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)

The Joys of Insulation

No one can deny that the biggest and probably the most exciting thing we are doing to the house is adding insulation. Because of the time period our house was built in, insulation I do believe was not even invented yet....In fact I know this because there was nothing behind the plaster when we took it off. Although I would like to say that previous owner were very resourceful and used newspapers, old rags and horse hair (this last one will be honored in its own post).

So, as you can imagine no insulation caused a few minor problems considering we experience 3o below winters. The last year especially was getting ridiculous as many areas of the plaster in the living room had cracked and were letting in huge drafts. Markus used caulking in many of these areas in an attempt to fend off the cold air. In addition to a drafty house our bills were also ridiculous. We were paying $260 equalized...$260 in the summer? And we were the type of people to only put on the heat late into the fall and turn it off as soon as it got bearable again outside.

The biggest decision we had to make was whether to use bat insulation or use spray foam. Using bat insulation is a cheaper option, however, after doing some research we decided to use spray foam insulation instead. There are a few reason why we choose spray foam:

1) Spray foam insulation guaranteed us that all the little cracks and holes in the outside brick would be covered and and possibly filled, thus not allowing air movement and also adding to the stability of our home

2) The installation of spray foam was a maximum of 4 days. Installing bats/vapour barrier on our own would have taken a HUGE amount of time and work

We originally had made contact and a tentative agreement with the most popular sprayfoam company SprayJones. In our original agreement with one of the contractors, we had agreed to let them know 3 weeks in advance to when we would be ready. So as we progressed through the building of the outside walls, Markus kept in contact with the company letting them know we were 3 weeks away...2 weeks away etc. Then our contact for the company went on holidays and we were left with the manager. When Markus went to talk to him again, he told Markus that the earliest we could get insulation was 5 weeks away - this was ridiculous as we had already been in contact with the company and because we are on a time frame before going back to work. Later that day when I arrived at the house Markus told me the news and I immediately phoned 3 other companies in Regina. The stars aligned and Pierre from Spray West in Regina called back and was at our house that night to look it over and give us a quote. It was one of those situations that although we were freaked out initially, it was meant to happen as Pierre was extremely friendly and gave us a great quote.

So that is what we have been up to the last week. Spray West came into the house July 27th and worked until the 30th. They did an amazing job with the prep,spraying and clean up, and Markus and I are really pumped about the foam insulation. It looks sooooo cool in the walls right now, and has completely sealed everything between the frames we made. The foam itself is solid and has really added to the structure of the house. Everything we made is so tight and hard right now, nothing is going to budge! Even though things aren't done, you can feel a difference already in the heat factor of the house ,as well as, the sound. It is going to be amazing to feel the difference in the house when everything is done, and to watch our bills drop!

New Electricity!

Another highlight of completely ripping the house apart was replacing the old "knob & tube" electricity that still existed in the house. When we redid the third floor we changed the wiring, and when the kitchen was done it too had new wiring installed. That left the basement (to a certain extent) and the main and second floor. Living with "old" wiring is not cool at all - for example the amount of "3 pronged plugs" in the house was at best minimal. For the last 3 1/2 years Markus ran a nice orange extension plug from the computer room to the hallway, in order to plug in his computer and other devices. The amount of power bars in the house was ridiculous, and the constant fear in the back of your head about the knob and tube suddenly deciding to short was not cool. So, new wiring in the remainder of the house was basically a must in this renovation and was the absolute best time to do it since the walls were completely exposed.

The best thing about new wiring is that we were able to add lights to places like the closets, and rearrange the lighting in rooms to fit our needs better. We have added many two-way and three-way switches which will be great!

Dad found a great electrician by the name of Tim Palmer, and he basically wired the whole house in 2 1/2 days. It was amazing how he and his co-worker threaded the wiring all around the house and had everything ready to go in no time. Although Tim's sarcasm was a bit much to handle the last day he was there as Markus asked him when he would return to hook everything to the box and he replied "6 months...you should probably be done drywalling by then"...

A Building We Will Go

After the demolition was done the next step to this project was to build new frames for all of the outside walls. This was due to the fact that the lath was attached to the outside brick wall by tiny little nails in a tiny strip of wood placed between the brick. Once everything had come down, there was nothing there for us to hang drywall on.

The first decision we had to make was how we were actually going to build these walls. We debated two options:
1. build 2x4 walls and in the end have deeper window wells and adjust accordingly after
2. rip the 2x4's and build the walls to fit the existing windows

we went with option number one as it seemed the most logical to us. We figured that it would be less work in the end to adjust the depth of the windows, than it would be to try and make walls fit to the windows.

And so it began....and now July 20th...we are almost done. We have been working on building walls for about 4 weeks straight now and have finally just about finished all the framing we need to do. For the most part we have not encountered too many problems as we have been framing. The majority of the walls are built with 2x4's, and in some sections because of space we have had to make 2-3 separate frames to do a wall. The most difficult area we anticipated was the west outside wall that runs from the front of the house to the basement, and under the stairs. Once we had ripped everything down, the space under the stairs varied but for the most part we only had 2 inches to work with. This posed a problem as we had been building all other walls using a 3 1/2 spacing. The other issue with this wall was that it was so big. Because it runs the length of the house and all the way up the stairs, we needed to build at least 2 large and separate frames to cover the wall at its largest point. After much deliberation we decided to try and build the wall on the flat and tie into the stairs where we could to stabilize the frame. To our surprise this worked very well and went incredibly fast compared to many other walls we built. The following is a selection of pictures that shows the various frames we have built around the house. The last few pictures I will post will be of the wall built on the flat!

How Can Something so Small be so Crappy?

One of the worst rooms to take apart ended up being our small bathroom. This is one of the rooms we had left to last, and one weekend Markus and I tackled it. This room was mostly covered with the industrial diamond shaped wire I described before, and plaster. The upper part of the wall all away around the room and the ceiling were done in this manner, which meant that we had to rip and struggled with the crap for quite awhile. After we had removed the majority of this wire, we realized the bottom portion of the walls had been covered with plaster and cement directly. We attempted to chip this off entirely until we realized that the plaster/cement would not come off easily and in most cases would take the brick behind with it. This is when Markus decided that we could only chip off the first layer (approximately 2 inches) and would have to leave the rest on the wall. Markus being the good guy he is, sat for a few hours and chipped away at this crap with a chisel and hammer.

The next surprise we found in this little bathroom was when we went to remove the tile on the floor. Again we realized that chipping away the tile by itself was a ridiculous idea as it came out piece by piece. After we put a sledge hammer to a part of the floor and investigated further, we found that somebody had poured at least 4 inches on concrete to make the bathroom floor before putting tile on. Our only assumption was that someone was attempting to make a bomb shelter, or assumed that there would be a lot of water spilling on the floor, because otherwise there really is no rational explanation. Again, Markus took on the job of chipping out the 4 inches of concrete over a series of days, and finally the bathroom was clear.