#Shiplap!

August 8th-11th

The first thing I did Monday morning was start trying to take down drywall. We had no idea what we would find behind the drywall so I took the biggest hammer we had and started to hammer away at the wall. If you know me at all you know that at the end of every theater production I do I want to destroy one prop or another. It is usually the prop that has given me the most trouble through the run of the show, which also happens to be the one prop that my director or the owner of the theater wants to keep. I never get to destroy anything so this was my chance; my very own #demoday! Of course because of the amount of work needed in the house and the fact that we are doing it all ourselves, it was just the first of many, many demo days. 

My First Demo Day!

So I'm banging away at the wall, and if you've ever hit drywall you know it does't take much to create a hole, but I get nothing. The drywall seems to continue to stand and I've barely made a dent so we begin to think maybe, just maybe we have shiplap behind this drywall. And sure enough, after we manage to scrape away some drywall we see shiplap! It's not in excellent condition but it isn't bad either. We'll have to take it down and hammer nails out of it, sand it down, and then put it back up before we can paint it, but it's shiplap! It's original to the house and it's want we wanted to go with on the walls anyway so all in all it was a huge find and a major plus! We also found wall paper from 1940's under that drywall but over the shiplap. Whoever built the house put the wall paper up using nails instead of glue. We're thinking that may have been because they didn't want to glue to the shiplap so even though I hate all the nails in it I'm more grateful the paper isn't glued and has been mostly easy to remove.

Shiplap, Drywall, 1940's wall paper

No more drywall!

This week I was determined to get rid of all of the vegetation around the house. So when I needed a break from all the drywall dust I went out with my clippers and attacked all the green around the house! Nothing was to be spared! Anything that my clippers couldn't handle I had Olaf come back to with a chainsaw. After an hour of work I was very happy with how things looked! I had been wanting to do that since week 1 but other things were more pressing, remember we could have our sheep escaping! Now we have a huge burn pile of leaves and branches and we have an excellent source of wood for fires and fence post!

No more vegetation around the house!

Can you spot Lacy?

Before

After

After a few days of internet searching and talking to a contractor we felt fairly confident we could attack the foundation ourselves. We bought a beam and the wood needed to make outside supports and went to work. With this type of thing I basically just do as I'm told and hope I'm doing it right. I helped to dig holes for concrete supports, I measured 2x4's to the right length to fit under the roof, and I held things in place while Olaf screws things together. Once we had the outside support in and raised a bit it was time to go inside and start chipping away at what was left of the foundation. This was the fun part! I've found out I really enjoy destroying things and when you have a fixer upper you get to destroy quite a few things! By the end of the week we had a new foundation beam in! The beam we placed may not be the beam we end up leaving because we have since found out we can order a much longer beam which may actually be better but we have yet to decide what to do.

Outside Support

Old Foundation Out

No Foundation

New Beam In!

Despite reports of rain all week we managed to stay dry. It was like the rain just kept going around us or skipping over us on it's way out of the state! I know we won't continue to be so lucky seeing how we have rain predicted all next week but hopefully we can still get some work done! As usual we don't have a firm plan going into next week but I'd like to finish removing the drywall in the living room and maybe get the floor out in another room and maybe, just maybe more drywall. Until next week.

Where Lacy likes to be while we work!

While our camp stayed dry surrounding cities did
not. Lacy just happened to be in the car while a
thunderstorm rolled in...she did not like that!