Our “Old House” was truly an old house. Built around 1914, it still had the original boiler to heat the house. Still functioning just fine, started our as coal-fired, converted to oil, then converted to natural gas. Big pipes, radiators and no moving parts: hot water rises, cold water falls.
Maybe its kind of sad when home renovations play a major part in your life. But we got a lot of satisfaction out of it. And we enjoyed doing everything ourselves.
We bought our house in late 1989; it looked like it was in almost perfect shape, maybe a little paint in a few rooms… We did that little bit of painting, and then as time went on, couldn’t control ourselves… One thing that we feel has been well worth it, has been redoing the external walls. The existing ones had essentially no insulation left in them. The saw dust which had been put in in 1914, had packed down so that only the bottom 2 feet had any insulation. By the time we sold the house, we had redone 90% of the upstairs walls.
February 1990 First project. We started in the smallest room, the sewing room. A new closet interior! We didn’t tear down the walls, too much of a novice I guess.
June 90 We re-landscaped the yard, with garden borders etc.
July 1990 I felt the roof needed new shingles.
I bullied Sandy into doing the little low roof. She wasn’t comfortable at the top of a ladder!
September 1990 We removed a half wall in the kitchen.
January 1991 We tore down our first external walls and re-did the insulation.
September 1991 More work on the kitchen, new counters and wall tiles.
May 1992 More work on the kitchen. This is the in-floor heating system. I felt this was necessary to avoid frozen feet on ceramic tiles in winter.
May 1992 I needed 220 volts in the garage for welding, so…
July 1992 Finally finished off the kitchen. Here are the tiles going down.
Fall 1992 Now we could start on the computer room in the basement. This included putting in a bathroom.
Winter 1992 Here Sandy shows off the finished bathroom.
July 1993 Now that I had power to the welder, I could make a fence!
August 1994 The chimney needed re-pointing. Dad was in town to help me with this one (Sandy had made it clear she was not going up on the roof again!)
February 1994 It was time to do a major renovation on the master bedroom. Sandy and I moved into the guest bedroom for an extended stay… Here is Sean (Sandy’s brother) and Warren in full destruction dress.
Here is Chris, admiring our framing workmanship. The funny stuff along the wall is going to be built-in closets and chest of drawers.
Here is Sandy, putting up some of the gyproc.
May 1994 Finally some paint, and some of the woodwork.
June 1995 Sandy decided that she had had it with our concrete path. It is nice having friends to help. Here are Kevin and Rhett.
Here are Paul and Kevin with the jack-hammer. It quickly got too hot to hold without gloves.
March 1996 Time to start on the baby room. You never know what might happen.This is Gilbert squatting in the dust and debris.
May 96 Time to finish off the path with paving stone. After almost a year of stumbling along a mud path, we were ready. Here is Paul helping to move the paving stones into the garage. Higgins is supervising.
We then had yet another house guest, Diane Mackenzie, help out with the installation. It takes a long time to move and install 10,000 lbs. of paving stones.
November 1996 Sandy had a bee in her bonnet about the living room. It is really nice now. It took a lot of time to chisel the plaster and cement off of the chimney. Once again, friends came to the rescue. This is Rick admiring his handiwork.
Once Sandy had painted the walls, we had the floor redone too.
February 1998 Back from our RoundTheWorld trip and the pressure is on to complete the baby room. Sandy’s cousin, Tal did the gyproccing and mudding.
Whew, just in time. I had to do the painting because the pregnant Sandy was trying to avoid paint fumes. Sandy did stencil on 5 or 6 cats though!
Well, we started our last real renovation during the last Christmas holidays of 1999. We tore the walls apart and removed the sawdust and lathe and plaster. The balcony was very useful!
On the inside, things were made warm and fuzzy with lots of fiberglass…. We itched for a long time after this.
And that is it for our major renovations. It is now June 2000, and we are in a panic stricken rush as we try to finish up all the diddly bits before selling our house:
- fix rear stucco
- finish interior of new room
- varathane floors
- new baseboards
- etc.. etc.. etc..
Life goes on, and things probably will be much the same in the new house: work, work, work, but all of it worthwhile, because we did it “All by myself” (as frequently claimed or demanded by Keiran).
August 2000: We have now sold our baby to friends. After marketing our house for 6 weeks, Dwain and Laura came by, saw it, and wanted it. It feels good to sell the house to friends who will appreciate it and continue to improve on what we have started Go Dwain and Laura!
Goodbye old house!
Here we are, on our way to the Roastery, maybe for the last time.
