A mess!

Life's not easy living in a home during a major remodel. In fact there are days I don't want to get out of bed because of the mess. And so I take one day at a time...... 

All of my kids are displaced right now. We've had to move both boys into the front room. The above and below pictures is what you see when you walk in my front door. A freakn' crazy mess!!!

I don't have that wall and fireplace anymore buy I've got a wall of stuff! Stuff that can't go outside. Stuff that we use every time we work on the house! Stuff that we don't know where to put it so it stays where it's at. Like the 4 new exterior doors leaning up against the wall and the windows for the garage. It's hard. It's stressful. It's rough. I cringe when someone comes to my door. I don't want them to see my house like this. So un-orderly! We've been without a working washer and dryer for  14 days now. My mom graciously took all my laundry about day 5 and did it all for me. Bless her heart. It was so appreciated! About day 11 I used my neighbors washer and dryer while she was out of town and got it all done. I've got another few days and then I'll probably have to do it again at my mom's once more and then hopefully we'll be ready to get them working again. Cross my fingers!!

Every Monday the kids go off to school and I "try" to organize it. Put all the plumbing parts and pieces and tools in the same spot. Put all the drills and other hand tools in one spot. I can usually see a little of my front room floor. Then Kory gets home and most likely stuff is pulled our once again and used through out the week. Come Saturday night it looks pretty bad again. We come in after dark completely tired and exhausted. We go to church Sunday morning and come home and sit, play games with the kids or turn on a movie. We have no desire to do anything. Monday morning comes, everyone leaves and I start all over again. Trying to make my front room look somewhat orderly even though it may only last a few hours. I try.....

The little girls also lost their room. So we moved their beds into Madelyn's room. During the day Kylie's bed is pushed under Emily's giving them some room to move around. At night the bed comes 

out and it's wall to wall of beds. But they are surviving too! Madelyn loves having a clean room so she stays on them to pick up after themselves. We've all shed a few tears when it sometimes gets a little too much. 

Right before Christmas Day we got the call that our 5 newly ordered windows had come in. Not knowing where to put them that would be "safe". They ended up behind my couch in my front room. 

The day after Christmas we packed up the bedrooms and moved all of their stuff to my family room. Behind the back door we've got our closet for both boys and Emily.  The dresser you see is shared by both boys.  The new windows are still behind the couch. Kylie's clothes is kept folded in a dresser (in my kitchen) so she can reach her own clothes. 

Across the room in the other corner, by our tv we've got their toys. 

The kids are excited about their new "playroom". 

The wall behind the hanging clothes is where we keep the last dresser. This dresser is shared by both Emily and Kylie. It's also where we keep our laundry baskets since the tops of the washer and dryer have become a shelf for hand held tools. So much fun!!

Sometimes I wonder why we even bother to try cleaning. Saturday morning I had the kids clean the their new toy room, the girls room and both bathrooms. By the end of the night I wasn't sure why we had even bothered with the bathrooms. When we lifted the roof insulation, dirt and just yucky stuff fell onto our nice clean bathrooms making them look not so clean anymore. 

I keep telling myself at least when we go to clean this up we know it's just dirt. It's not dried pee and soap and dirt from us. It's not dried bodily fluids that's been there for who knows how long. It's just dirt from the attic! Right??? It at least helps me if I tell myself that over and over and over again. 

Our hallway to the girls room is still a little sketchy!

The black pipe you see is the new plumbing line. It is under the newly poured cement. When we get ready to do our new bathroom this hose is what we will use for the water line. The cardboard on the Left is covering the doorway that use to lead into the boys room. The white melamine wood we used to cover the entryway into the girls room also seen on the left.  We sealed the edges trying to keep the warm air in and the cold air out. It is now January after all. There is no more wood floor down the hallways just cold cement. 

Our pantry is no longer clean and bright but also covered in dust. This drives me crazy. I know everything is sealed in their cans or boxes but I just don't like seeing the dirt and dust by my food.

Crazy I know.... 

