The 2010 House Remodel

Step one of our project was coming up with a design. The upstairs consisted of one large bedroom, a large bathroom, and a walk-in laundry room. We wanted to convert the space into three smaller bedrooms, one smaller bathroom and a smaller laundry room. To add more room to the upstairs, we also decided to fill in the cathedral ceiling in the downstairs living room. The upstairs ceiling is vaulted, so part of the space we were adding by doing that wasn't going to be livable space, but it would work as storage. Nate drew all this out with a cool online program on floorplanner.com, and after a process with the township we were able to get our permit.

One thing became clear as we considered the project before us. When Nate built the house, he was a young bachelor who lived alone, so he didn't mind sleeping in a dusty, unfinished (and sometimes with no roof!) house. However, nowadays the house is occupied by Jen, Silas and 2 cats. We knew things are going to be a little different this time around! Fortunately, Nate's mom lives nearby and opened her home to Jen and Silas for the duration of the remodel. The cats, however, had to brave the commotion!

The first drawing you see below is the old layout of the upstairs, and on the right is the new design (drawings done on floorplanner.com). Then there are some photos of the upstairs before we started the work, as well as the living room with a vaulted ceiling (complete with skylight whose future was uncertain when we began demolition). TOP Mid-April — The first, big, work weekend Jen and Silas moved out, then Nate and Len (Jen's dad) piled up all the upstairs and downstairs furniture and covered it with plastic. Next, the upstairs walls came down, and the bathroom was emptied and prepped for the plumber. A lot happened it a short amount of time! What takes a long time to build takes only a short time to tear down, apparently. TOPLate April — To create a floor in the space of the cathedral ceiling in the living room, Nate ordered engineered, composite joists so that we could span 15 ft with no additional supports. It took Nate and Jen's dad less than a day set them all in place.

These pictures are a little surreal, so you have to look closely to see that two separate floors of the house are showing. TOPEarly May — This is the fun part! Nate and both of our dads helped to carry in the wood and frame the walls. Meanwhile, the plumbing is continuing to progress in the bathroom and the electric being run. The rooms are really starting to take shape! TOPMid-May — Over the weekend, our drywall guys came in and began transforming our framed walls into real rooms. The change is dramatic! Now we can really tell how the upstairs is going to look and feel. On the flip side, the rooms seem smaller once now that they're closed in with drywall, but hopefully that's just a temporary perception. Once the gray drywall is painted, the rooms should brighten up considerably.

This is one job that creates an incredible amount of dust! The floors almost looks white! Spackle is yet to come...and even more dust. It will be great to get past this last messy phase of construction and move onto the finishing work. TOPLate-May — The windows had to be replaced in order for each room to pass code for "egress", which means that a fireman has to be able to fit through the window in the event of a fire. Because the previous room had one large window, and because the code had changed since Nate originally built the house, we had to change all the windows. We chose three matching, double windows from Pella.

The job required some outside work removing the siding from around the old windows, enlarging the opening for two of the windows, and making the largest opening smaller. Thankfully we were able to reuse some siding so we didn't have to buy new panels.