A Crack in the Wall

We just spent a lot of money on our house.  A lot of money for a really boring and never going to be seen project.

We had our house piered.

We had some pretty major cracks in our basement wall.

We had main house support beams that were not bearing on the wall anymore.

Our house had settled a few inches, which was causing the cracks in the basement wall, cracks upstairs in our drywall, cracks in our exterior brick…etc.  We had this problem a few years ago.  We tried some other solutions to see if we could get the house to come back up on it’s own without having to spend the money to pier it.  The house did come back up, but then it went back down again.  So we took the plunge and hired out a company to come and fix our problems.

They are not exciting pictures, it was not an exciting job.  But it’s all done now and we are hopeful that it fixes our problems.

In case you are curious, we had 9 piers added to our house along two different walls.  Our Southeast corner was the worst, had dropped the most, and it got jacked up 1 1/4”.  We also had granular fill added on the outside of the full basement wall and a sump pump installed so that the wall will not continue to move inward and should hopefully never have any leaking problems.  And now buried under the house are all my dreams of getting a kitchen remodel in the next 5 years.

As for what we have been doing around the house lately.  We are still working on the basement, trying to get the mudroom and stairs finished up.

Then we move on to work on Bella’s room, which was the reason we bought the house in the first place.

Weekend spent in the basement

Jesse and I took a couple of days off of work to get some projects done around the house.  Specifically the basement.

After spending almost 4 days in the basement, it doesn’t look like much work got done, but I assure you progress is happening.

I’ll provide you with some pictures, but basement pictures are extremely boring, look at your own risk.

At the start of our weekend.

After 4 days of work, which mainly consisted of changing around electrical lighting and outlets, organizing basement storage, tearing down a couple of walls, and putting up a few more walls.

It should really start looking different once we get more drywall up!

Master Bedroom Balcony

Jesse took all last week off and we had my mom around to help watch the kids.  So together we tackled the screened in porch.  BTW-it’s been a really really really long time since the two of us have worked on a project together for more than a couple of hours.  As always it can at times be quite a test of your marriage.

Anyways…let’s get to the pictures.

Here was the old balcony from the exterior with the original railings.  The original railings looked like they were made out of scrap pieces of 2x’s.

Here is the balcony now.  We completely tore out the old railings and built in new frames so we could screen it in.  We also used round metal balusters instead of wood.

Here is a shot of Jesse during the work.  It took us 3 days total to get the walls/railing installed and painted/stained, the screens installed, and outdoor carpet installed.

Our kids spent a lot of time outside below us while we worked (they had sitters/family watching them).

Bella hanging out in the shade.

Oliver getting in the pool with his clothes on and then having to be stripped down to his diaper.

Now we just need to furnish it, before we take final pictures from the inside.

The Dining Room

The dining room is complete.  It only took 21 weeks or about 5 months to finish up.

Here are all the before and after pictures.

Dining Room Progress Weeks 15 & 16

This is the week color has come into the room.

New seat covers, new drapes, and a new chandelier made for a busy weekend for myself.  Here is a sneak peak of the work in progress.  If I showed you a picture after the weekends work, it would reveal too much of the “finished” room.

Hopefully another couple of weeks and we can get the remaining furniture moved back into the room and have a functional  and completely finished dining room.

Dining Room Progress Week 14

We have finished the floor.  Alleluia!!  We even bought a new rug.

We even moved some furniture back into the room.

But we are not done yet.

Dining Room Progress Weeks 9-13

I had to do a little research to figure out what weeks we were on, as in how many weeks had gone by since we actually did anything in this room.

Week 9 we worked outside and didn’t touch the room.

Week 10 we were extremely sick all weekend and didn’t touch the room.

Week 11 we got the edge tile laid.

Week 12 we were on vacation.

Week 13 we were still on vacation, but managed to squeeze in getting the grout placed.

Yep, we were actually productive on a day we were still catching up from being gone for over a week, doing a million loads of laundry, dishes, unpacking, etc…we still managed to place grout during Oliver’s nap time.

Here is the picture of what the room looks like in it’s current state.

From afar, it really doesn’t look much different than the last picture we took of the room.

We need to install the base trim and then we can finally move our furniture back in the room.

