Renovation Realities

Well this spring break was not spent relaxing on the warm California beaches but rather was spent doing grueling grunt work in order to make our house feel brand new. That's right, we renovated! This house was built in the 1770's and when we bought it, it still had the original carpet through out it. Three years we saved until we could pull up the shaggy green, blue, gold, orange and brown carpet. Every time my little baby's started learning how to crawl, I would cringe at what nastiness they might be crawling over. No offence to the previous owners, you could be the cleanest people but after 40 years, there's no way you can say this carpet was clean.  It was hard and stressful with nights spent working till 2 o'clock in the morning and then getting up at sunrise to do it all over again, but in the end, the result is pure cleanliness and heaven! (Pictures soon to come of the results. This post is full of the destruction.)

The blue room with weird orange sponge padding. 

Jared's brother, Dusty, came and helped a ton. He was chisling out our foe brick linoleum by our garage door in preparation for prettier wood flooring.

This is the annoying doorway and pillar in the middle of our family room.  It completely breaks up the room and makes it look smaller that it is.

Here is the beam taken down to just the post holding up the weight baring beam and Jared undoing the baseboard heater so we can finish pulling up the grossest of all the carpets in our house.

Here is Jared and James Evans, one of the greatest and kindest guys we will ever know, building the fake wall so that we can pull down the beam with out collapsing our house on us.

We had to get a bunch of guys to come help us carry the beam because it weighed over 400 lbs. Jared said he would have taken it down himself, done a few curls, and perhaps a squat or two but then thought it would be good to let some guys from the ward have an opportunity to serve. I was so scared our house would fall on us but James assured me that the fake wall would do it's job.

Thanks to James and Mike Corbett, Kevin, Josh, and Zack Leal, Fred Bunce, Royce Murdoch, Byron and Dusty Heath, and especially again to James Evans and his wonderful wife, Emily, for letting us have him all week long!

 The guys hamming it up for the camera on how heavy the beam was. I think it is funny that Josh, the third guy in, is showing off his guns for the camera.

We bought a glue lam beam to put in place that would suspend across the entire family room but when we got it, it's dimensions were 5 1/8th by 13 inches by 18 feet.  Jared quickly realized that with a 7 foot ceiling, that means he would hit his face square in the middle of the beam whenever he ventured downstairs. Not wanting to live in a hobbit house and have to visit the emergency room multiple times a year, we nixed that idea. Instead we bought four more feet of and I-beam and had our friend, Kent Gardner, weld it onto the existing I-beam that was already in our home.

Most of the time we had the kids locked up in the upstairs level. (Before you call social services, they had the whole level to play on. They weren't literally locked up, just told to stay upstairs and not to come downstairs at all. For their safety!!) However, we did let them come down and so some cheap child labor where they pulled up chunks of glue down padding.

 After they worked on the glue down padding, our good friend, Shawn, took and scraper and worked his tale off getting the rest of the big chunks off. It was a nasty job but Shawn prevailed in the end!

So many people helped us finish the jobs in our house before the carpet installers came and for that we are in your debt. Thank you thank you!

We just have to finish up some trim work and then you can see the final results. Stay tuned!