The truth is that despite the beyond-frigid temperatures, it actually could have been worse! The work we completed on the foundation this summer and Guy's basement door walls/fortress really lessened the amount of cold air flowing into the house. For the first time since owning the house, the inside was actually (slightly) warmer than outside. When the temperatures outside are only 12 degrees that might not be saying much but still, it's a plus!
Pinedale Shores stands out nicely against a snowy scene
To get us through the chilly months ahead, we've come up with a list of goals that revolve around first-floor work. We've decided not to move onto demo'ing the second floor until the first floor is 'ready to go' for its' final steps: electric, plumbing and drywall. First and foremost we're focusing on finishing the kitchen, which includes laying down subfloor and relaying a hardwood floor on top of that, framing out a doorway for the basement door (right now we climb through a hobbit-sized hole), and replacing a series of rotten wall studs. Thankfully, we're getting closer to completing our first goal. This weekend we reached the '1/3 finished' mark by finally getting up all of the original floorboard! It was as lengthy and tricky a task as any.
This lady knows how to man a saw!
We kicked off the frigid weekend by venturing to the coldest place in the house, the basement, to finish replacing the few remaining damaged floor joists. These joists, located near the back of the house, were actually no longer connected to the right-side support beam which gave the floor a nice trampoline-like feeling upon walking. After losing feeling in the majority of our limbs, we finished hammering in the new joists and could move on to task 2 - floor removal!
Tony and I spent more hours than one would expect tag-teaming the removal of the remaining 5 feet of floorboards, piece by piece. As Tony sawed through the countless nails holding each piece down, I used a crowbar to pry it up. It was slow and not all that exciting, but once we rubbed away the sawdust from our eyes we found a completely demo'd floor! With whatever feeling we had left in our hands, we hauled in a stack of subfloor pieces and roughly laid them out. We are now prepped for stage 2 of our subfloor goal.
During our next visit, we will finally be able to build something up instead of taking it apart! It will take us some time (of course, because nothing about this renovation can be a quick fix!) as we have to level out the floor by adding shims to every floor joist, but once THAT is done we can begin piecing together our subfloor. Perhaps it's wishful thinking to hope we'll get the entire subfloor down in one weekend, but we'll see! The sooner the subfloor is down, the sooner the actual hardwood floor can go down and that is one BIG to-do checked off of our list.
Not too pretty but it does the trick!
We'll be keeping an eye out these upcoming weekends for a few days that promise to hover in the balmy 30s, or 20s even. Once the weather cooperates we'll be back at the house for subfloor installation! Those two words don't get many hearts racing but to us it's nothing but good news ;)
More to come soon, all!
Melissa
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