Living Room, Part III, The Rebuild

So now you've seen the ugly truth hiding below the tiles...it's time to see what all that demo led to!

Once we had all the joists out, we cleaned all the debris off the dirt and replaced the sills:

Then it was on to new joists with vapor barrier below on the dirt:

We insulated between the joists so the floor wouldn't be so cold:

And layed new subfloor on top:

Now we had to deal with the ceiling.  It was covered in popcorn, there were several light fixtures we were removing and replacing, and the biggest problems of all-the ceiling was different where the closets were and there was a hole down the center where a faux beam had been.

This is the ceiling:

We had some choices.  Try to repair it, rip it all out, or leave it and cover it up.  We originally tried to cover it with 4x8 sheets of beadboard from the home store.  We got two pieces up and decided it looked awful. Then we talked about drywall, but thought it would look off in the room.  So we went with a product we've worked with before in our old house, tongue and groove pine planks.

By now, you're seeing the white washed paneling in the photos.  It's the same paneling, just sanded and white washed with Minwax Whitewash Pickling stain.  We DIDN'T follow the directions, which is why it has the vintage-y worn look.  We brushed it on, let it sit for 10-20 minutes then wiped it off with a towel.  It dried in some places and not in others, giving it that worn barnwood look.  It has to be done carefully, you don't have to use pressue when wiping the stain off, just let the towel run over the boards.

And now, the more recent "now" photos from the left corner to the right:

Next up, information on the cool stuff you're seeing in the now pictures, and the "what were they thinking" photos of the "framing" of the window you see in the last image.

The Living Room, Part I

So way back at the beginning I mentioned that I would blog about our biggest project to date.  Since we haven't been doing a lot of things on the Cottage while we're working on our mountain of wood, I thought it might be a good time to start.  I'm going to break this up into a few posts, but don't worry, I won't make you wait to see the results!

When we bought the Cottage, we knew we would need to do work on this room.  We didn't realize just how MUCH, but we were pretty sure it wasn't going to be a simple quick fix.

These photos were taken before we even bought the place, though a hole in the cinder block foundation.

Those are just a preview of what's to come.

This is inside, where the living room met the original part of the Cottage (the Living Room is an addition).  You can see the tiles are broken-that's because it dropped down at least 2" there.  A sign of trouble...

For some reason, we never took photos of this part of the living room before we started the demo work, so I'll point out two things that are missing now-look to the edges of the photo where the green tiles are and you'll see walls.  On the left, it's the closet for the bedroom and on the right, it's the laundry "room" (a closet).  Both are gone now, casualties of needing to tear out the floor.  We decided it was a LOT more open without them.

So, as promised, here are the photos of the before.  We liked the paneling and you'll see we kept it, albeit in a slightly altered state (because we removed the closets, we will need to buy more new paneling to weave in, and we couldn't match 30+ years of fade).  The stove was WAY to close for clearances and wouldn't have worked in the corner after we were done anyway.

The left corner (check out the copper piping for the heating systm running up and around the stone behind the stove):

The middle (look closely and you'll see copper piping running over the window):

The right side:

And a preview of the final product so you don't have to wait out the posts showing how we got there if you don't want to:

This is the middle of the back wall now.  Well, not NOW, but after a LOT of work.  I have to take some new photos of the now, but this shows the doors, hearth pad and "white washed" walls.