A Lot of Work, A Lot of Laughs

To date we have been officially working on the house for 31 weeks or 217 days or 5208 hours or 312,480 minutes. During this time there have been many long days, hard days, and boring days. But there have also been many days that we have accomplished so much, or learned new skills, or had a lot of fun.

The pictures below are some candids during the process so far.

Mudding and Taping and then Mudding and Taping AGAIN!

We made a decision to have an outside contrator come into the house to tape & mud the drywall. Markus searched around a little bit, and ended up making contact with a guy who dad had used when he was renovating his flip house. This guy (who we will call Danny) is young, but eager and did a fairly good job for dad. There were a few instances were he could have been a bit more "professional" with dad, but all in all, we thought it would be oaky to have him work for us again.

Danny started out fine, as he gave us a really great quote and made room for us in his schedule very fast. However, the honeymoon operiod was short and Danny...well became a pain in the ass. Danny first needed some cash in advance as he needed to take care of some personal things..no probelm. then danny needed a little more cash...we were genrrous. Then Danny called us one Saturday night (when we happened to be at the spa) looking for some more money because he needed to go drinking with his brother....Then Danny had sporadic attendance at the house. Then Danny was sooooooo close to finishing, but then he went on a bender and we didn''t hear from him for a few days. Then Danny came in late on a Sunday to finish as he needed to get back home on the Monday. We left him, as we had also entrusted him with the keys to our house....and when we came back the next day there were more than a few spots NOT DONE and our prized drywalling posession a "Rotozip"was gone. Since then Markus has literally harrassed him by phone and email and we have never heard from Danny again.

The end result was that we had to finish sanding the spots he left undone and then had to go back over all the screw holes and remud as they were poorly done and we even remudded some of the larger seams.

Lesson learned on our opart for not being so damn trustinbg of people/contrators. We could have been much more strict with him, but thought that the guy needed a break and that we could trust him to do the job completely.

Lesson learned on Danny's part: Keep a low profile in Regina because I am still not over losing my Rotozip!!!!

Drywalling #2

There is really not much to say about the drywalling process as it is not too exciting and just alot of work. It took us just over a month to finish drywalling the entire house and we really didn't encounter too many problems.

The pictures below are of the house at various stages in the drywalling process.

Drywalling

To say we had a lot of drywalling to do would be a slight understatement. You don't really realize how many walls you have and what the square footage is until you have to put up drywall.

The drywalling process started for us by making a large order to Kenroc building supplies. Talking with a neighbour of dads we were persuaded to have Kenroc deliver the drywall and use a boom to lift up the drywall from the truck and put it through our second story window, so the guys would not have to carry it up the stairs. Absolutely ridiculous. The boom operator was a little sketchy and maybe not the sharpest tool in the box and dismantling a 1913 window so drywall could be put through it was also not the easiest task (and a huge pain in the ass to put back together). When it was all said and done we had 180 sheets of drywall in our house.

The pictures below are of the drywall being delivered. The last picture I think is quite artistic!

So Its Been Awhile.....

So its been awhile since I last posted.....and by awhile I mean at least two months! I apologize, but Markus and I have been struggling to find a balance in our lives between the house renovations, responsibilities at work and just relaxing/enjoying life. I can officially say that the "novelty" of renovating has long worn away, and we are in a critical mode where we need to make progress when we come to work, as we can't live away from our house much longer!

We both knew this was going to be a crazy undertaking, but I don't think we could foresee what it exactly would be and feel like. It has been very weird going back to work and not living at our house. Getting ready everyday in someone else s house, having supper at someone else's house and then going to bed on a blow up mattress every night! We have actually started to really miss our house, that we both when ever we can stop by during the week to get the mail and be in the house, last night we even rented a movie and watched it upstairs "just like old times" as we wanted to be in our space again.

Basically we have decided that we will move back to the house over our Christmas vacation in December, whether the house is done or not (and it won't be) - this way we have enough time to unpack things that we can and to clean properly. Then we will just continue to live here and continue to work at the house bit by bit and put it all back together! We will also be having another house warming party once the house is back to normal, so clear your schedules for sometime in the spring of 2012!

