Takin' it inside ...

Once again I have taken much too long to update, so here goes ...
Mike has pretty much wrapped up the outside work for the season. Most of the siding is back on except for the bottom row. He is hoping if the weather cooperates he can get a little more repair work done on the sill plates before the snow takes over. If not, it can wait until the spring.

In the mean time, the work has shifted inside. What's been going on?

The porch area has been double insulated and drywalled. Mike has not mudded or taped it yet though. He has, however, removed the old closet and crappy, bain-of-my-existence sliding doors that were hung on it. It will be replaced with antique hooks and a bench made from reclaimed cottage wood.

The kitchen counter has been installed and our new appliances have arrived. The water line for the ice maker/water dispenser in the fridge (Mike's new toy) is not yet plumbed in, nor is the dishwasher, much to the detriment of my dry chapped dishpan hands!

In the current laundry room, which will be Maia's future bedroom, we have demoed the two walls of closets and reclaimed the old tongue and groove planks,that were originally doors that someone had cut up and coverted to shelves.

Mike has also been working on the fireplace surround. Our beautiful mantle is in place - an old maple beam complete with original wooden pegs; the tv surround is installed and finished out with the old tongue and groove boards that we salvaged from the closets upstairs and the cement board is installed below the mantle in preparation for the application of stone. Mike wants this to be a big reveal as it's a pet project of his, so sorry, he has banned me from posting progress pictures - you will have to stay tuned!

We have chosen our flooring and 58 cartons are due to arrive with our name on them tomorrow at Tim-br Mart. I have absolutely no idea where we are going to put them!

We agonized over the selection of this flooring.You  may recall in the family room Mike installed reclaimed hemlock. It was a very tedious, time consuming process with each plank needing to be individually cut. The result was beautiful. Unfortunately with a large, energetic dog in the house it only looked beautiful for about a week. It is now terribly marked up and grooved from Finn's claws. We are so disappointed.

Hemlock falls somewhere between a soft wood and a hard wood, so we considered trying a hard wood for the rest of the main floor. However with the dog and kids and sand we were worried whether hard wood would be durable enough. We were also advised with the fluctuations in temperature and the high moisture levels in our climate that hardwood is not recommended for our area.

We ultimately decided on, gasp, laminate. The good news is this flooring is nothing like your first generation laminate that was all shiny and fake looking, like a picture of wood glued to a masonite plank. We have chosen a new line from Mannington flooring called "Restoration." The planks look old and weathered and have the texture of wood grain. They are also extremely durable and able to withstand the riggers of dog and kids. Even better, and what is important to us, is this flooring is made from 70% recycled materials and installs with an adhesive-free click system. For a project in which we had hoped to use as much reclaimed materials as possible this is a good compromise.

Next update ... hopefully some pictures of installed flooring and maybe the fireplace!

Season's Greetings from the Crooked Cottage!

the domino effect ...

The last time I blogged we were working on the kitchen. Well things were happily moving along then we hit a snag. As I went to order our new fridge we realized that none of our doors were wide enough to get a new, larger refrigerator into the house!

I filled Mike in on our dilemma and he just very matter of factly said "well I'll just go ahead and install the new front door."

While this might sound like a simple solution I should explain that it wasn't just a matter of widening the door opening and installing our new door. The front entrance was actually moving.

This is how our house was configured when we moved in. You can see that the entrance is on the side, not the front. Silly us, we actually wanted the front door on the front of our house.

So given this task Mike decided that he should just go ahead and reframe for the new windows too. In a matter of hours we went from the picture above to this ...

Needless to say there was a mad scramble about 10:00 Saturday night to get some plywood up on the front of our house to close things in ... and to keep the neighbourhood critters out!

Sunday, with the help of our fantastic neighbour Bob, Mike got the front sheathed and wrapped and all of the windows installed. Yesterday the door went in.

The windows and door still need to be trimmed out and the siding put back on. Then the old door will be removed and the wall repaired.

This was a whole lot of action for one weekend ... only in the Crooked Cottage can the house get a partial face lift to accommodate the purchase of a new fridge!

Next spring the work will continue on the upper level. We will be taking the roof off of the front of the house and raising the roof line up to the height of the main structure. New windows to match the ones we just installed will also be going in.

Kitchen preview

I had planned on holding off until the kitchen is done to do a big grand reveal, you know, for the wow factor. However, lots of people have been asking to see pictures and Mike went and promised his parents that I would update the blog (sorry this is almost a week late!)

