We're Moving!

Ha! Jokes on you!

You think we'd leave our place after all of the work we've put into it? All the memories? All the brush piles?

Nah.  We're just moving blogs. I somehow ran out of space over here, so will be moving everything over to a different hosting site.

Same projects, same cute baby, only bigger and better!

Follow us here:  http://michelleandgregprokott.wordpress.com/

See you soon!

Completed Stairwell, New Walls!

OKAY OKAY.  I've been awful about keeping everyone up to date on our house progress!

What can I say?  We've been really busy this summer.  Stella has a lot of requests: swinging, sliding, helping in the garden, and just enjoying the great outdoors.

So here goes nothing.  Time for some grand updates.  Let's get through the pictures with snow on the ground, shall we?

First, a reminder for all you non-believers....

Not only was our brush pile larger than yours, but now our bonfire is too. 

With scores of oak trees on our property, the brush pile seems to have renewed itself since last fall. I suppose we'll have another bonfire gathering this winter too!

But, I digress.  On to the real work.

With the location of the new stairwell, the front door is officially out of commission!

Remember our laundry room is downstairs in the main house.  Until the stairs were completed, the ladder was the only way into the basement.Thankfully Greg is speedy.

Door gone, replaced with a transom window to let in natural light. This side of the house faces the highway so we purposely put the window higher. It's set to where we can see everything but the cars going by.

Staircase: Complete!  Another job well done.

The walls were surprisingly easy to put up.  I thought we'd be talking about a month or two before the walls were up.  It was more like a few days to a week!  Before I could utter the words "Where's my walk-in closet?" the walls were up and we could walk through our new home.  And my walk-in closet.

Securing the walls is a tedious job.

Greg burning the midnight oil:  Constructing our new bathroom.

View from the garage

Standing in the new living room - the yet-to-be-completed staircase is straight ahead, followed by the bathroom and Stella's room at the end of the hall.

Across the hall from the stairwell is the entrance to the master suite as well as the main floor laundry (YAY!)

View from the master suite: Straight ahead is the walk-in closet (!!!) as well as the entrance to the master bath.

Now this is what I'm talking about!!  Can't you see it?

Next up:  How to turn a garage into our dream kitchen!

What's your job all about?

So to this point, we've seen a lot of the different things that Greg has contributed to our project (read: everything).  You may find yourself asking, "What exactly is it that YOU do during all of the hammering, drilling and measuring?

There are all sorts of things I keep myself busy with!  My biggest job, of course, is this little bundle of joy:

Really, it's a stretch to consider hanging out with the coolest baby on the block a "job." Does this look like work to you? But, she keeps us on our toes, so someone must keep her out of harms way and stimulate that little mind of hers.

There are, of course, other things that keep me busy....

Yummy drinks for my awesome husband. Guy needs a break every once and a while!

My arch-nemesis....DISHES.  Hate them.  Sadly, we haven't been successful in teaching them to do themselves.

Motivation!  One skeleton in my closet was that I was a cheerleader for one football season. I think that gives me the street cred to keep things cheery and motivated around here.  People are getting things done!

Shopping!  .......oh, come on.  Someone's gotta do it!  It was on sale, I swear!

Stairs - Coming Up!

Take one last look at the house before it REALLY starts changing.  Trust me.  You'll hardly recognize the place when we're done with it!

Sometime in January, we finalized the main layout of the house.  This allowed Greg to start a very important project:  the stairs.

If you'll recall, we used to have two sets of stairs in the house.  Bear with the pictures, it's tough to visualize if you didn't walk through the house before demolition.

Staircase 1 pre-demo

Staircase 1 post-demo

Staircase 2 pre-demo.  Nice paneling, very scenic.

Staircase 2 post-demo, post house-lifting (note: where Nola is in the 2nd picture is where Brian is standing in the first picture for reference!)

Clearly, this wasn't an optimal floor-plan for a 2400 square foot rambler. We took both sets of stairs out and are replacing them with a new, more user-friendly set.

Below, Greg is making the first cuts in the floor.  No turning back now!

There it is.  Big ol' hole in the floor. Watch your step! You can see where staircase #1 was where the wood is a little lighter.

