Tag Archives: remodeling

Gutting the Wood House

We have made some major progress on the deconstruction/cleaning/gutting of the wooden house. We hired our friend Dave again, who had helped us remove the deck bathroom and he is a champ! I know we wouldn’t be nearly as far as we are now without his help and knowledgeable advice.

BK and Dave 1
Lots of stuff to remove

Britton worked with him about half the time, and they managed to tear down all the walls and floors of the upstairs bedroom as well as the whole kitchen area. Then they cleaned out the wall cavities which was a dirty job.

stairway
Stairwell

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Kitchen/Living area during deconstruction

The upstairs bedroom had at one point in time been inhabited by bats (though there were no living ones that we could find) and so the wall cavities were filled with about 4 trash bags worth of bat guano! There had also been five huge bee hives in the walls too, and while we had earlier had those removed, there was still some old dirty honeycomb left as well. I guess when no one lives in a house for 10+ years, nature starts to reclaim it!

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Upstairs bedroom with the bathroom removed and all the wall paneling

There is now a huge pile of wood that we have to sort and stack and we still have some major decisions to make about the wooden house. We haven’t put any money into its renovation yet, and so many choices still float out there.

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But it is moving along finally, and we love to see progress. The house is clearing out and feeling much better.

(And in case you were wondering, this- in and of itself, is not the teaser creative project though it is a part of it…)

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Ideas for the Wood House in Rincón

Cassie and I have been brainstorming for what we’d like to do with the house.  We’ve told how we go back and forth on either tearing it down and building a concrete place from scratch or working with what we’ve got.

Lately we have been leaning towards working with what we’ve got.  It would move us quicker to our goal of moving to Rincón to keep what we have and simply remodel it.  There are a few things we would like to achieve.

  • A main floor bathroom.
  • A better bathroom in the master bedroom
  • More space / Separate living space
  • More light / brighten it up

We are pretty much certain that we’d take the bathroom that was built on the deck down.  It seems like too much of an add-on and doesn’t really fit.  So what we’d do is just move it to the side of the house and integrate it into the main house structure.  We can make an entrance to it from the inside of the house and from the deck.

The bathroom in the upstairs bedroom is only a toilet and a sink.  We can extend the room and reconfigure that bathroom to take up more space.  We can put in a shower or bath so that the master bedroom upstairs is a bit more complete.  We are thinking about also adding an upper deck off the master bedroom.

We can pour a concrete floor under the house, then close in the lower area and frame rooms and a bathroom.   This would provide more living space and/or a separate living area which could be used for visitors when they stay with us.

As far as more light, we will take out some of the shutter windows and put in more traditional glass windows on the ocean side.  We are thinking about also putting in a glass sliding door to let more light in.  I’ve seen some of them that are rated for hurricane force impacts.  I’d have to do more research on the windows available and how they hold up in high winds, but adding slots for storm shutters /plywood would be part of the plan.

Here is a rough sketch of what we were thinking.


Bathroom on side and deck off upstairs master

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Progress Pics

We just stopped by the rental and figured we would update some pictures. The tile is pretty much done, time to reassemble everything.

counter

Tub

Its nice to have some good progress. The wood floors still need to be finished and lots of little things, but its coming along.

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Kitchen and Bathroom Demolition and Remodel

Well this little rental house is probably the biggest undertaking we have made in our rentals and in our own house. We have finished our basement, are currently working on a basement project on another property and had to do some minimal work on the other rental, but this is the first project that we’ve had to do some major demolition work on. We had to paint, tear out the carpet, all the tack strips, staples and backing for the tub. But the biggest chore so far has been in the kitchen. We had to remove all the glued on sticky blue fake wood formica, the backing and remove the sink.  Thankfully we are hiring out the tiling and wood refinishing, but this has been a major job. Here are a few pictures and a video of the process. We are excited to see how far the tilers got today while we were at work.

Bathroom tub
Tub area after removing the old plastic backing

Bathroom floors before
Bathroom Floor 1/2 with old pink carpet

Kitchen during
Here is the kitchen 1/2 through demo


This was tons of fun! (not)

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