Totally caught up!

OK everyone, with this post we will be totally caught up as to where we are now with the house. Very exciting :)

The steel beam in the kitchen.

The steel beam from the 2nd floor - they had to cut part of the flooring out b/c they messed up originally. All good now though!

The two bathrooms with new floor joists and an open view down to the kitchen.

The new open kitchen with no wall!! Now we can really start to see what the space will look like.

This is actually the boiler/mud room. The windows in here were placed about two feet in, so we just had the framers pop them out to where the exterior wall already was. Kinda confusing without seeing it in person, but it really opened the space up.

On to the wallpaper - Will found this amazing spray called Piranha that you just spray on the wall and it makes it so the wallpaper just scrapes right off! It is amazing.

Elizabeth is now back from Costa Rica (yay!) and was adding a little artistic skill in her scraping.

Now these two were FANTASTIC helpers! My younger cousins, Guy and Bo. They jumped right in even though they just came by for a tour and then Guy told his dad to go on home and hang out by the pool, he wanted to work "for another 45 minutes or so". I'll take it! :)

Guy and Bo smiling and showing off their work. This was tough stuff too. Not only was this wallpaper, it was the grass cloth wallpaper.

The foyer - post wallpaper removal. Taking off that dark grass cloth already lightens up the foyer.

Another view of the foyer without wallpaper.

Now...the master bedroom also has 1 wall with wallpaper and unfortunately the magic spray was not working as easily with this one. But Piranha comes with a hand tool that perforates the wallpaper first then you spray and perforate again, and spray and then scrape it off. It certainly works, but it's a LOT slower and a LOT more work!

So there we are! Now I'm off to the house again to finish scraping off the master bedroom wallpaper. Thanks to Nick who is coming in town again to help out!

Lots of Helpers!

Parker - I'll have everyone know that this is right after he climbed up into the attic with the sledgehammer and proceeded to bust out the shower ceiling from above! Not to mention the old fiberglass insulation that I know was miserable....THANKS Parker!!! Come back from China soon!!

Will putting his effort into the shower demo.

Ahh, now doesn't that look SO much better???

Guest bathroom - just the start of demo here - and you can look through to the master bathroom too.

Jeanette helping demo the guest bathroom!! She did a great job on that wall tile - look at how full the bath tub is! And Martin was amazing as well - I can't believe we didn't get him in the picture!

This was Martin's contribution - cleared out the cabinets and laundry room sink.

Will started tearing down the ceiling in the living room. This is where we are going to raise the ceiling height by putting in a tray ceiling since there is nothing on top of this room. Very excited about what this will look like!

John and Will checking out more of the living room ceiling.

Helper Pic! My Uncle John, Will, and neighbor Lynn Walker.

Ivey-Puller In Chief - So proud of her ivey pile :)

Now, below we have a little series of shots that chronicle Will and John removing the cast-iron tub from the guest bathroom. Talk about HEAVY. I about died watching them take that thing down those narrow steps - clearly I was a huge help! haha

This is the steel beam that has to go into the kitchen so we can take down a load bearing wall.

Family shot! My mom, me, and Uncle John.

Exciting news - we got ELECTRICITY the weekend that Nick came into town - yay!

So our friend Nick joined us for a whole weekend of hard house work. This is Nick and Will knocking out the whole bathroom floor.

Nick again - here you can see the floor boards....unfortunately we had to replace all of these.

Great view looking up from the kitchen, through the bathroom and up to the ceiling.

Living room without a ceiling - doesn't that look great? I wish we could keep it vaulted, but we need to be able to insulate it. The tray will be amazing though.
Grainger, Will, and Nick after a successful job.

It got hot...but here's Tilden helping! After we took the ceiling out, we had take out all of the nails in the ceiling joists so that we could re-use the wood for the new framing of the tray ceiling. At this point, all the guys had so much fiberglass on their clothes they had to strip down not to itch.

Oh, hey Nick! Working hard! :)

Will and Grainger after they took out a massive section of a cast-iron pipe in the bathroom. We had to rent a pipe cutter from Home Depot to cut that ridiculously heavy thing!

The new tray ceiling :)

Will had his framers come in to help out one day.

Framers at work.

Not only did they put up the tray ceiling, they also put in the steel beam in the kitchen.