Rehabber’s Rehab

Its Christmas time and the family is in town, what else is there to do but work.

Our cabinets arrived December 23 filling the garage with boxes big and small. Liz and I came back from Indiana the day after Christmas because I was on call and Liz had to work. If work was slow and I didn’t have get called in I would be able to help Matt and Dad install the cabinets.

I spent Friday doing a massive cleanup project, reclaiming our home from the dust for the living. I did laundry for the first time in our new house with our new washer and dryer that arrived a couple of weeks earlier. I mopped three times and still could not see the rich red of our living room floors, but the dust was slowly disappearing. I’m sure your socks and feet will still get dirty walking around the house, but at least now its not being tracked from one room to the next. After cleaning, Liz came home and grouted some holes in the bath tub tile and I painted the ceiling and kitchen walls white so that we could install cabinets without having to later paint the area. I survived the day without being called in to work.

Early Saturday (7AM), Dad and Matt arrived from Indiana and we started installing the cabinets. Its always slow going at first as you need to establish the high point of the kitchen floor so that all the other cabinets can be set level by shimming them up to that highest point. But the Martin boys were firing on all cylinders and managed to get all the base cabinets in and some of the wall cabinets including the difficult built in refrigerator cabinet before break time.

Our Aunt Lynne and Owen were still in town and Liz’s birthday was the next day so we decided to have our traditional family dinner with Liz’s family at a popular gourmet Mexican restaurant in Oak Park- the New Rebozo. We had a lot of fun with the two families, Uncle Bruce visiting from Texas and a fair amount of Margharita’s. You could tell Liz had a lot of fun with everybody she loves together.

The third day started a little bit later and I knew that I just would not be lucky enough to not get called in for a third day straight to work, but Dad and I got to putting together the wall cabinets having learned a lesson that we could attach a manageble bank of wall cabinets together on the floor and then hang them together on the wall. This proved helpful and allowed us to move on to the bathroom cabinets pretty quickly.

When Matt arrived we threw up the last of the wall cabinets and then brought in the monstrous 8ft high bathroom built in cabinet through a complex manuever via the front door. I finally got called in to work just as we were sitting down to a late lunch. When I got back I helped Dad and Matt muscle in the built-in in a tight fit in the bathroom and admired there completed work in the kitchen.

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We passed our insulation inspection with flying colors and now have permission to cover up the walls with drywall. We originally planned to drywalling ourselves, but then looked into seeing if our mudder knew anybody. He came back with a price we couldn’t beat. So on Saturday morning Francisco and his buddy came by. A few short hours later the entire project was drywalled.

I’ve never seen anybody move so fast. These guys were actually running around the house while working. All we needed to do was finish a couple of framing things and try to keep them supplied with drywall.

On Sunday we took the day off after doing some cleaning and Francisco started mudding the walls to make them smooth. Mudding is an art that it just doesn’t pay to do yourself. You can never be as good as a professional. You can never be as fast, and its cheap work ($500). Unless there is a hole that needs to be patched you will never catch me mudding and sanding.

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By the end of the weekend the rooms had finally come together to look like actual living space. The bathroom had walls, the windows were surrounded by drwall, you could no longer see through to the outside, and a huge plus or plumber returned to install our new upstairs toilet.

With Liz finishing the painstaking cleaning of the slate tile we had a functional bathroom after five weeks of using the nasty and scary basement toilet.

By the middle of the week we could finally move back in, although we remained at Liz’s mom house because of the regular traveling for the holidays and the funeral in Galveston, TX.

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Its been very busy this past month so pardon the dated posts. After mostly passing all of our inspections, we were able to proceed with the insulation. Oak Park is very thorough in its insulating requiring a separate insulation inspection and the highest standards of insulation protection. Although demanding, its good for the heating bills and conserving energy. We have been scraping by with large pieces of plastic sheeting to help keep the heat in and cold out, but this is certainly not ideal.

So we spent the enitre weekend of December 7th and 8th insulating. We got tremendous help on Saturday from Matt’s friends Samati and Maria. They were machines with plenty of experience remodeling their own place. We hope that they will make a guest post with their own (mis)adventures in rehabbing. As they worked on insulating the kitchen, Matt and I installed two new windows in the backroom adding a lot more light.

On Sunday a new crew of friends came over with Matt’s current roommates Brennan and Kim and Matt’s old college roommate Wade. Our progress was significant leaving just a bit of ceiling insulation in the backroom and the attic left to do. The big project of the day was installing the new 8ft long casement and picture window in the backroom. The window was massive requiring the straining of three grown men to lift it and five people to fenagle it into place, but it payed off big time. Later I found out that Kim had been promised that she wouldn’t be working outside and dressed accordingly. While technically true, when you take out an 8×4.5ft window the opening left behind leaves you pretty much exposed to all the elements.

We also had the pleasure of taking down the shanty. It is no more. The back of the house looks ten times better, or at least it will once we get all of the trash out of the yard.

Later in the week, Matt and Allison came out to help finish up the insulation in the attic during the passing of Frank Jr. The help was so greatly appreciated as the inspection was to happen the next day and Liz and I were not in any condition to work.

