The New Room Part 2

The work on the new room has progressed for two more days. Wednesday is not going to be a working day for the guys coming over to work on it. The main guy is being paid a silly amount of money by someone for him to come and install something. Since the guy is our friend and this is an informal hiring on our part, we thought it would probably be good for him to take the day off from our place to do this other job.

I am hoping our new bathroom door comes in tomorrow and we can work on that. It is supposed to be here by Thursday but I am still hoping it will get here a day early. If it doesn't, we can pull some siding from inside the room. The new bathroom door will replace the lack of door we have on the bathroom; we have a curtain. The curtain is better than no door which is the way the bathroom is actually built. I ordered an accordion door for it. It is a large span to cover, 54 inches, and the door is 48 inches fully spread open (or would that be closed?). I could have ordered two doors and had then join in the middle but thought it would work better, and a lot less expensive, to block one side of the doorway with a 1 x 12 plank and hang the door from it. That gives us a few inches of play for the door so it isn't stretched to its limit. I need to stain the plank to match the rest.

Anyway, here are some more pics of the new room.

Three walls are up.

A view of the new and old back door.

Rafters are up, end of day three.

Day four and the sheeting is going up.

From inside facing the back.

Inside facing front.

Last Day four pic. Some roofing sheets have been put up.

It is going to be sweet to have this new room.

The Next Blog/The New Room

8/5/2014,

The Next Blog

I was sending these blogs to my dad as letters but he died on July 24th so I obviously will not be doing that anymore. He was a good guy; I do, and will continue to, miss him.

10/19/2014

The New Room

I included the failed attempt I made at a blog after my dad died. It didn't get far. And then other things came up, such as my just turned 15 year old running away. We are still not through that mess but that is not what I want to write about right now, I want to write about my new room. I include the little blurb about my dad because it seemed fitting.

My dad left my siblings and I some life insurance money. One of the things I am doing with that money is home improvement. The first step in this is a new room on the back/side of the house just off the kitchen. This room is 12 x 14 outside dimensions. It will hold the washer and dryer and hot water heater, all of which is on the other side of the house in a small utility room that isn't well insulated or easy to move around in. The hot water will no longer take forever to get to the kitchen and we will not have to worry as much about it freezing up in the winter. The room will also hold our upright deep freeze and possibly our chest freezer but I am not sure about that at the moment. I will have room for all the odd kitchen stuff I have and don't use every day or every week but do not want to get rid of, like my canners, food dehydrator, extra large stock pots, empty canning jars even, all sorts of stuff; I'll even have a place to put the vacuum cleaner.

Wow, a little off topic here, I just looked at the TV and saw the nighttime skyline of Denver because of the Bronco game -- I am sure glad I don't live there anymore.

The room will be open to the house, via the kitchen door and the window over the sink during the winter so it can stay warm. But we will close the door and window in the summer so we don't have to cool it. The room will have good insulation (better than the rest of the house has) and will have good summer ventilation (which this house also lacks in general) to keep it cooler without making the AC do it. I figure I will be doing some summer cooking out there too.

Getting this room done and set up will allow us to finish the kitchen floor a lot easier than we had been looking at. We need to pull the last of the carpet up, which is only along part of two walls and under stuff, like the refrigerator. Then pull up the layer of old tiles followed by the layer of even older tiles until we are at the subfloor. We are to the subfloor in about half of the kitchen, another part is down to just one layer of tile. Unfortunately, we started this a couple years ago but Ron can't get down to scrape the tile because of his back and I was doing it until it put me into so much pain I just quit. We have had bare subfloor in part of the kitchen for quite some time. But my hernia has been fixed and I think I can scrape again, especially if I can actually get to the floor without having to move a bunch of stuff every few feet. 

Probably next spring we will start on the other part of the home improvement, a big part. We will tear down the den and old utility room, the den being a carport that has tin walls and a wooden door, enough to keep the weather off you when taking a cigarette, and the small utility room that is at the back of the den is barely more substantial. Anyway, that will be torn off and we will use the cement slab for the foundation of a two story add-on of approx. 12 x 20. That we are going to do that is pretty solid but what we are doing with the add-on is still up in the air. Two large rooms or four medium rooms or one large and two medium, two down, one up, or two up and one down, what exactly the rooms will be -- still a bit fuzzy there.

I failed to take a real "before" picture but I did get a couple real early ones. You can see the frame of the old awning we had over the back step; it did have brown tin on top of it.

The floor level is being set here. The freezer is still on the step.

It looks a bit small with the awning frame. This was day one.

Here is day two.

Notice no awning frame and the freezer is gone.

The window to the left of the door, and the door, will go into the room. The other window is on the outside of the room.

You can see that better in this last picture. There will be a new back door facing the actual back of the house whereas this door is on the side.

Well, that is the end of day two.

I'll try to keep you updated.