Day 27- Watch your Step!

Well the floor of the bathroom upstairs was very soft from water damage and was now an issue once the tile had been removed. Part of it needed to be replaced and since I wasn't sure how I felt about cutting out floor and kneeling on rafters with a giant opening I had my contractor do it.
So all the sudden when I walked in one day I saw alot of light coming into the downstairs bathroom and when I realized that it was streaming from the big "skylight" above from lack of floor i will have to admit I was a little freaked out. But of course I had to grab a picture because hopefully this is something that I will never see again.

And the mess below from the falling rotten floor. Awesome. Can I just tell you how many times I have cleaned out this bathroom?? And I'm not even living there yet!

Day 26- My most Loyal Crew

Just wanted to give a shout out and thanks to my most loyal working crew- My parents...and don't forget my 89 year old grandma who also tries to help where ever she can! My mom has been a wallcovering stripper, plaster knockerdowner, staple puller, and just about anything else I ask her to do. My grandma usually takes clean up duty but is also been known to strip...wallcovering that is.

And my dad (who is not pictured below because he worked the first shift this day and we were working the second shift) has done a little bit of everything too, this day he took down the kitchen cabinet and old vent...which he had to do partly with a sawz-all.

Looks like it is almost ready for a new refridgerator!!

Day 25- Whatever Blows your Skirt Up

Which might be you standing on a HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Cooling) supply vent on the floor of my new house...so watch out! Alot of the old registers are big iron grills on the floor. Which need to be desperately cleaned and painted....any volunteers? I have moved a few of them and need to figure out how to patch the spots as well. So tricky when wood floors are involved. But I will figure that out next week. So one thing I can tell you is that I did decide to upgrade from the old oil tank that is in the basement (which needs to be removed before I can occupy the house...again, any volunteers?)

And for a little HAVC education: This 1938 house was actually orignally run on coal. There is a coal shute door behind the wood board you see to the right in the picture above and behind the old carport post you see in the picture below. (I did take that out and put in a small glass block window). So after coal went out of style (50's?)they installed this Oil tank (pictured above) which was fed from outside pipes which you can see in the picture below. This then fed to a Oil burning furnace and then probably about 30 years ago upgraded to a gas furnace which was completely fried and unworkable when I moved in. So needless to say all winter when I visited the house my toes would become frozen.

So, HVAC has basically been ignored in my blog world and I do apologize to all of the HVAC geeks out there who have been losing sleep over it. I actually had my new 95% furnace installed the first week I had the house and the Furnace and AC are about 1/4th of my overall construction budget. And they have been rerunning and moving ducts here and there but wrapped up alot of it this day. Here is a picture of the new unit in my gorgeous basement;I am looking forward to my $1500 tax rebate next year with this puppy (and also hoping it saves me a ton of money this winter). We did rework some ducts runs upstairs to gain some more space and better efficiency and moved some downstairs due to wall changes but the biggest change was adding a run up to the new toy room. In order to do this we had to run a duct up along the dining room wall to the old attic dormer space above. Problem being this is right over the unit in the basement and the return on the other side of the dining room wall was in the way. So they got it in the wall but had to bump it out at the floor which made us fur out the wall a bit as you can see below. Now that is one fat wall...but at least the kiddos will stay warm upstairs!

They only have one duct to adjust and then I will need to get everything THOROUGHLY cleaned because not only are the ducts filled with plaster chunks, construction dust and dirt but also 50 years of discustingness that I do not care to think about but cannot help but see when I look down into the vast void of nasty iron return grills. Yuck.