You can still see the old layout in the sub-floors. Back in the day they used to build the walls before the floors.

Hard at work!

More on the way!

Foundations

Walls getting set for the poured-cement foundation for the entry.

 

The new garage will attach here.  We will excavate and build the new garage in due time.  For now we're focused on the living space.

Here you can see the entry point to the crawl space.  This will be accessible from the garage.  Greg is one ingenious man!

Wah Lah! Ground back-filled in.

 

Foundation is complete for the entry way!  While at it, Greg opted to tear off the remaining siding.  He'll need most of it off for the next part of the project anyways.

Goodbye, ugly peachy pinkish brownish-ness!  Now how will people find our house??

Digging Holes

Next up, excavating!

As I've said, we're turning our existing garage into our new, fabulous kitchen.  A lot of thought went into this decision, actually.  Do we work with what we have, keep a smaller square-footage and likely outgrow the space?  In this option, we'd spend significantly less, but very likely have to move in five to ten years. Otherwise, do we expand our space by converting the existing garage into our kitchen while adding on a new entry-way and garage? We would be forced to spend a lot more in this instance, but we would be guaranteed to have plenty of space for our growing family.

We opted to expand our building palette.  Sure, we'll be spending a little more, but with as much work as we've put into this space up to now, we want this to be our forever home (or at least until the nest is empty).  The investment will be worth our while in the long run, and we'll have a little more flexibility to make the space unique to our tastes, rather than be concerned about what will "sell" in 5-10 years.

Time to excavate!  Greg was able to hire the job out to a good friend and get the excavating done this fall before the frost hit.

Poring over the plans

The entry will be angled off of the corner of the existing garage, with the new garage extending off the entry.

Greg decided to excavate over four feet down not only to accommodate the frost line, but to also create crawl space below the entry way that we can use for seasonal storage.  It will be accessible from the garage.  No need to stuff Christmas decorations in a closet somewhere in the house!

 

Ah....I love progress.

Life is too short. Lift up your house!

Don't you hate it when your house sits too low?  I hate when that happens. Luckily, Greg has the skills needed to fix the problem.

When we purchased this home we were faced with an interesting problem.  The house has no duct work.  The only existing heat sources were electric baseboards and there was no air conditioning.  If we were planning to invest our time and money into a project of this magnitude, it only made sense to upgrade the existing utilities to include central heat and air.  Besides, window A/C units don't make for a nice view of our vast property.  They're rather ugly.  So, we decided to add new duct work to the home.

Enter Phase 2 of our problem: the ceilings in our basement sit at just under 8-feet.  That means, after adding in the necessary duct work, our basement ceilings would be a measly 7-feet.  Claustrophobia, anyone? 

So, what is one to do when faced with a problem such as this? Why, lift up that house, of course!

The crew had to lift the house up inch by inch. It really was a neat, albeit nerve-wracking, process to see:



About 6 inches of progress so far!



Notice the difference between the house and the garage.

View from the garage - eek!  You can see into the basement from here!



Someone must keep the crew hydrated....thanks, Nola!

Notice the new stringers in the floor go over the old staircase in the photo above.  For several weeks our house seemed to be more of a jungle gym than anything!

View from the basement to the outdoors!  So surreal....

The Day One Crew!

Day Two: More of the same!

About 15 inches of progress.  Wow!

Greg opted out of using more cinder blocks to increase the height of the house.  Rather, he built a structural wood frame of sorts. By doing it this way, we'll be able to put siding all the way down to the existing block.  It would look pretty funny if we had 4 feet of cinder block on the outside of our house.  Often, I wish I had an ounce of the creativity and ingenuity that Greg has.

All the walls have to be supported through the process.
Also you can see a section of the structural frame being built - sort of looks like a ladder.

Steve helping build the frames

Almost ready to position the framing





 

It's amazing what an extra 17 inches does to the view from our house.  Its as if we added a whole floor!

No project would be complete without some burning.  BURN IT ALL!





Project complete!

 Whew!  Got through that process unscathed.  It was a little nerve-wracking, but my confidence in Greg's abilities never wavered.  He never disappoints!