Working from the inside out and the outside in.

Throughout the last 8 months we’ve been working on the exterior of the house simultaneously with other projects. Parts of the foundation, bottom plate, and exterior walls were in pretty bad shape due to weather, ground erosion, termites and various other things over the past 50+ years. Here are a group of pictures showing some of the work we did last summer and into the fall. There are a slew of more recent pictures of the exterior but I can’t post them yet because we completed a couple major projects while we worked on the outside. I don’t want to ruin the excitement! Therefore the posts dedicated to the two largest and most time consuming parts of our home transformation… are coming soon!

Here you can see the damage to the bottom of the rear wall. It looks like our siding was eaten away.

This is the front corner of the house under the living room windows. After removing a few bushes from the side of the house we discovered this entire section of wall was actually missing! You can also see where some of the neighborhood termites had previously stopped in for a bite to eat.

We dug a small trench around the perimeter of the house to keep the dirt away from the foundation. We then cut off the bottom 2 feet of wall, exposing the bottom plate and the brick. The bottom plate is a 2x4 that’s anchored to the brick by a series of long bolts. The vertical studs of the exterior walls are then nailed to the bottom plate.

We removed the bottom plate and pulled the bricks out in order to repair the damage and re-secure the exterior walls to the foundation. Here you can see the bolts that are used to secure the bottom plate. Kevin took this opportunity to show off his brick laying skills J

Here you can see where we placed aluminum flashing on top of the bricks. The bottom plate was then laid on top of the flashing and secured with the bolts. The flashing helps keep water from entering our house.

 

This is a front corner of the house where we also did some repairs. Here you can also see the edge of the concrete slab that the house sits on.

 

The bottom 2 feet of wall was removed from the front of the house as well. This took place in the beginning when we really thought we could salvage some of the walls. Not too long after this did we decide it was better to just replace everything.

 

This rear corner is where the master bathroom will be. At this point we had removed the windows in this room and we’re replacing the outside corner with plywood.

 

Here’s a better picture of the same corner. The left side still has the original siding and windows.

 

Here’s the back of the house. The dark brown you see here was the original sheeting. It was more like old crumbly cardboard then anything solid. We re-sheeted the house with plywood (shown on the left corner here).

 

Since we were altering and replacing the exterior walls we had to put up temporary walls inside to hold up the weight of the house.

 

The driveway side of the house is pictured here and shows both old and new things.

 

We removed all the windows in the house and built new walls in their place. Here is the corner of the kitchen.

 

 

We removed the living room windows and replaced those walls as well.

 

My comments are going to become repetitive with all these old and new walls so here are just a few more pictures.

 

Enough of the old walls – here are some NEW walls! Yay! This is the back corner of the master bathroom.

 

Here’s the new rear wall in the kitchen.

 

Here are the new walls in the master bedroom.

 

One more picture of the back of the house.

The next few posts will be more exciting because now we move on to the new water and sewer line – and – the rear roof dormer! Woohoo!