I will do a more detailed post later where I will include the before & after shots and all of the in between. But for now here is a little sneak peek of what Mike has done so far.

When we moved in the entire main floor, with the exception of the family room, had a drop ceiling covered in fibre board tiles. When we ripped it out (on the day we took possession) we discovered tongue and groove plank ceilings underneath. Unfortunately at some point someone installed new subfloors upstairs. In the process they breached the main floor ceilings with thousands of nails. It was too much to try to repair, so Mike has recreated a tongue and groove ceiling with exposed beams in the kitchen & dining area. There is still more trim to add and then it will be painted out white.

After some major shimming of the studs so that at least the interior walls of our cottage will no longer be crooked Mike reinsulated and hung new drywall. The new cabinets and sink have now been installed as well. We are still quite far from finished, but here's a teaser ... we have gone from this ...

to this ...

Still to come are counters, new appliances, flooring, back splash, hardware and a reworking of the former penninsula. Stay tuned!

Made in the shade ...

While Mike toils under the house I've been working out in the yard.

We have a lot of re-grading to do to bring the house up out of the ground (at some point someone back-filled the yard too deep against the house and the moisture has started rotting the sill plates of the exterior walls). Because of all of this work we had pretty much resigned ourselves to the fact that we wouldn't really have any gardens this year. However, sometimes things take an unplanned turn that makes for a nice surprise.

A few weeks ago Mike asked me to move some hostas that were going to be in the way of some excavation work. The only place that was available was a spot under the trees at the front of our property that had been used as an area for dumping some of the excess soil.

So one afternoon the girls and I headed outside to tackle the task. Maia manned the rake for a short time until she gave up and relegated herself to the position of wheelbarrow and tool manager. Ran was content to pick rocks and provide snacks (a delicious combination of gold fish crackers and granola bars ... mmmmm!)

This is what we started with (my FB friends will have already seen the first two pictures) ...

and by the end of the afternoon we had this ... we were so pleased with the results.

The garden is now filled with several mature hostas, periwinkle, lily of the valley, ferns, astilbe and moss. Everything was reclaimed from somewhere else on our property except for the ferns, which our neighbour gave us and six small moss plants which I bought.

To take things one step further I have been adding some rock over the last week. The bed is now outlined with a beach rock border (the rocks were recovered from under the cottage last summer when we had our crawl space dug out). I have also laid a flag stone path in the clearing that cuts through the trees at the front of the yard.

While a garden was not part of the plan for this year it sure is nice to have at least one patch of pretty out in the yard.

We are just gutted ...

For a couple of weeks I've been telling people that I'm going to update the blog so I guess it's time I actually did! You might want to make yourself comfortable. There's been a lot going on so this entry is long!

I would say we are now in the thick of the main floor demo. With the exception of the family room and the powder room the main floor is pretty much gutted.

The kitchen/dining area reno began with moving with built-in dish cabinets in the dining area. I love the usefulness of these cabinets and didn't want to see them disappear completely. They are now sitting in our future pantry (in the former back hallway) where they will become, no surprise, my pantry cabinets.

When we pulled out the cabinets we discovered an original cottage wall. We will be salvaging the material to maintain the rustic look. The wall will be partially opened up to allow a view out to the lake from the dining area. The lower section of the wall will remain and will be covered with the original boards that we are saving.

Next we started the demo of the main kitchen area. This was a tedious process that required a number of sequential steps.

First, the penninsula of base cabinets had to be removed in order to get to the flooring. It is now sitting in our living room and helping to serve as part of my temporary kitchen. Mike then ripped out the strip hardwood flooring that we absolutely hated. As he started pulling up the subfloor he made an interesting discovery. There were layers of old newspaper under the floor.

The papers dated from 1937. There were articles about the Spanish civil war, local tourism (from the London Free Press), sports, fashion etc. Unfortunately most of the paper had fused to the floor and it was almost impossible to salvage more than just small pieces. In some areas the ink had actually transferred onto the floor boards. In this picture you can see where the floor says Chevrolet from a car dealership's ad.

Taking a break from the work for a little fun ... one of the benefits of living in a house under construction ...

Once the subfloor was removed and the paper scraped we had to rid the walls of this lovely faux brick. It was made from some sort of wood fibre and was adhered to the drywall. Everyone got in on the act ...

