There now…let’s take a breath! With the demo of the second floor and bump out, it was time to do some clean up. The demo was exciting, don’t get me wrong, but after the crane truck left and the contractors went home, we were looking at a HUGE mess! So today the crew from Gehrke Inc. out of Eldora, IA was here to clean up the mess. They are a local tiling and excavating company. They also showed up with…
Can you believe that the roof is gone?!? My nerves were pretty shot after day 1. With the second section being so difficult to remove, I was hoping for an easy breezy day 2. (If you didn’t read about day 1, check out this post. It’s pretty wild!) Day 2 The crane got to work bright and early. Being that we are not a “bright & early” family, by the time we rolled in to take a look at things,…
With the brick off all the walls, second story windows out, and the interior non-load bearing walls removed, the house was ready to get a giant haircut. It was time to take off the entire roof! A crane arm greeted us as we drove to the acreage the morning demo was set to start. For the past two years, we’ve discussed plans for this house with people hundreds of times. Here’s how part of the conversation usually goes: Me: Yeah,…
Hey everyone! It wasn’t our intention to take such a long hiatus from the blog, but summer had us running this way and that. Aside from getting bank approval to begin construction, we’ve only had time to continue the yard cleanup and keep it mowed. That is until NOW! We are so excited to show you what’s been happening the last few weeks! YES! THE. BRICK. IS. COMING. OFF!! Our contractor, Matt, had angle iron hooks bolted onto…
We’ve reached an exciting time (again!) during our house remodel…FINAL PLANS! After the architects presented us with three revised designs, it was our job to decide which design we wanted to move forward on. We can’t say that there was a definite winner. There were elements of each design that we liked. Before I get into that, let me remind you of the three designs I told you about in this post: Design #1 Design #2 Design #3 Here are…
Today’s post finds us outside once again. Now that the weather has turned drastically cold and it truly feels like winter, it was fun to look back (just a few weeks ago!) at some fun we had working outside. After getting many of the trees cut down and cleaned up, we still had lots of piles of branches all over the yard. So when the upcoming forecast was 50 degrees on Saturday, we were biting at the bit to rent…
Happy New Year! I hope everyone had time to relax and unwind during the Christmas break. We enjoyed time in Nebraska with my parents and were thankful for good traveling weather both ways. Speaking of great weather…we have really lucked out with some nice weather this past month. It’s enabled us to do some tree demo work to get ready for this spring when the second floor will be coming down. Ok, we won’t be doing any of the demo…
Chris & I have been working with architects to come up with our final house design. Obviously, we went with the house design that we liked best but also one that fit well with the house. We put a lot of value into the expertise of the architects too. Together we weighed the pros and cons of each design. Dutch Hip Roof This is a very unique design and fit the modern farmhouse feel. We both feel it integrated the…
As we had left off of the last post, we had taken a long shot approach and found a local farmer that was willing to take down the machine shed. After more than a year of cleaning out and cleaning out and cleaning out…we actually get to do some demo work! We cannot begin to explain how excited we were to see something done other than shoveling raccoon infested trash into a dump trailer. After a bit of logistics, the…
Meet Blue..Big Blue. Big Blue is the newest addition to our remodel project. It is a full-size, 8′ by 40′ shipping container. Blue has most likely made thousands of trips across the ocean. And now it sits contently in our backyard. So how did this happen? We knew we needed a secure place to put all our remodel/construction stuff after the machine shed gets taken down. And of course, when construction begins on the house, everything will need to be…