So as I said earlier, life is hard, life is a bit stressful and it's rough right now. But we really are trying to make the most of it. We are doing o.k. We will get through this! I will get through this. This too shall pass........  

Lifting the Roof

Wow, these past few weeks are just flying by. We have been working on our house almost every single day except Sunday's for weeks now.  The next big project was to lift our roof. To get ready to do that we needed to make sure everything was loose from the interior walls and nothing would really hold us up. On Saturday Dec 6th Kory and Hunter finished taking down the old swamp cooler. 

Then they had remove the boards that were covering the attic. They were looking for all the the J bolts they used to tie the trusses down to the top of the brick walls.

Same thing on the other side of the house. 

Then Kory cut the top of the roof away from each other so it would allow the roof to lift. The part of the roof Kory is standing on we will not be lifting. Someone years ago thought it was a great idea to cut some trusses in that part of the attic to turn it into a play room. Not the best idea!! Being we need to replace the trusses on this part of the house we will be removing the entire roof, making it 2 stories and ordering new trusses. The part of the house we are lifting the roof the trusses are in good shape so no need to replace. So for now we are just trying to lift the other side of the roof to 9ft.  

Months ago Kory bought 3 heavy duty jacks to help us lift the roof.  The first jack was inside the house right by my front door.  Then outside we had a jack in front of Cody (orange jacket) and another jack in the middle where Ben (Blue jacket) is walking towards. 

Together these 3 guys using the jack lifted the roof inch by inch.  

It was hard to see the movement outside but from the inside of the house it was quite obvious. 

It slowly got bigger and bigger. We finally hit 9 foot! Woo Hoo!

We didn't have enough jacks to lift the other side of the roof at the same time. Kory also wanted to make sure that the roof was stable on one side while lifting the other. To be frank we didn't know if this was really going to work. Kory has spent hours researching the safest and easiest way to lift a roof. He has spoken with many contractors and acquaintances that has had this experience. Some said it was pretty easy while others said they wouldn't do it again. Yikes! Eventually we'd like to sell this home and knew it would be easier to sell if it had 9 ft. even ceilings instead of 7'4 and down to just above 6. Our goal is to make it look as normal as possible. So we decided if it was too hard or not working we'd stop and re attach the roof and just deal with the crooked roof. 

All I can say is we had help from the other side and our prayers were answered. Not only did it work but it was relatively simple. The men that helped us thought that the reason it was so easy was because of all the before work Kory had done beforehand. There wasn't much left to stop the roof from lifting. So very thankful it worked, no one got hurt and my house is intact as we were expecting.  

The corner or my kitchen. 

My bathroom.

We've got another busy week in front of us. We've got a few more j bolts to find so we can lift the other side of the roof now. Our goal is to get it all done this week and lift it Saturday morning. We got rain most of Sunday and most of Monday now. We've got rain in the forecast through Wednesday. I guess we'll see how much we get done!

Good Bye Front Exterior Walls

The time has finally come to knock out our entire front wall! Eeeek!! But before doing so Kory wanted to insert a large beam to help hold up the roof. We will also be using the beam to lift the roof. At the moment our ceiling by the front door is only about 7 ft. 4 inches tall it goes down hill from there. The opposite side of the house the ceiling is just a little over 6ft. Crazy!! Our goal is to have 9 ft ceilings all away across the house. Crossing our fingers it works. But before we can try to lift the work we've quite a bit of work to do first. 

Anyways to insert the beams Kory knocked a few bricks out of the girls room that the beam will be going through.  

He then had to knock a whole out in all the interior walls also to allow the beam to run from one end of the house to the other.  

We had a total of 4 walls we knocked holes in. Once the holes were complete with a little help from a neighbor and the skid steer we were able to slide the beams all the way through the house. 

We actually had to put a piece of wood under the beam by the front door to allow us to be able to open the front door. Funny!

Once the beams were in it was time to start knocking out walls! 

This was the boys room. 

After the boys room was done. Kory cut the bricks into the girls room that we needed to take down. 

Wall between laundry room and girls room.