Working Outside All Weekend Long

As I mentioned in my last post, this weekend was going to be busy, and it was going to be spent outside.

First up was our garage sale.  At the last minute we managed to go through all our stuff and get some things pulled together to sell.  We also had some bigger miscellaneous items that we didn’t need anymore and had them out too.

Oliver helped get the sign ready for the sale.

The garage sale itself was kind of a bust.  We didn’t actually have very much time to sit outside, too much else to do.  We did post the bigger things on craigslist and sold most of the stuff that way.  As far as the little things, most of them are being donated.

Next up was Jesse’s project.  He ordered soil and picked up some grass seed to try and fix our damaged yard.  The damage was from 5 different projects.  The septic tank/city sewer project, the dead pine trees being removed, the circle drive being placed, 3 big oak/maple trees being removed, and the landscaping project.

Here was a picture taken when about half of the work had been done…so half of the soil pile at the end of our yard had already been dispersed throughout.

Oliver stayed outside with dad pretty much the whole day.  He did some coloring with sidewalk chalk and then got to ride along with dad as they compacted the soil.

The little bit of money we made from the garage sale/craigslist sales went to pay two college aged kids to take down two more dead pine trees in our side yard.  You can see them at work next to the truck in the yard.

Then both kids got to accompany mom to get some yummy food from their favorite restaurant Dairy Queen.  Oliver was in high heaven as he ate a ketchup packet and then got some blizzard treat.

I was also trying to show the complete mess that was Oliver.  He was full of dirt, sidewalk chalk, and food remnants.  It was straight to the bath after this.

On Sunday Oliver again had to be outside the whole day.  He was helping pour some dirt for Dad.

And even though this was mostly an account of the weekend through Oliver’s eyes, Bella was around too.  She got to enjoy lots of outside time in the swing and on a nice long walk with mom on Sunday morning.  She also helped Mom the whole time during the garage sale by keeping her company.

By Sunday she was a tired girl and spent more of the day inside.

Declutter

It’s our neighborhood garage sale this weekend.

So on top of our normal everyday life around here, which recently has been quite a few nights of interrupted sleep.  And since I’m mentioning it, let’s go ahead and quickly visit that topic.

Have you noticed what our count is up to for days of sleep.  19.  19 days of sleep where we are not interrupted between the hours of 10pm and 5am.  Which in my book isn’t really a full nights sleep anyways, but those were my rules.

19 days out of 94.  So very tired around here.

Anyways back to the real topic of discussion.  This weekend is the garage sale.  And we definitely wanted to take the chance to declutter our house and get rid of all the things sitting around that we don’t use.  It’s especially helpful to clean out the basement, since that’s one of Jesse’s projects he has coming up.

This weekend is supposed to be beautiful out.  It should be a great weekend for a garage sale.  It’s also a great weekend to get yard stuff done.  We have had big patches of mud (no grass) in our yard since the replaced septic tank and then we installed the circle drive.  We haven’t gotten around to planting seed.  Then we removed 4 big trees, which also left huge mud holes in the yard.  We also have 2 dogs and one toddler that manage to walk/run through the mud every time they are outside.

So this weekend Jesse will be moving top soil around the yard and spreading out seed.  I expect this project to take more than the weekend we have available.

I’m just hoping to survive the weekend with all our yard projects, garage sale and then with me having to put in hours working to get a work project done by Monday morning.

Dining Room Progress Weeks 7 & 8

We officially have all the tile cut, although the outer edge tiles have not been mortared in yet.  And then the whole room will need to be grouted, trim boards cut and installed, etc, etc.  So in our world probably about another month worth of work left to do before we can even move the furniture back in the room.

In case you are curious the clothes and shoes in the center of the room are what Jesse wears when he is working in the room.  Oh that doesn’t explain it enough?  The clothes have mortar (cement dust) all over them, so they stay in the room as to not track it all over the house.

Dining Room Progress Weeks 5 & 6

It’s slow moving around these parts.  Jesse has been laying tile while Oliver naps on the weekends.  And then usually we have plans at least one of the days, so really he is only laying tile for a couple hours each weekend.

We are finally to the cut pieces, and since its going to be a lovely 30 degrees and snowing this weekend here in the KC area…we might not get anything done on the dining room.

Where is spring?