabinet by the “soon to be removed” wall, and John Saws-All’ed the cabinet right off! He then moved the stove out of the way.
Since we were taking out a major wall, John needed to find a way to support the second floor. He decided on cement headers over the doorway.
I took a day off work, and Tiff’s boyfriend at the time, Dallas, came over to help. First John had me drill holes in the walls to make removing the cinder blocks easier. We then jacked up the ceiling to support the second floor. That was a bit unnerving for me.
While Dallas and John used hammers to bust out the cinder block wall, I took the cinder blocks out to the trailer, and tried to keep the floor swept up. After they got the wall tore out, John needed to build a step to get us from the living room to the kitchen. Since part of what was left was cement, he decided to finish the rest of the step with cement as well.
Dallas came back again to help John lift the headers into place. Because they sat in the rain and soaked up water, they were even heavier than before; even John was having trouble lifting them. John rigged up a pulley system that we used to then lift and support the headers while trying to seat them into position.
Soon it was going to be time to put the roof on, but before that happened the old white siding needed to come off and the new siding put on. Brittany’s boyfriend, Zane, came over to help John remove the old siding and put up the new.
With the header set and the mortar and concrete dry, it was time to remove the supports. This was a nerve racking process. If the headers didn’t hold the whole upper floor and side of the house could come down. All went fairly well, the supports came out, with minimal settling and cracking of the plaster upstairs.
With the roof outside complete, it was time to put in the insulation and drywall. We were both getting tired of looking at the cinderblock walls!
By now were were getting very tired, so we decided to “hire out” the spackling. We had some friends who take on spackling jobs so we had those two ladies, Carla and Jan, come over and spackle. While they were doing that, my Aunt Lois showed up with some food for lunch and helped me scrap and clean the windows I was getting ready to paint.
With the drywall up it was time to put the pipes in for the heating. From other projects in the house, we had old cast iron heaters left over and we decided to put that in the living room instead of the newer baseboard heaters we took out. I LOVE cast iron heaters; they heat very evenly.
Because we were putting the heaters in different places then where the original heating had been, we had to move pipes that were in a crawl space under the living room. We also wanted to put a gas fireplace in the living room and a gas line needed to be installed as well. John doesn’t “do” confined space anything, so under I went to complete the work. It was September and getting cold so I was very motivated to get the heat back in order.
I finished painting all of the outside windows except the broken picture window on the “Secret Garden” side of the house. It was out for repair as it had a hole in the outside pane and with the vacuum in the window gone, was not very insulating. Because of the residue that had built up on the inside of the window, you couldn’t even see out of it. That was more expensive to get repaired than we thought it would be.
Finally it was time to paint the walls and trim. I painted after work and weekends; I was so anxious to move back in our living room.
After
The cranberry color of the roof matched beautifully with the red bricks on the outside of the house, as did the siding we picked out. John wasn’t sure about the cranberry roof at first but after it was on he (and several neighbors) thought it looked really nice.
The bright walls and clear windows really changed the appearance and feel of the room.
Now that the living room is finished (except for the carpet) and I sit gazing out at the secret garden and all of my happy birds as I write this, looking back at the stress, frustration, sore muscles, and all the unplanned expenses. John originally figured he could do the room for $3000.00 that was before the chimney, water heater, gas line, wall and roof. It ended up 4 times that, but we love it!