Another interesting discovery was made as the walls came down in the dining area (although not nearly as amusing as the old newspapers).

The walls were a mess of random strapping that had been slapped up to support the panelling and drywall. We also discovered that the north wall of the house had been insulated with blown fibre insulation. You may notice in the picture that the fibre had settled in the wall cavities and there are several pockets in the wall that had virtually no insulation (no wonder we had big heating bills this past winter!). And what a heck of a mess to remove! Mike spent hours knocking it out of the wall, shovelling it up and then vacuuming the remains.

One cool thing about opening up the walls is we are able to see where original windows and plumbing and a door once were. It's fun imaging what the cottage used to look like (and kind of sad).

The remainder of the cabinets have now been removed except for the sink area. Mike is having to reroute some cabling and remove several old dead-ended wires. He is squaring up the studs and will hopefully putting up some drywall in the next week or so (and obviously insulating the exterior walls).

Mike has also been working hard at levelling the subfloor. This is a tedious job that involves a lot of work in the crawl space cutting out old supports and reinstalling them in a more appropriate configuration.

Stay tuned for pictures of our beautiful new cabinets. Here's how they look now ...

The Family Room Becomes the Den

Progress. The fireplace is drywalled in. Final sanding and it's ready for priming and painting. We'll trim the corners and the rest of it out to give it a panelled look, probably cloud white for the background and the trim colour for mouldings. You probably can't see them clearly, but there are speaker wires coming out of the walls above each of the end table lamps for the rear speakers of the surround sound system. Installed a new electrical outlet in the center of the ceiling, and a ceiling fan identical to the one in the living room. It didn't go off without a hitch, however. You see the downrod between the ceiling mount and the motor housing? It's supposed to mount to the motor housing by sliding into a bore on the top of the housing, and then you install a steel pin through holes in the bore and the downroad to connect them together. Except the downrod supplied had no holes. !&!&^%!. Being as stubborn as I am, and not wanting to take everything down, package it up and take it back to the store, I took the ceiling fan in the living room apart so I could measure the size and location of the holes in it's downroad, and then drilled the new one out. Needless to say I was pissed.





Here's a view of what I now call the den looking toward the back yard. Eventually the plan is to mount the tv on the wall above the sideboard to make room for a center speaker below the tv. Baseboard work left to do, trim around the new garden doors, install 4 pot lights, move the heater in the wall to the left of where the fireplace was/is....... you get the picture.

The cats now have the nicest room in the house. Where's the justice in that?

Family room fantastic!

The floor is in and Mike has started putting the finish on it. One coat done, two to go. It's a completely different room! From this ... To this ...

Caution, construction zone!

Things have been hopping here. We have been ripping out and rebuilding and things are looking good. We finally feel like we are starting to make some progress on the inside of the house. For this spring/summer we are focusing on the main floor.

One job that needs to be done is to move the washer and dryer downstairs. They are currently occupying the bedroom that should be Maia's. The laundry will be incorporated into our first floor utility room.

To get things rolling a few weeks ago I got out a pry bar and hammer and did the demolition in the utility room. I pulled out all of the old wood panelling and took down some shelves. Mike carried on with the tear out in the back hall adjacent to the utility room. This will become our mud room. Here are some before and after shots.

Work in the utility/mud rooms is temporarily on hold now. The flooring for our family room has arrived. Mike has two weeks off of work and is going full on with the family room renovation.

So far Mike has torn out the old ceramic tile floor and underlayment. He opened up the floor and levelled some uneven joists. He reinstalled the sub floor and added an extra layer of plywood on top. Tomorrow he hopes to start installing the new wood floor.

While the floor work was going on we took advantage of some nice weather and had our new garden door installed in the family room. I was sooo happy to bid our horrible old sliding patio door good riddance! It was hard to open and was continuously freezing up in the winter.

Mike had to temporarily suspend the floor installation while the garden door was being put in, so he went to work on ridding us of another problem feature in our family room - the fireplace. You may remember glimpses of the dated 1970's fireplace in the family room pictures near the end of this post. We were initially hesitant to cover it over, but now we are happy that we did. As it stood the fireplace was not functional, with the chimney needing repairs. It is also a major source of heat loss in the room and it spanned almost an entire wall.

Mike has coverd the brick with foam sheet insulation, built a stud wall, filled it with more insulation and covered it with drywall. Further repairs will eventually be made on the exterior and the chimney possibly covered with a beach rock veneer to coordinate better with the cottage feel that we are going for.

