bedroom

And so with our windows in place and our insulation removed, it was time to press on. Next on the list - Framing! We had decided to frame around the entire perimeter of the room to increase the wall thickness so we could increase the insulation - so as to have a nice toasty bedroom! In addition, we needed to frame in the closets and part of the future master bathroom and the entryway! And so we picked a wall and got to work!
 
Wall beforehand

 
Checking for plumb! Looks good!

 
 
Nailing it in place! Nail guns are awesome...

 
And a few nails and wall sections later! Making some progress!

 
May not look like much, but it'll increase our walls' R-values by 15 when we're finished!
 
Making our way around the room.

 
And a little more...

 
And the final wall!

 
Now that we had the perimeter done, it was time to focus on the closets and interior walls.
 
Here is Vanessa's ridiculously enormous future closet. At almost 8 feet long and 3 feet deep, she will hopefully finally have enough room for her clothing!

 
 
Our first doorway! This is the future door to the future master bathroom.

 
 
Looking at the bedroom's entrance from inside the bedroom looking out. On the left side is part of the future master bathroom - The same doorway from the previous image. Eventually some of those walls inside the future bathroom are going to need some "Adjustments" - read, tear down.

 
And this is the wall that will separate the future office from the future bedroom. There's a whole lot of future action going on in here!

 
And this is the grand entryway to the bedroom. On the left is the entrance to our future master bathroom, and on the right is my little future closet. And behind that is a closet for the office.

 
 
And so with all that framing out of the way, it was time to start planning out the electrical for the bedroom. But before we started wiring it up, we decided to get the power to the house switched over to our new panel. Stay tuned... I'm not sure what, but something exciting is coming up next!!!

Okee dokee... It's been a little while. Hopefully we'll be back to a more normal updating schedule now that things have settled down a bit. We moved into the house in September and had cut back on our house-work quite a bit since then. Things are picking back up again so it's time to get back to work! So without further delay, to the marshmallow kingdom we go!
 
So we actually did this work this past summer when it was in the 90's in Seattle, which is not normal at all... And most unpleasant for this particular work. We donned our special marshmallow suits to prepare for the journey!


 
After getting all suited up, time to jump on in! One of the main goals of the future bedroom is to upgrade the insulation effeciency. Currently, the walls varried in their R values from R-5 to R-15 depending on which part of the room they were in. The ceilings are R-19. Our plan is to double the wall thickness and add an additional layer of R-15 for a total of R-30 in the walls and add a 2" rigid foam insulation to the ceiling to get an R-34 value there. That's still not even to code for new construction here in Seattle, but the ceiling is already pretty low and we can't add any insulation on top of what's there so all we can do is add down. The 2" foam is the most bang for the buck as far as R value per inch of insulation...
 
Here's the before. Everything all nice and tidy and kraft paper backed...

 
So onwards we go. We first removed all the old insulation, which was a mixture of kraft-backed fiberglass and some older stuff that I don't know what it was, but couldn't have provided much insulating value...
 
Some of that older stuff wasn't in the best condition.

 
Cotton candy-land!

 
We removed all the kraft paper first. We'll then take out the insulation itself ond reuse it in interior walls, but we needed to remove it to get to the current electrical and put in our future electrical!
 

 
We then unrolled the insulation right out of the walls and into large garbage bags for later use. After an uncomfortable not-too-long, we had the walls bare!
 

 

 
Stay tuned... Up next we start framing! Woohoo!

Moving right along here... On to the second bedroom window. This one went a little bit smoother with one window under our belts.
 
Here's what we're working with... A wide and short non-opening single pane window:

 
First we had to move our support wall into place. This held the roof up while we removed a large section of wall.

 
Once we had our support wall shimmed and screwed in place the cutting begins! We used our trusty sawzall to cut around the perimeter of the window. I did not do nearly as nice of a job on this side. The cut marks were all wavy and crooked.

 
Woah! What happened here!

 
With a wave of my magic hand, a little touch-up, and we're back in business!

 
It was getting late so we decided to call it a day. We didn't want to leave a giant hole into the house wide open, so we fastened a quick little wall. Worked like a charm!

 
We got the new wall and window framing all shimmed into place and nice and level.

 
This wall is right at ground level, so we didn't have to deal with being all up on ladders. Made things a bit easier to handle.
 
Here's Vanessa the lil' teapot, hammering away! Lookin' sassy! She's a hammering machine!

 
And concentrating hard on "NOT" hitting the window frame while nailing it in place. Great job! No damage done!

 
Look at that beauty!

 
Here she is from the outside. All flashed up. Still need to add siding, but again, we're concentrating on the interior for the moment. It's nice to have some opening windows in there!

 
Stay tuned for even MORE window madness coming soon!

So next on our list was the removal of the old flooring in the bedroom. There was an old parquet floor installed in almost all of this side of the house. If you look closely at this photo you can see the outline of the square tiles on the floor.

 
We started with some shovels we found in the garage but quickly found that those little buggers were glued down real well. So we once again went back to the trusy little multi-function tool from Harbor Freight. This thing has really proven itself useful for us!
 
So the middle of the room wasn't glued down quite as heavily as the sides.

 
One of us would use the multi-function tool to scrape up the sides of the tiles and the other one would use the shovel as can be seen leaning up against the wall on the left there to try to scrape up as much of the tiles as possible. It was a slow process, but we made steady progress.
 

 
And before we knew it we were done! Took 2 half days to get that guy cleared off.

 
Turns out the tongue and groove sub-floor underneath is in pretty good condition, so we're going to leave that in place. We're pretty excited about that. We really didn't know what to expect. We were hoping we wouldn't find anymore special kitty places.

 
So now that we've got most of the mess making tear-downs taken care of we finally got around to installing the new sub-floor in the area where we pulled up the subfloor. We bought some 3/4" T&G plywood and got to it!
 
We sized it up first to make sure it fit correctly...

 
Looks good so far.
 
Glued.

 
And Screwed!

 
Alright! Our first construction, as opposed to de-construction! Actually quite sturdy too!

 
Moving right along!

 
And before we even knew it we were done!

 
It's quite sturdy now. And the room is slowly losing that cat-pee aroma as it's being replaced by the scent of freshly cut lumber. A vast improvement!

 
Stay tuned! I'm not even sure what's coming up next!!!

Moving right along here...
 
So the progress continues on the bedroom. When we last left you we had gotten to this point. Dividing wall had been removed and ready to move along with fixing up the bedroom.

 
We decided that the drywall was poorly installed (no joint tape) and was coming apart at the seams. Some had some prior water damage. And we were still worried about kitty pee in various places. We also had been considering adding insulation to the walls and ceiling to keep the room cozy in the winter.
 
So we started removing drywall in the problem areas.
Like here:

 
And here.

 
We found the older section of the room had been insulated using rock felt instead of fiberglass. That will eventually all get replaced.
 
Moving right along...

 
Of course the next day I forgot my camera. We made a good deal of progress. The ceiling drywall was much easier to remove.

 
Looking pretty good! We got all the drywall off the walls and ceiling. Made it a bit easier to see what we're dealing with here.

 

 
1 of 2 buckets with nails from the drywall. I'm not sure what took more time. Pulling the drywall down, or pulling out all the nails.

 
A little bit of cleaning up later, and we get this! We just placed the old subfloor back down so we wouldn't get drywall bits all in the fiberglass. Worked relatively well too.

 
 
Stay tuned! Coming up next is the removal of the flooring.