Where have all the radiators gone?

.



March 23, 2011

First, there are a few anniversary announcements. Alok and I celebrated our 8 year "meeting" anniversary on the 21st. That is is also 8 month-iversary of the house. Today is the 1 year anniversary of Alok living with his mother in law during the remodal of this lovely Hampshire House. Which means, last year at this time, we were probably already in contract (or about to be) on this lovely house. Oh, if we only knew ;-)

So, back to the house. The front yard is in full bloom.

Our lovely hard decoration with some grass (or something) sprouting around. Notice that there is some ivy poking through! AH!


What are these weird flowers/weeds? They are all over! BTW, do we need to rake up this straw or something ;-)


Random sprouts of grass

Moving inside, we've had a lot of removal going on. Check out all of the things that are missing:

OK this isn't missing here, but check out the basement now:




No more massive, horror movie boiler.




Hot tub, anyone? There would just be about 2000 bugs crawling on you

Bye radiators throughout the house (hold your breathe for all sorts of pictures of where radiators used to be):


Butler's pantry


The apartment


Kitchen... this was a whole seat thing



Dining room


We finally got rid of the weird heater thing that was here! Notice that there is still grasspaper on the wall here!


Front foyer


Upstairs bedroom/my office to be

The upstairs yellow bathroom is also continuing to be stripped:










View into the apartment




Gotta love all the random holes now

Here are some additional pics:


Pipe filled foyer

Now, this means the upstairs now has no heat, but we can worry about that later!

Jessica

What would you do?

March 22, 2011

Alok and I have been discussing our master bedroom. The current plan has been to make the former mold room into our bedroom, as seen here:


Potential master bedroom


An older pic with Patrick that shows the rest of the master bedroom


The door into the other room that would be used to build a closet


Potential master bath


We would then finish the attic and just make it into a big rec room (the apartment area will also be a family room).

We have been discussing the possibility of turning the attic into a huge master bedroom/nice master bath instead. We need to decide now, as we need to plan for plumbing.


Potential attic bedroom


Attic (that part in the background that is heavily slanted would have to be walled off because that is where the heat/air for the 2nd floor will go)

So the question is, what would you do?

BTW, we are running a few days late on our 8 month review... that will come soon (we skipped 7 months, largely due to laziness/nothing happening).

Jessica

That's a lot of plaster

March 18, 2011

With this lovely house renovation, we have a lot of not-so-lovely bills. A bill recently came from our last dumpster rental. I look at it and we were charged double. I figured it was a mistake, but Alok informed me that the limit for our dumpster was 4 tons. That's plenty, right? I mean that's 8000 pounds. We didn't come close to that with our other dumpsters.

Remember this dumpster from Snowtorious BIG?

Guess how much that sucker weighed?


Did you guess?


8.4 tons! That is 16,800 pounds. 16,800 pounds of a lovely snow plaster mixture.

Wow.

Alok would like to add that if he took 100lbs per trip, he made about 1700 trips to that dumpster.

Jessica

We're back.....

March 13, 2011

After a hiatus, we are back to working on the house (or at least Alok is). We apologize to our blog readers and promise to keep you up to date more often! We were going through the "why us" phase of house renovation and are now past that and back on track (with hopes of moving in during 2011.....)

I pulled up to the first time in about a month (literally....bad, I know) and found this ladder up against the house.



I'm pretty sure that was used to assist in the removal of the pipes from our house. Speaking of which, we pretty much have no pipes in the house. 5.5 baths and only 1 is still attached (but is attached to nothing). This appears to have been a fairly smart move, as the current pipes were rusted and some of them were barely connected (Read: sewage pipes that weren't connected... not only gross, but smelly and unsanitary).

This picture also highlights the fact that we need to do some outdoor work once it gets a bit nicer. Bye-bye peeling paint. Hello bright blue colored house.

Moving on inside, Alok has been hard at work tearing down the pipes and opening up this front hallway area. Here is this area before:


Here is the area now:





This is the hallway that used to lead to the basement and goes into the apartment area. With no more doorway and no steps above head, it is actually nice and open.

View from the apartment area back through the hallway into the foyer:


Here are more pics of this area, going into the apartment area:

view from the hall into the apartment... that area straight ahead is the butler's pantry area


The same area


Apartment area/apartment bathroom/butler's pantry (from L to R)


Apartment


Lovely wallpaper that was hidden

Here is the door that used to be in the hallway:


I'm sure we can find use for that somewhere. The goal here is to open that front area up as much as possible.

While I was taking my photo tour and coughing (bronchitis + this house is not good), Alok was up on a ladder taking down pipes:

Yes, that is Alok. Not to be confused with Marty McFly in BTTF part 1. Alok was working on taking down pipes, as seen here:

Old, rusty pipes

As I was taking this picture, I was thinking that he really needs to be careful. That thought was followed by him falling off the ladder later in the day, fortunately without the saw in his hand. No worries, he's OK.

The pipe removal has led to more demolition in several areas. Here they are:

Upstairs hall closet before:


And after:

(That's the master bathroom on the other side of the wall)

Here is the current master bath before:


And now:




The upstairs hallway bathroom has also been destroyed. Here it was before:


And now:





Let's just say there was a LOT of mold in here. Yuck.

He also demolished the little half bath in the upstairs yellow bedroom, which is actually no longer going to be a bathroom. Here it was before:


And now (it has spilled over into the yellow bedroom):








Of course, the apartment bathroom has also been further destroyed. Here it was before:


And now:




It hasn't all been destruction. Alok reinforced this area of the house that was falling down:


Here it is now, all structurally sound:






That's all for now. More to come soon, I promise this time.

Jessica