The family room is looking fantastic and we can`t wait to see the floor go in.

Next steps will be the installation of a ceiling fan and lighting, wiring for the tv to be wall mounted and the speaker sytem to be hooked up. Then we will decorate!

On an other exciting note, when the installers came with the garden door we also had them bring the first batch of our new windows (that will find their home in the porch area) and our new front door. Here is a sneak peek ...

One man's trash ...

The last time I posted we had embarked painting the family room. I am happy to report other than a bit of the mortar on the fireplace we have finished de-sauna-fying our back room. The walls are now lovely white tongue and groove planking with the trim and fireplace a sand colour.

We are now waiting for our flooring. Sourcing out flooring provided us with a bit of a dilemma (it would have cost us half as much to purchase Chinese-made pre-finished hardwood), but we followed our hearts and went with the re-milled barn board flooring from The Timeless Material Company. We want to keep the rustic feel of the cottage and we are really excited to be using recycled materials while achieving this look.

In the mean time we've been visiting the Sarnia location of the Habitat For Humanity ReStore in search of a few little gems for our crooked cottage. We have not been disappointed.

First we bought this door to replace the one that currently exists between the kitchen and the family room.

Mike purchased this dresser that he plans on transforming into an entertainment cabinet. It will be modified to be incorporated with our (non-functioning) fireplace in the family room. The tv will sit on top while the componentry and dvd's will be housed in the cabinet. It is a "Peppler" of Hanover piece from before the time that the company was Sklar Peppler.

My personal favourite is this little cabinet. I'm sure most of you will think I'm crazy (I know our kids do) but I love this piece. Initially Mike didn't want it. He said we didn't have room. I assured him that there is a space for it in the livingroom and that once restored it will house some of our less frequently used china. I also told him that it was all I wanted for my birthday and it only cost $20, so what could he say?!

It is hard to see from the picture, but there are some cute little carved details on the front and a built-in silverwear compartment on the top. I plan on repairing the veneer, rebuilding the interior shelves and then painting the piece. Since the veneer is quite badly damaged in some areas and it doesn't appear to be a high quality wood I am not going to attempt to patch and stain the cabinet. Rather, I will paint it to go with our new kitchen cupboards (once we have them picked out).

There is a label on the back of the china cabinet that identifies it as having been built by the North American Bent Chair Company of Owen Sound. I did some research and discovered that this business was established in 1892 and closed its doors in 1945. That means my little ugly duckling is at least 76 years old.

We are excited by our vintage finds, especially because we have managed to discover some pieces that were manufactured in the area. We really like the idea of bringing some local history into our home.

Sayonara sauna!

Happy New Year! With our trip in December and the holidays it has been quite a while since I've posted. Unfortunately with all of this going on not a lot has happened in our house since the last update. However, with things getting back into a regular routine work has started once again.

First, we have a new fireplace. Literally the morning we returned from Florida our fireplace man called and told us our new unit was in and asked if he could come the next morning to install it! Yikes! While Mike had removed the old propane stove he still had to smash out the old brick hearth and build a platform for the new insert.

We now have a fantastic new propane fireplace. We still don't have the surround or mantle built, but here is a peek at what we've got so far.

Pre move-in.

Tear out.

Prep work.

New fire box.

We still need to build the surround which will be clad in this cultured stone. It is very close in look to the actual beach stone that was dug out from under our house.

The mantle will be built from an old barn beam that we have acquired. Unfortunately it is currently wrapped in plastic and not available for public viewing. You'll all just have to wait for the final reveal!

The other project in progress is the family room. In a previous life it was actually a hot tub room! The walls and ceiling are completely lined with tongue and groove cedar boards. Except for the fireplace the room looks like a glorified sauna. We absolutely cannot stand it any more so I have begun the tedious job of painting it out.

Since we are going for a cottage/beach house look the planking is perfect. The room just needs a lot of cosmetic help.

Because of the grooves in the planks and the primer I need to use I am having to brush on the paint and can't use a roller. It has taken me two days to do just the first coat and this is excluding the fireplace and the ceiling. Fortunately Mike has started to help paint the ceiling. Since I'm not the tallest person this is an enormous help and a great relief to my aching back!

Even at this early stage the difference is dramatic. I can't wait for the finished product. There will be hardwood floors, garden doors in place of the dated slider, new lighting and a refacing of the fireplace.