House Renovation

I spent most of July painting. It all started one day in late June when I decided to clean behind a cabinet in the entryway. I pulled it out and found this behind it. I decided it was time to do more than try to clean old wallpaper.

Next step: peel off the wallpaper.

When James got home, he decided that the whole area needed to be skim-coated with plaster before I repainted.

Then, I decided to do the rest of the room. On the opposite side, in an area set off from the rest of the room, this is what I found. When we moved her, there was a water heater in the corner where there are slits in the wall. A couple of years later, it started to leak, and obviously, all that water went up into the wall. James pulled all the old gib board off, since it was so moldy.

This is what we found behind the gib board! This corner must have been outside the house at one time. I like the shade of blue! He filled the walls in with new gib left over from jobs, and then plastered the seams when he skim coated the rest of the room.

While I was waiting for that to be done, I decided to tackle the kitchen. The paint job in there has been bothering me for a year or two already, and there were a lot of holes that needed to be filled in. James ended up spending several evenings plastering those holes. The ceiling used to be the same blue as the walls; I decided to change it to white, but keep the blue for the walls.

I really like the way it turned out. It feels a lot brighter, and much, much cleaner now.

Finally, this past week we finished what we wanted to do in the entryway. We moved the fridge and cabinet to a different wall, and swapped the coats to the opposite wall from where they had been. James built a shelf for the coffee machine, and another boy built shelves for shoes. I got to paint both of those. We’re loving the new look and layout!

One day in early May, Esther went into our shipping container to find something that was stored in there. She was horrified to find evidence of mice. We had never had mice find their way in there before, but sure enough, when I went in, it smelled strongly of them. That was on Saturday. We helped someone move on Monday, so Tuesday was our first chance to get into the container. We decided to pull everything out of the area under the shelves and see if we could find where the mice were getting in. We found it! See the hole in the corner and the pile of bits of wood around it? We also found that this corner of the floor was quite damp. After some consultation with the builder and the floor layer in the family, the decision was made to tear up the old particle-board floor, which was water-damaged in many places, and replace it with new, treated plywood, covered with commercial vinyl offcuts that Elijah was able to get for free.

We were surprised, when we pulled up the floor, to find this underneath! The container was a reefer, which explains the channels.

James got the new floor laid that evening (what a blessing that Elijah can bring plywood home in his work van), and Elijah got started laying the vinyl.

That weekend, he finished the job, and on Monday we moved back in! The floor has three different colors, but it is sweepable and washable and we are delighted. And, no mice can get in. The hole through which they were entering has been found and plugged (a plug blew out when someone was using a power washer a few months ago). The cats still want in, but that is because they like the beds that are often in there.

We saw a lot of renovations happening this summer! Of course, there was the work on Eijah’s new house. Elijah also worked on his bedroom. He started that project last winter, in July or August, and finally got to move back in in March, after the painting was done. I took a few pictures of him laying the carpet. First, the girls had to get their things out! See the walls? He chose to whitewash the plywood he used for the upper part of the walls. The lower part is the original boards that were there, which were covered with a thick coat of yellow paint. He carefully pried them off the wall, then ran them through a machine that James’s boss has which sanded both sides at once, and then oiled them after putting them back on the wall.

Next, he put down tack strips, laid out the underlay, rolled out the carpet on top, and then stretched it in. I enjoyed watching him do what he does every day at work.

Esther got her room painted this summer. A couple of years ago, she touched up some places where the paint got messed up. She used the bucket of paint that was originally used for the room–but didn’t know that a creative brother had mixed some other paint in to it, so she ended up with white squares on a cream wall. She didn’t have time to repaint that summer or the next, so this summer she decided she must get it done. The three girls moved out to our guest cabin for a few weeks, and she painted all the trim, patched and sanded several places where there were holes in the wall (thanks to other renovation projects that punched through), and painted the walls. The motivation to get this done came from finding a set of new curtains at an op shop–she wanted to get them hung, but not until the room was painted!

Miss Joy was delighted to be back in her own room, even though the cabin is very cozy!

When we moved into this house over six years ago, the walls in the toilet looked fairly good. I didn’t like that they were wallpapered and impossible to really clean, but the room was all right. However, a year or two ago someone accidentally broke through the wall down near the floor, and gradually the walls became mildewy and the ceiling looked awful. Then, a few weeks ago, someone figured out what the noise was that we had been hearing for a few days… a leaky water pipe inside the wall. Our resident builder, James, tore a hole in the wall, found the leak, and got it stopped, and formed a plan of action. A few days later, Gayle and I went to town and bought plywood and paint, and that weekend James finished gutting the lower half of the room. He replaced the old gib board (wallboard) with plywood and put a piece of trim around the room at the join with the old wall. Esther requested that he build a box in the wall to hold rolls of toilet paper up above floor level so they’ll be accessible, clean and dry, so he did that, too, and created new corner trim for just outside the door. He had to replace the door jamb, too, because that was rotten because of a water leak sometime in the past before we came here. Compare the before and after pictures, and you’ll know why I am so happy that the job was forced on us!

Just before Christmas, we started working on recladding the house. For a week, until we took off for a weekend over New Year’s to visit friends in Kaikoura, all the men in the family focused on pulling off the old weatherboards and putting up new ones. Then, Simon started work on his house, and Gayle kept puttering away at this one, with help from James on a couple of days, until they all went back to work.

See how rotten that sill is? It had to be replaced. Later, they also replaced the pile at the corner of the house.

This side is insulated, and the building paper is going up to keep the house drier!

One day, I saw several of them on top of the house. They had pulled the weatherboards off the end, and couldn’t put up a new fascia board because so much was rotted out up there at the top. So, part of the roof was pulled off, several purlins replaced and a new fascia board put on, and the roof replaced–all in one day

.Finishing up the gable end. We had to get the electric company out to pull the fuse so the cable could be safely unhooked, the weatherboards put up, and the cable hooked up to the house again. We had about two hours to do all that before they returned to put the fuse back in at the pole.

This was the most challenging part of the entire project. Gayle spent a couple of days working out the angles to cut the boards to get it to look right under the bay window, and then James took a couple of days off working on Simon’s house and helped him get it finished. They started all over again at least once. It came out looking good–but what a process!

In early February, Gayle had a day off work, so he started painting the house. With help from Esther and the younger children, they got the first coat on the two sides that were replaced. We need to get the other two coats on yet, but it’s a start.

We’re hoping for a warmer, drier house this winter! We should do the other two sides of the house, but not this year. These were worst, so they got done first.