And So It Begins

On Tuesday Oct. 25 construction officially began!  The first step was tearing the back room of the house off.  Little fact about that, the room in back (which will eventually be the kitchen and family room) was originally a porch.  When my mom was in high school (I believe) it was made into an actual room.  So Tuesday the room was torn off, and Wednesday the wall that was the end of the dining room, where the house ended was torn out. 


There will be more pictures to come later, but here are a few just to let you see the progress:

After Tuesday.  The room is gone.  A little weird to see.  My favorite part is the door on the right side.  When we would go visit, this was the door we always used.  Now it will be filled in and a side door/entrance to the house will be through the garage and a new stairway will be made from the garage to what will be the kitchen.

Well half of the wall is gone.  I kind of like it.  Maybe we should leave the wall like that.  A little alfresco dining?  I guess it would work better if we lived somewhere other than St. Louis.  The weather isn't too cooperative sometimes.

Those are the only pictures I have for now.  Hopefully there will be many more to come in the next few days.  So much for my slacking on blog posts.  Now that the ball is rolling, I really can't slack anymore!

Christina

Wallpaper be Gone.

Since I am usually at work when demolition was taking place, I went over one day to start stripping wallpaper in my future bedroom.  Here are some of the pictures:

Remember this lovely wallpaper? I was really intelligent and decided to take the wallpaper off this wall first.  I then realized that this wall is being removed.  Oh well, good practice at least.

When I took it off, there was some Big Bird Yellow paint.

On this wall I decided to not only remove the wallpaper, but also the excess glue.  It took me 45 minutes to remove the wallpaper from the majority of the room and TWO HOURS to remove the glue just from this little section.  Not fun.

The pile of all the wallpaper that was removed.

Yep,  that used to be water.  This is the third bucket of glue remover/water when I finished the wall.  Pretty gross.

Those are the only wallpaper removal pictures for now, but I'm sure there will be more in the months to come!

This is What Happens When you Give Someone a Hammer Part 2

Ok, the next step in the demolition that we did was tearing out the wall between the master and den, tearing out part of the wall between the master and the living room, gutting the main floor bathroom, and lastly, tearing out the walls to the staircases.


I will warn you, this is where all the photos start running together and it gets a little tough to know exactly what you're looking at.  So stay with me and hopefully I will know what I'm talking about at least.


There was also a little bit more work to do in the kitchen as well.  This is what the kitchen looks like now:

This used to be the wall in the kitchen with the stove and cabinets.  That hole in the middle of the wall is actually open to the bathroom now.

As you can see, the wall between the dining room and kitchen is COMPLETELY gone

The kitchen now.  Down to the studs.

A few people have asked by we aren't moving into the house now.  This is our kitchen.  And Mom is standing in the bathroom.  Need I say more?

There are so many pictures and they are so tough to differentiate, so hopefully it makes sense, how I am posting them.  Here are some of the walls that have been torn out so the staircase can be widened. 

The living room, looking at the master/den/stairs.  Part of the wall to the master had to be torn out because of the stairs.  Since the stairs are being widened, there has to be a landing and an extra step into the living room.  The door to the master can't stay where it is because of that. 

The same view.  Seriously, how much does Raina look like a lion guarding its lair?

On the left is the lack of wall where the stairs are, on the right the lack of wall where the kitchen is.

Same thing, different angle 

The wall from the dining room into the living room, and a little bit of the lack-there-of wall going into the basement

The wall for the basement stairs had to be torn out too

Mom showing off her handy work with the torn out stairs.

And now on to the master bedroom/den/bathroom.  The pictures kind of overlap since there are no walls to say which room is which, so I'll just put all the pictures together.

This is taken from the master looking at the den and bathroom

Again, it's a little messy, all the roof had to be torn out too

The den looking into the bathroom, there used to be a mirror there, now it's an open hole to the kitchen

Brian got in on the action in the den.  Don't worry, there will be a close up of that beautiful wall paper in a minute

Tearing out the ceiling

The bathroom.  Not really too usable.

Looking from the master out to the living room and stairs

A cleaned up version of the den

Look at that wallpaper.  It's too bad it was covered up by all the shelves.

Taking all the tiles out of the bathroom

After all the tile was gone.  Beautiful, isn't it?

Mom showing off her handiwork again

This is pretty cool.  While tearing out the walls, we found the original electrical inspection for the house, from 1937.  How crazy is that?  It now resides on our fridge and will eventually be hung in the new house once it's finished.

Well I think that's all for now on the demo pictures.  There are two more posts about to come your way, right now, and a third will probably be up sometime this weekend.

Excitement!

I am going to try my hardest to get more demo pictures up this afternoon, but for now, here's a pretty awesome piece of information.  They are actually starting construction TODAY!! The back room of the house is being torn out so we can get started digging new basement and really get the project rolling.  Please, please pray for good weather in St. Louis,  it is supposed to rain later in the week, which would set progress back before it really even got started.

This is What Happens When you Give Someone a Hammer

We have been doing some preliminary demolition for a few weeks, but since I'm so far behind, some of these pictures might be a little outdated already.  I guess the easiest way to go about this is going room by room again.  I will tell you now, the house is so far into the demolition that it is honestly a little difficult to tell which room is which at some points.

Here is some of the pictures of the dining room/kitchen wall:

Warning: Mom's got an axe!

And here it goes!

Look at that form, no doubt from all that tennis!

Jessica joined in on the fun while Mom worked from the other side

Jessica and Peter on the kitchen side of the wall

a little bit further along

Jess and Peter showing off their demo skills

This is about how it looks now, but maybe a bit cleaner

As you may remember from the last post, the kitchen was in the middle of the house, but will be moved to the back of the house.  Here are some of the demo pictures:

There used to be cabinets, but they all had to be taken out.

More cabinets missing, plus the stove used to be next to the drawers on the right

There was a cabinet above the fridge, the wall behind the fridge is the shared wall between the kitchen and the stairs.

Dad working hard...

Or hardly working.  That wall he's tearing out is between the kitchen and the dining room

Here's a better view of the wall (or lack thereof)

It seems that those are the only pictures I have on my computer now, but I know there are more pictures on a disc at home.  Hopefully I will have those posted this weekend as well.  For today, I'll leave you with some "fun" pics:

Tucker, Raina, and Norman have been a huge help with demo, as you can see here, they are working hard.

Lots of cabinets and trash

Lunch and nap time.  Since I have to work most Saturdays, I typically just come over after work and usually bring lunch.

Tucker is exhausted

This is actually really empty compared to how the dumpster looked in the end

My Grandma and Grandpa has this hanging in the back room of the house, it is the only thing the estate sale people left behind.  We decided to leave it up throughout the construction, so now we're going to have Jesus watching over all!

Here's a little preview of the next post.  Taking out the wall between the master and the den

Raina working hard

Peter's dad Jerry came over one day to get a little preview of the house