Once the girls room was done we carefully took down the laundry rooms wall. These walls we had be super, duper careful with. We have the electrical box, water lines, washer & dryer hook ups and the water heater stuff in these walls. It took us a full day just working this one room. 

But finally it was complete! 

Then came the fun part....Not!!!

The foundation had sagged, lots in the front of the house and the cement was all cracked. The floor was not at the same level but off up to 2 inches depending on where you were at. To fix this, Kory pulled out the wet cement saw and cut away. The kids and I then came behind him with the sledge hammer to crack it into carrying sized pieces. We then threw it into the skid steer bucket where Kory would then empty it into the back of the trailer. We lost count of how many times he had to empty the skid steer scoop or the trailer.  We ended up taking out more than what we originally had thought. But we figured we might as well do it right while the house was torn apart. We do NOT want to ever have to do this again!! Almost the entire front part of my house was missing!

Before we could pour concrete we had to dig up that indoor trench for the future water line. Cody Goodfellow an awesome friend brought his backhoe over and dug the line from the house to the city hook up for us. Saving us lots of shovel time. Kory's brother Kale from Nebraska was visiting for the holidays and came out to help too. 

We had a little accident when the back hoe hit the existing sewer line. Oops. No bathroom breaks or water usage until Kory could fix it. Of course the sewer line was not where it should have been like everything else in this house. 

Oh my goodness my house!!

After a day or two of laying re-bar and setting the cement forms the big day finally arrived. It was time to pour our new floors.  

The cement truck came and immediately got caught up in our over grown tree. 

Oops! 

A little chain saw action and the truck was freed. 

Thank goodness Bro. Bradshaw (owes his own concrete business) was here helping us. We had a bit of a blow out in the middle and he was able to help us rescue our  big project. 

Brayden sure loves to help us with these projects.  

With the blowout we had it became a blessing in disguise that we ran out of concrete to finish the whole job. So why did we have the blow out??? Let me tell you! Many, many years ago the previous owner noticed that his house was shifting and his foundation was I guess failing. So he did a few things trying to repair it or stop it from continuing to happen but it didn't work. So out of frustration he dug a huge hole right in front of the house (where the problem was) and dumped supposedly 4 yards of concrete. 4 yards just happens to be about the same amount of concrete we used this day for filling in the existing cement block footings, 2 bedrooms and a laundry room. That is a ton of concrete. So when we were forming the rooms we had a hard time with the stakes because just 6 inches below the dirt we kept hitting where this 4 yards of concrete was dumped. Not knowing exactly what to do Kory just put more stakes in closer together than what he would have normally done. Well it didn't work. The forms didn't stay straight and with the weight of this new fresh wet concrete it bulged the boards out about 4 inches. Yikes! For the life of us we could not get any stakes to work so in the end Kory pushed the bucket of the skid steer right up against the form to hold it in place.  It's not perfect but it's not out 4 inches either. 

A few days later cement truck #2 came back to let us finish the job. We were able to pour our new front porch walkway and also the trenches we had inside of the house. 

How did we get the cement in the house? We used our wheel barrel of course. We let the cement truck fill her up and we pushed her through the house. 

Just follow the trail she left. 

I was the most excited for this part right here. This is my bedroom. For months now I have been living with a dang 6 inch trench running through my room into the bathroom/closet. It's tripped me, I've fallen into it. I've scraped my toes on it. I hate stepping in dirt with no shoes inside my bedroom so trying to avoid it I've overstepped and ran into the dang wall to many times to count. Not to mention the piles of dirt I still have in it. It's been miserable. I've hated it!  And I am so, so  happy that most of it is finally gone! 

Our front porch. Don't mind my husbands flaying arms. Not sure what he was doing and he had no idea I was taking a picture. 

I think this was the last time we will need a cement truck. Woo Hoo!

Oh my goodness what a week it's been. We had wonderful Christmas Day! But the next morning on Dec 26th we packed up all the rooms and moved everyone out including the laundry room. It then took us several days to knock out the walls and several more days to get ready for our new concrete. Our final cement truck came on Tuesday Jan 5th. It took us 10 days to do all this. But now it's done. Next step is to raise the roof!