Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Adventures in budget renovations- doors and more (part 1)

Way back in January I showed you the unsightly side of our kitchen in this post. Back then our washer, dryer and behemoth hot water heater were all still looming large in my small kitchen. But all that was okay by me because they were blocking the door that lead to a 10 foot drop to the ground below. The door had been blocked off and useless since the previous owners of our home tore down the rotting deck it once opened on to. 
looking a little cramped, right?

yup, that's a door back there!


Rebuilding the deck was on the top of our list since it is not only a mega hazard and an eye sore, but would keep a bank from financing our home when we sell it. Before we could even think about building the deck we had to relocate the washer and dryer to our garage. This meant running all new plumbing out to the garage, thank goodness all our plumbing is under our home and not run through the walls! While the garage may not be the most glamorous place to do laundry, it was the only real option in our tiny 1200 sf. home.

After those monsters were removed we installed our *new* fancy on demand hot water heater. You may remember that in January's post I spoke about how we had gotten a "gently used" on demand hot water heater...well long story short we got it installed and that darn "gently used" water heater was a lemon. After shelling out several hundreds of dollars more for a brand spanking new one I made the hubby swear to not make anymore large purchases off craigslist! After I finally quit fuming over our water heater folly it was time to get to work connecting the door to nowhere to the rest of our beautiful redwood deck.
Here is the outside of the soon-to-be door to somewhere
(don't worry this doug fir lumber was slathered with that nasty green weather proofing/bug proofing stuff before we added the decking)

all built by this handsome man!

here is a messy but finished view from the old deck to the new, if you look between the grey storage box and the blue ice chest (classy, right?) you can see where the darker, older stained wood stops and the lighter newer wood begins. 

we actually only had to add about 12 feet of deck to tie it into the existing deck but since it is quite a ways up in the air it took several summer afternoons and weekends to get it all finished. Jess has, of course, done 97% of the work on this project, leaving me just the painting and sanding and such. Having to learn as we go has been hard but it is really amazing to see how far our construction skills have come since we started! 

Tomorrow I'll be back with the second part of this huge project. This week has been crazy busy and the never ending construction in our kitchen has of course left our house upside down! Currently the entire contents of our pantry cabinets are on our kitchen table, and our kitchen counters are covered with  drills, levels, screws and plaster dust! We are almost there, and someday soon I'll be able to say that I have a FINISHED kitchen!



& Patience!

1 comment:

  1. I appreciate your sharing these. I did wonder how the actual scenes looked like. 

    ReplyDelete

A kind word always brightens my day!

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