18. July 2008 by admin.

Well, all the walls are up now and the plywood is all down for the tile to be installed.  I had to make two enclosures for the water supply going up to the bathroom and the hot water pipes in the corner for the radiator upstairs.  As you can see, I’ve started some of the mudding of the drywall too.  Katie’s Dad is going to be here for a bit starting today to help with the project!  Full speed ahead

We also ordered the tile and the cabinets last weekened so any day now we should get those delivered.

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6. July 2008 by admin.

Today we finished putting up the sheetrock for the ceiling!  We used 5/8″ drywall for the ceiling.  As you can see from some of the pictures with Katie, I made a “T” brace to hold up one end of the sheetrock while I screwed it into the ceiling joists.  Once up, I used my dremel with a drywall attachment to make the circular cutouts for the preinstalled recessed lights

I almost have all of the OSB plywood down over the wood plank subfloor.  A product called “Ditra” which is a 1/8″ thick roll of flexible plastic will be applied to the plywood and then the tile over the Ditra.

Within the last week I was able to get new insulation stapled into the exterior walls.  Here is a picture link that describes what is going on with the long exterior wall of the kitchen before we put up the sheetrock (1/2″ thick) on the walls.  Hopefully the walls can get done this week.
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3. June 2008 by admin.

Once I took down all the layers of the ceiling (suspended ceiling, cardboard tile, 4 layers of strapping) it was pretty obvious that the ceiling wasn’t level or plumb. Joists were different depths and in general, the ceiling was lowest in the center. The joists had sagged a bit in the center which is fairly common in a 90 year old house. So, I bought a nice laser level on ebay (got a really good deal of course ;)). I fastened it about an inch below the lowest part of the ceiling onto a wall stud. The laser level only takes about a second to level itself and shot a laser across the room for me to work off of. I basically kept the lowest piece of strapping (the long thin boards that attach perpendicularly to the ceiling joists) where it was and based every other point off of how far down the laser was off of this board. I marked a line on my straight edge and went around the room doing this. I used either shims or 2×6’s sistered to the joists to bring the level of the ceiling down in the corners where it was quite a bit higher than the center of the room.

It took a couple days to do this as you can imagine but I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. Some of the recessed lighting is up, I’m hoping to finish that tomorrow.

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26. May 2008 by admin.

So this was my(Tom) Memorial Day.

We wanted to remove the washer spout in the kitchen and move the water pipes going up to the bathroom into the same channel as the sewer pipe. The pipes were running under the joists on the ceiling because they changed where the bathroom was upstairs a while ago and in order to cover up the new piping, the previous owners just put in a dropped ceiling over the pipes. So not only would removing the pipes free up the ceiling, it would also free up a lot of space on the wall so we could put a dishwasher in.

The easiest (I think best too) way to do this was to remove the nest of copper pipes and put in PEX tubing. PEX (the white tubing) is very flexible as you will see in some of the pics; you can make 90 degree turns without any joints. For the interior wall joints I used SharkBite joints which are can be used with copper and PEX. They are compression fittings that you simply push onto the pipe and thats it!

So far everything has been faucet, toilet, and shower tested.

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25. May 2008 by admin.

When we bought our house, we knew the kitchen was going to get updated right away. There was a sink, a stove and a few old overhead cabinets. There was a suspended ceiling that we didn’t like with not much lighting and the floors were in poor shape.

So after a few weeks of demo, the ceiling and walls are completely bare. It took a while because the plaster was in bad shape and I wanted to remove all of the lath (wood strips behind the plaster to support it). Some of the insulation is still hanging in there, so the more we can keep up the better. The plan is to have about 9 recessed lights in the ceiling and maybe a pendant above the sink.

Knob and Tube wiring that has to be updated! Yeah!

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