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 ...