Our Biggest Splurge

Our biggest renovation splurge to date, has definitely been the purchase of two gas fireplaces. The original fireplaces, although beautiful, were not practical or in decent enough shape to use. The last three years we have lived here we have never had a fire as we worried about the condition of the fireboxes and the chimney, not to mention the fact that we hadn't had it cleaned yet.

When the demolition started and we were discussing the possible upgrades we could make, one of them was to get two gas fireplaces, one for the living room and one for our bedroom. Although at first I thought I would want to keep the fireplaces as they were, as there is something to be said about a wood fire on a cold day, the practicality of it just was not there. Wood fires require you to be there and maintain them, whereas a gas fireplace can be turned on and off with the simple click of a button. In addition the heat is instant and they are easy to manage. After a few discussion we decided to get Wheatland Fireplaces http://www.wheatlandfireplace.com in and provide us with a quote. Before receiving the quote Markus had a sit down chat with me and let me know gently that if the quote was near or over $10,000 we would have to really reconsider this decision as we have a limited budget....In the end we got the fireplaces!!!

A few things had to happen before the fireplaces could get installed. First we had to take out the old fireplaces, close up the hole and build a frame for the new fireplaces to sit on. We built each fireplace on a little hearth and built the wall out from the original wall just a bit. Then we had to have two holes cored out of the brick so that the fireplaces could be vented - This was really cool to see as they use a huge drill and you could watch the brick get hotter and hotter from the outside as they got closer and closer to drilling through. Finally, the fireplaces were installed and they look awesome! the final touches of course will come with tiling around each of the fireplace's, but even right now they look pretty cool!

Information about Spray Foam

I just wanted to do a separate post about the spray foam itself. Here is the link to the company we used:

http://www.spraywest.com/

The Spray Foam that was installed in our house is what they call "Urethane Closed Cell Spray Foam Insulation".

To be specific here is some information on the foam that is in our house:

POLARFOAM PF-7300-O SOYA an environmentally friendly high performance, closed cell rigid polyurethane foam used for insulation, is spray-applied exclusively by certified applicators in accordance with the standards CAN/ULC S705.2

POLARFOAM PF-7300-O SOYA is fully self-adhered to the substrate which makes your building much stronger and much stiffer. There is no air space between the insulation material and the substrate, no joints, no glue, no mechanical fasteners and no convection air movement.

Green BENEFITS Include:

• Made from Recycled Plastics
• Made from Vegetable oil
• Zero Ozone Depletion Substance
• Ecological Insulation

The All-in-One Wall System Concept puts insulation, air and vapour barrier into one product.

Insulation : Independent laboratory tests confirm the on site long term thermal performance of POLARFOAM PF-7300-0 SOYA spray foam insulation in the building envelope system increases thermal performance of the building envelope. The long term minimum insulating value is R-6/1 " RSI 1.05/25mm.

Air Barrier: Research shows that 40% of building heat loss can be attributed to air leakage conducted through the building envelope. Tests for air leakage conducted by an independent laboratory recognized by the CCMC show that POLARFOAM PF-7300-0 SOYA exceeds 500 times the requirements of the NBC as an air barrier material.

These results confirm that POLARFOAM PF-7300-0 SOYA is one of the highest performance air barrier materials on the market and this feature is the key element in an air barrier system that meets the objectives of the NBC

By creating a sealed air barrier and eliminating air filtration POLARFOAM PF-7300-0 SOYA does not allow wall condensation, that can often result in mold, mildew and wall degradation.

Vapour Barrier: Water vapour permeance is the speed to which water goes through a homogeneous material. The National Building Code, stipulates that a vapour barrier must have a water vapour permeance less than 1.05 PERM (60 ng/Pa*s*m2)

* 75 mm of POLARFOAM PF-7300-0 SOYA spray applied on an exterior gypsum board = 44 ng / Pa*s*m2 (0.77 PERM)

* 75 mm of POLARFOAM PF-7300-0 SOYA spray applied on concrete blocks = 22 ng / Pa*s*m2 (0.38 PERM)