Corwin's house renovation adventure

Sorry guys, been rather busy with the baby this last month, barely had any time to work on the house. I did make the decision to remove most of the wood panels on the walls, to gain some space/light and because they're a bit crap. To enlarge the entrance to the kitchen (was too low now that I flattened the room) I removed those first and cleared the side of the staircase too, which is way better than it was. I sometimes feel all I have to do is bring back the house to its original state, removing all the layers of crap that each owner seems to have added over the years

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Also I started doing the floor tiles in the kitchen but I had messed up the floor screed a bit and I started at the high point but soon realized it was going to be higher than the intended level of the living room, so I'm not breaking the tiles I just put in to redo it all properly. Oh well, I'll learn to not skip steps next time, it happened because I didn't bother adding wood boards as guides when I was doing the floor so there was one spot that was higher than the rest.

I also should hear back from the carpenter to know his final price for redoing the roof, and I got some new electrical switches installed so the electrical system can handle multiple demanding appliances running together without breaking.

My family is visiting next week, hopefully while my older kid is busy playing with them I can focus on doing some work on the kitchen to finish the damn thing. Got my brand new dishwasher and fridge waiting to be installed and I'm still forced to wash the dishes in the bathroom sink...

So I'm wrapping up the kitchen, hopefully will be usable on Sunday evening or Monday morning. I need to hurry because the rebuilding of the roof is going to happen from the 24th on, and I need to break a whole lot of things (including a whole floor to do a mezzanine) way before we start so the carpenter can know what beams he needs and how to cut them.

So I've redone the floor correctly this time so it wasn't too high and was fairly flat, done the floor tiles and borders on that, put a new coat of special plaster over the whole room to cover small defects and isolate it a bit, and painted it yesterday. Still needs a few touch-ups on the paint job, and to lazure the wood boards on the side to be a color that matches our kitchen furniture better, and to do the joints between the floor tiles. Then I can cut up the furniture to fit, finish the water connexions and exposed plugs, and we can start using it.

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So it was a bit trickier than expected because I had to raise the kitchen counters so the washing machine would fit underneath higher than the original kitchen setup allowed, but we finally started using the kitchen today. About time too, because tomorrow we're starting the destruction and rebuilding of the roof.

It's far from perfect, a few things aren't straight, a few things are already damaged because we bought the furniture used and cheap, and I had to do what I could to adjust it to fit. I still have to finish the doorways, the shelves under the stairs (left of the doorway on the first shot), and put the planks at the feet of the furniture to hide the supports and pipes below. My wife likes it though so mission accomplished! The two extra appliances we had to buy (fridge and dishwasher) we chose to go for extra energy saving stuff (A+++) because electricity is expensive in Germany (biggest of our bills so far).

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About the roof, I had a bad surprise last week after removing the layer of concrete from the floor of the attic, that all of the beams going across the house and forming the ceilings and hold the walls together (except the main center one that holds all of those) are completely wasted. Basically, anything that was oak survived the years, anything that was pine was eaten by insects or rotted away under the concrete/plaster. So on top of redoing the roof itself, we now have to redo the floor underneath it to replace all of those transversal beams, and so that means we are also breaking all of the ceilings in the 1st floor rooms. Luckily that only affects the main house, not the extension that was built on top of it (got its own roof) so we can keep on living there while the rest of the house is carved open and rebuilt. The house is now surrounded by scaffoldings, my brother arrives this afternoon and we're starting the work tomorrow with the carpenter and his apprentice. Was supposed to last 2 weeks but with those additional beams, it'll probably be more around 3. Was supposed to cost around 20000 euros and will probably be more like 25000.

Here's the attic before and after removing the concrete:

(You can see the spot where I had to remove the chimney to pass the electrical cables down to the living room in the first shot there).

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Definitely planning on isolating the whole thing before the winter (before the end of october is the plan), both the roof itself and the floor below it that we have to redo, or we'll freeze our asses off. When I mentioned "biggest bill so far" I was talking about other places we lived at since we are in Germany, we always got money back for heating and water but always paid extra for eletricity.

The heating system uses gas, and was installed brand new in 2007 so that's cool. I don't think I would have bought if either the windows or the heating were bad, but both are ok.The old isolation works suprisingly not too bad as far as I could see, it seems to not loose too much heat at least in the rooms we did heat when it got down to 8 degrees and below outside for a couple weeks in August. Sort your weather out Germany...

We broke all of the space between the beams under the attic floor today and removed all the dust. We start replacing the beams tomorrow and breaking the two walls at both ends of the roof. Photos coming soon

Here's a photo dump of the progress of the first 2 days of work. We had one more bad news: one of the vertical beams in the corner is rotten to the core so we have to replace it and that means breaking part of the wall of the bathroom (basically the only room that we didn't want to touch too much) and since my wife and kids were holed up in that room and the one next to it, they have to move out. That doesn't raise the price much though, got a new estimation by the carpenter and we should be able to handle it. To make sure we don't get more bad news I spent part of the afternoon exposing all of the beams on the 1st floor so we could check them out, and it's all ok for the rest.

The carpenter got in touch with his old landlord and we get a small flat just across the road for 130 euro a month so that's ok. It's super old and crap and smells like the old caravan abandoned in the forest behind my grandparents' place when I was a kid, but that'll do for a week or two, and we are literally 100m away from our place if we need anything. We'll probably move there tomorrow and put the stuff in those rooms under blankets and such. It sucks to move out just when we just got the kitchen working, but we have to bite the bullet.

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You can see in that one how eaten the beams were. It's actually pretty scary to think they were holding the ceiling above us. Some break in half with just a hit from a mace.

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Been at it for 1 week and a day, and all the beams supporting the roof itself (top ceiling/floor) are replaced and the roof is gone! We covered it for the rain, and now I pray that it doesn't rain too much this week so we can proceed. We do have a few things we can do around the house if it rains outside, but not more than a day's worth. Part of the new beams for the roof have been delivered too, a crane-truck will come soon to bring the main one up to the top.

I also decided to open up the space a bit more in the house now that I've seen the ceiling off, so while I was breaking the chimney conduct on the second floor I also broke the wall around it, so we turn a tiny room + a decent one into a massive one that has an open ceiling and an office above. Kind of a loft in the end. That allows us to get rid of the shitty doorway that was entering the tiny room, which was at the top of the stairs, and had an extra step, which made it dangerous for a kid (hit your foot on the step, and you fall into the stairs). We'll also move the existing doorway into the main room a bit back into the corridor so the stairs up to the office space under the roof is part of the room and not out of it, so we don't need a door for it either.

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