When the walls fall down, on your old town, then you begin

In the past few weeks many changes have taken place at the Waterhouse Renovation so this is catch-up posting #1.

Our grand renovation plan requires that we live downstairs in the basement suite. This allows us to be on hand to assist with the renovation (more on that later) and so we do not have to pay rent for the duration of the work. The previous owners rented out the suite and found someone willing to pay money to live in the space, how bad could it be, right? Hmm...

In any regards, before we could move downstairs, we needed to do any structural/foundation work down there required by the city and engineering review of the plans. Luckily, the foundation was deemed acceptable for the additional floor, and we didn't have to shore up the load-bearing posts. We did, however, want to remove a chimney that was in the middle of the house, and for which we had no real need. The chimney was serving as a vent for the gas furnace and hot water tank that sat in the middle of the basement suite. Ditching the furnace was easy, as it was late summer then (how’s that for schedule motivation?) and Chris replaced the hot water tank with an electric unit in the nearby utility room / workshop.

Afterwards we moved downstairs so the serious renovation work could officially begin, better late than never (it was early October by then). Before we let the professionals in, Chris was able to take out some frustration by demolishing several walls upstairs, plus discombobulating the bathroom.

After that, the professionals took over. We came home one day and discovered we no longer had front steps.

A few days later and we did not have a front lawn - it was that day that we also did not have a water connection to the city. Thank goodness for kind neighbours! A word of caution for anyone digging in the front lawn: ensure the excavator checks how deep the water line is before digging to ensure it isn't broken in the process. Luckily, our sewer connection line is much, much deeper or else we would have had a huge mess on our hands. It was at this point that the foreman for our job caught the H1N1 virus so our house looked especially uninviting for an additional week.

Once the watermain issue had been resolved and Johnny got over the flu, the front porch foundation was poured. Update #2 will include phots of the framing for the porch already complete!

Just last week we came home to find new bathroom facilities in the parking pad. Neither Chris nor I have checked it out yet, but it’s nice to know that it is there.

With all the destruction going on, we ended up with a quite large pile of construction materials in the back yard as we waited for the construction waste bin to arrive. In addition to drywall material in the house, we had wood and bathroom bits sitting in the back patio space.

As mentioned above, Chris and I wanted to be involved in the renovation process – partly as a cost savings and partly to ensure value for time spent. Why get the crew to sweep up each day at their charge-out rate when one of us could do the job? One of the more adventurous tasks that Chris took on was removing the insulation in the attic. In addition to a layer of fibreglass insulation (the pink stuff), there was six inches of blown-in insulation foam on top. Chris, with some much-appreciated help from our friend Thomas, spent two solid days shovelling the fluff out of the attic and into oversize garbage bags so the construction crew could then demolish the roof - more on that next time.