I'm asked 'what's you next project?' every single day. And the answer is - our house! We moved in over a year ago, but never quite finished everything and I've been reluctant to share all the 'reveal' photos until it's done. So now it's time to make some progress and get it done!
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| Our 1898 home |
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| Day 1 - three years ago |
But first, a quick recap. As best we can tell, our house was built in 1898 by the Loveitt family, as a small rental cottage. Long term renters, the Dana's, bought the house in 1915. They owned a lumber mill in Portland and our guess is they did some of the initial expansion to the house. It continued to get added on to over the years. And of course when we bought it, we needed to put our own stamp on it.
But first we had to unravel all those additions. Many of them were obviously done by people with little understanding of construction techniques (after all, it was a summer rental cottage for many years), so we found lots and lots of problems.
Some of the big gotchas included:
The sill (the wooden beam that the house rests on over the foundation) on the west wall of the house was completely rotted out. We're still not sure how those joists held anything up - because they were a mess too! We had to jack the house up to replace the sills and all the rotted floor joists. It was a huge job and not part of our original scope of work!
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| Replacing the sill/joists meant we had to gut everything down to the crawlspace |
We needed to turn off the water while we worked on the house, which led to the discovery that our water line was ancient and no longer acceptable to the Portland Water District. So we had to dig up the front yard and replace the water lines.
The dormer addition on the back of the house had its structural members cut away at some point and it was collapsing into the dining room and sunroom. It had to be torn off and a combo of steel and engineered beams were installed to create structural integrity into the frame.
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| A 4 inch drop in an 8 foot wide room!!!! |
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| Removing the dormer and reframing the roof solved a lot of structural issues |
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| The new dormer is structurally sound and added an additional 8 feet to the 2nd floor |
The next disaster - we discovered that the ceiling joists in the living room were dramatically undersized and needed to be replaced (especially since we were adding a bathroom to the second floor). Again, a huge job!
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| It looks so weird without a living room ceiling! |
We also found carpenters ants, powder post beetles, raccoon infestations......seriously, I wondered if we would be swarmed with locusts at some point. And yes, at times we were tempted to run away and call it quits, but we kept chugging forward, trying to get everything fixed.
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| Carpenter ant infestation over a large window |
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| Asbestos flooring |
It's probably not surprising, but we found that there was asbestos on the heating ducts and some of the flooring. That stuff on the trailer? All asbestos that was professionally remediated.
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| All of this was asbestos that had to be professionally removed from the house |
And at long last, 17 months later, we could move in (for comparison, our typical project takes 6-9 months). Whew!! Was it finished? No. But we've been slowly picking away at it and I'm hopeful we can make lots of progress in the next couple of months.
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| Moving day! |
So please follow along as we try and finish them up. It's come a very long way!
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Whew! Makes me tired just reading about it. I can't wait to see it when you're finished.
ReplyDeleteWow, I forgot about all those problems. Can't wait to see the additional progress and the final reveal.
ReplyDeleteYou always do such a beautiful job. I love following along. I am guessing it was a good thing this was not your first reno. Hopefully, the road bumps were a little easier to deal with considering the number of flips you have worked on.
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