Our Journey through the dust and rubble

Raise the Roof!

We solved our sagging floor problem in the front upstairs bedroom! The remidy: raise the front of the house up by 1" on each side. There was only a 2x6 floating inside each piller. We used a porta power hydraulic jack. Piece of cake. We are planning on adding a third piller just to the left of the front door to help keep the beam in front of our place straight. The piller will also help define our entry as well give us a lot more options for decorating.





New Bearing Wall

New wall with the doorway framed in it for Phase 2 of our project: the main floor! Phase 1 is the upstairs floor ( 2 bedrooms, full bath, and a central room for a total of about 850 sq. ft. our own apartment).

Our new stairway!

These stairs are going to be awesome. I kept the width of the stairs the width of the closets that they replaced which is a wopping 4' wide! I love lots of room. All the "head bonkers" in the house are now gone with exception to the two upstairs bedroom closets. We kept the orginal mini solid fir five panel doors.

No more stair way


Hole in the floor

The upstairs stairway has now been removed!



Notice how open the room looks. You might have to be here to really notice.

Reinforcing the ceiling

The wall seperating the kitchen from the dining room is now removed and the guys are beefing up our upstiars floor joices with 2x8's. Purpose is two-fold. 1. reinforce our floor 2. provide adequate space for our upstairs toilet plumbing.

Meet Marcos y Jorge

These guys are awesome. With a little bit of broken english and a lot of sweat these guys went did all the things that I wanted to do. They are so much faster than me. Here they are working on the stairway in the front entryway.

More cat stain

Major Cat damage. and yes it is an outside wall! Believe it or not but we were able to get most of the stain and all the smell out of the beams by just using a 2200 psi pressure washer and a little bit of bleach. I also install new subfloors over the exposed areas.

We hate Cats!

I'm not sure why but cats will always pee on the bearing and outside walls. The stains are from the cats next to the original masterbedroom

Looking around

From the kitchen looking NW



From the back door looking West

Lumber is here!

A first load of lumber for the project is here! Wood is expensive. We decided to use Timberstrand for our stair stringers. Timberstrand is an engineered board that is perfectly straight and incredibly strong! $45 for a 2x12x16! ouch, but worth it!

Stairway to...

The view from the future landing looking down the future stairs.




















Main floor looking down to the basement!

A Clean Basement!

Dennis and Holly pressure washed the basement a few times with a little bit of bleach and it smells 98% better! I had marked all the "trouble areas" when we first started the project.

Still chuggin along

Dad and I removing the old fir flooring. The flooring was in great shape till the cats destoryed it.














You can see the upstairs from the downstairs....WOW!