For the past three months we had the pleasure of having Frank stay in Oak Park with Liz’s Mom as Frank had become a hurricane Ike refugee. On the morning of Thursday Dec. 12 Frank passed in his sleep succumbing to a month long battle against injuries and complications arising from a fall suffered in November. He is greatly missed.

Three days off of work in November for Matt and I and a visit from Dad in the middle of the week and Walah! our old slanted roof of the backroom is gone and replaced by a vaulted ceiling gable roof.  Probably the most dramatic change since getting our floors redone happened last week when we tore off the roof of the back room and put up the new roof. It was like an old barn raising without the beards and the lemonade.

If it were only as simple as that.

The first day was spent demolishing the old roof which was complicated first by Dad’s car trouble and most dangerously by the existing power lines that run into the house along the roof line.  This involved a lot of sawing sledge hammers, and sheer brute force. The only delicate part was peeling away the roof right next to the existing power line to the house. But a long’s day of work and no electrocutions left a large open air sitting room that Liz could not appreciate during the frosty fall nights. Of course none of the demo pics are available because Liz always seems to have the camera when I’m tearing things up.  At the end of the night it looked like one big skylight and we contemplated leaving it that way. But Liz quickly put a nix to that idea because she thought it would be a bit drafty.

Day two started off with the required Home Depot visit. For those looking for a new car, twelve foot long lumber fits nicely into the Mazda 5.

By the end of the day, we had framed in the new back door and the roof rafters. We ended by throwing up the plywood sheeting and it was all coming together. You could finally see the outline of the new gabled roof that matched the house and made the back room look so much more substantial. Inside you could really get a feel for the vaulted ceilings and the size of the room. What had started off as a low dingy carpeted after thought of a room had now become a dynamic space for of light that was its own asset beyond just extending the kitchen. In fact the room was bigger than most of the other rooms in the house.  Our trash was becoming overwhelming so we got one of the guys who picks up scrap metal that we leave in the back to come back for a load of trash. $250 bucks got rid of all the trash that an 5×8 truck bed piled 5 feet high could fit. It was worth the weight off my conscience and the fear that neighbors would quickly grow tired of our mess.

Now, we were getting a lot done, but it was taking a toll. Each day was at least ten hours. I got sun burned one day thinking that you couldn’t get sunburned in 35 degrees weather. Each day ended with us heading to Liz’s mom’s house showering, having a couple of beers during dinner and passing out.

Then Day Three came, we were racing to get the roof on so that Dad could leave. Usually, he tries to leave early to beat traffic, but we blew past 3PM. We also decided to throw in some skylights, finally at 6pm while hitting our thumbs as much as nail heads in the dark on the roof we decided we should get to a stopping point and call it quits. This was a lot of work and after pulling 10 hours the day before we didn’t know if we would have enough in the tank. The night ended when we couldn’t see where we were hammering at 7pm in the dark and Matt had hammered his thumbs one too many times. But the roof was all sealed up and would only require a half day for Matt and I to finish on the weekend.

Matt told me that he had trouble sleeping because he would be lying awake in bed and as he dosed off he would be startled awake with the sensation that he was falling off the roof. Matt and I spent sunday afternoon finishing up the last shingles on the roof.

In truth it wasn’t very sealed up, because you could see through some of the sheating, there was no insulation and the shingles weren’t completely on, so it made for some really cold nights in the back of the house, this along with the lack of a shower (which we had taken out and given to the junk man so that the plumber could lay the new tub) forced Liz and out of our home and back for another stay at Pat’s.

As exciting as it was having a new roof line that looked clean and consistent, moving out was a major set back on our progression to home sweet home. And the soreness from climbing up and down the roof and ladders would out last the pain of running a marathon

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The Goal:  Tear off the roof on the backroom, finish enough framing to get the plumber and electrician working, and maybe just maybe install new windows.

Well, that kind of got scrapped before the weekend even started.  We planned on finally having our permit after 10 nauseating weeks.  Alas, we achieved plan approval on Friday at 4pm after a lot of red ink and copying by Matt in the Village Hall Building department making final revisions.  However, we did not have all the necessary updated licenses and insurance for our contractors to get the big yellow card for our front window.  Thus, we scrapped the brazen idea of ripping off the back roof in broad day light without a permit.  Also our current electrical service run through where we want the gable to end, so we realized we have to wait for the electrician, who is going to put in a new service.  We’re still on fuses, and are changing the one to the garage every other week with Liz’s projects out there. But it sure would have been fun.  Stay tuned for my Wizard of Oz themed parable on the permit review process in the Emerald Oak Park.

Then our windows plan was in ruin.  Our Jeld-wen windows from Home Depot arrived on Friday morning with a possibility of next day delivery on Saturday.  The only problem was all the back room windows were missing our cottage style grills.  So two hours at Home Depot and much wrangling over the phone, half the windows were going back and the replacement windows for the bedrooms and dining room were be delivered early Saturday morning (I got a call at 6:30 AM when I’ve been working nights for the past month, argghh!).  But this window saga was happening at the same time as the rush to get our permit, so Matt had to leave me to fend through the westside CTA.  I love and hate (late buses) the CTA, but never have I smelled anything so foul as somebody who was s*itting behind me on the Cicero bus. (more…)