Home Renovation: 2013 Edition

Here we are. Another September. And you all know what that means, right? Time for some more home construction projects! This year, Denisa and I decided to import help: her brother Milos flew out to stay with us for five weeks and help some on the house. We’ve invited Milos several times to come stay with us. The stars aligned just right, and this year is the year!

What’s on the agenda? Well, we still dream of finishing off the space above the garage, and wee’ve known for some time that it needed additional floor support to make that possible. So first up was tearing down the garage ceiling, slapping up sister joists on all the existing joists, re-insulating it, and putting up some sheetrock to finish it off–more or less. We thought the demolition would take a few days at least.

We finished it in an afternoon.

So we’ve been re-evaluating how long it’ll take us to get through the various projects we have. In light of that, here’s the plan (as it stands today):

  • Insulate and put up sheetrock in the garage.
  • Finish scraping and painting a few outside areas of the garage that never got finished.
  • Paint the woodshed
  • Clean out the area above the garage (which has been a storage site for 6 years)
  • Frame the walls and ceiling for the bathroom, closet, and master bedroom that will eventually go there.
  • Redo the electric work in the downstairs of the garage
  • Redo the electric work in the upstairs of the garage
  • Finally fix the outdoor porch light (now broken since October 2012)
  • Insulate the walls upstairs in the garage
  • Start putting up finished boards in the upstairs
  • Scrape, repair, and paint around the trim of the downstairs windows

If we can get that far, I’ll be over-the-moon excited for the progress we’re making. Milos has been a huge help so far, and we’re really grateful for the assistance. Lest you think we’ve been doing nothing but work him to death, we’ve also taken him to his first American football game (and tail gate party!), to the local auction, to the open house at the school, and toured around the city. And there’ll be more to come, for sure.

In any case, yay construction! I’ll be helping out this year as I can, of course–fitting it in where I can. But the good news is that we might be quite close (relatively speaking) to seeing that dream of a second bathroom and bedroom become a reality in the next three or four years. (Just in time for when we’ll really start needing that second bathroom . . .)

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