Saturday, November 15, 2008

Our latest project

Last fall we installed a wood pellet/corn/wheat burning stove in our family room to help supplement our geothermal heat pump during the winter. When it gets below 10 degrees, it's really hard to keep it comfortable in our home. Of course, we have a lot of those days here in Iowa.

Last year we were doing our school at the kitchen table. This year we bought a new dining room set, so are now doing school in the dining room. It is kitty corner from the family room on the first floor, and just doesn't get as warm. There were times it was 80 degrees in the family room with the stove burning, and only about 62 degrees in the dining room.

Our solution to this problem was to put french doors between the dining room and living room to help circulate the heat. It's a pretty straight forward home improvement project, and I had never broken through a wall before. It sounded pretty fun.

We chose not to get doors with windows in them for obvious reasons (Alex, Jackson, Chase, Bryce, Colton, Katie, Naomi, Hudson, and SHANNON). I wanted to retain the feeling of two separate rooms, and we often watch different shows in each room, so needed to be able to separate them at times.

We started this project about three weeks ago on a Friday night.


This is the before picture.



Shannon makes the first cut.


Everyone helped.


Some were more helpful than others.


As with every project we take on, it's never as easy as we think it will be. We needed to relocate the cold air return vent. It was smack dab in the middle of our new doorway. Shannon is doing some exploratory work here.

Finally through. I got the honor of using the rip saw to cut through all of the lath board and plaster. FUN!!!

This is where I tried really hard to upload a video of the boys breaking through the wall. Poor Alex was sick on the couch, and got plowed over by the wall when Jack ran through. He didn't get much sympathy. Either I'm not uploading correctly, or I'm not patient enough to sit and wait for the process to finish, but it's not going to happen today.


The framing is done.


The doors are installed.

The drywall is now done, except for some of the sanding. My camera is broken, so I can't take any pictures of it. Obviously I'm not going to get the family room, living room and dining room painted before Thanksgiving (original goal). I have gotten a couple of coats of stain on the trim for the living room side. It's still not dark enough to match the existing trim, so I will continue to add coats until it matches.

Maybe I'll get a finished project picture taken before Christmas. For now, I'm trying to get all of the plaster an drywall dust out of my house before the company comes on Thursday.

I'm finding that my furniture just isn't fitting anymore. I'm not sure how it's all going to play out.

"Prepare your outside work, make it fit for yourself in the field; and afterward build your house." Proverbs 24:27

1 comment:

Melanie said...

wow, very impressive! I'm much too chicken to try a project like that in our house.