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,…
We are so excited for the progress that’s been happening on the house. After over two years of dreaming for things to start, here we are, right on the verge of taking off the second floor. Today we’re sharing the LAST STEP that needs to be done before that can happen…well, last 3 steps. Remove brick from front of house Take out second story windows Remove interior walls Removing Brick We tore down most of the brick in this post….
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 we are so excited to share with you (for the 2nd time) the initial plans that the architects drew up! After our first design was WAY over budget, Chris and I went to work designing a new home. If you remember from our last post, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out a new design that stayed within our budget AND still looked cool. Here are a few things we considered: More square footage needed to…
Hi! Yup, we’re still here. We’re still doing a major house remodel. We’ve been hard at work on the house but have no progress to show for it! Let me tell you why: The house was broken into. What a total bummer! We went out to the house a few Fridays ago. As we were enjoying the solitude along with some huge snow drifts, we got to the door to find it ripped open via crowbar. They’d dumped things out…
Now that the design phase of our house remodel is finished, we are starting to think about supplies, fixtures, and design elements. Anyone who has built or remodeled a space knows that the amount of decisions can be exhausting. With the square footage in this house, we know we need to be very mindful of the budget. I am going to work extra hard to be sure that the whole project comes in on budget (or even under)! So when…
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…