Renovating Denver - One House at a Time

Woo Hoo! Something’s almost done! (Almost)

The decking for the upper front deck is going on! Now you can step out the window and stand. The handrail will probably go up tomorrow, then the mason needs to come to finish up the brick columns and half walls. The electrician has wired the lighting already for this project.

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With the decking on, we could finally take down the awful awning covering the second story windows. Looks much better from the outside and inside!

Some more pics of the deck:

Framin’ and Strippin’

Just about done with the new master vaulted ceiling. What a project, but it’s totally worth it. Even without the drywall yet, we can tell it’s gonna be awesome.

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We are strippin’ the old pocket doors we found at the salvage yard. I bought this stuff called Citrustrip. It’s orange and smells like oranges. It’s supposed to be safer than other strippers. It seems to work pretty well. We’ve found the best way is to let the stripper sit on the door for 24 hours before using a putty knife to scrape the gooey paint away. A small wire brush works well to get the goo out of the cracks and crevaces. Cool, one side down, only 3 sides left!

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Working on the Inside

We have been working on the interior framing, and are almost finished with the second floor. This floor will have a master bedroom suite with nice walk-in closet, a new master bathroom and French doors that open to the 2nd level deck above the front porch. We have decided to vault the ceiling in the master bedroom area. This means we have to sister the existing roof beams to make them stronger so we can take out the current ceiling beams. Check out these photos:

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Here are some shots of the master bathroom. There will be a huge shower (maybe steam?), 2 sinks and a toilet. Sorry, no tub - we thought a sick shower was better than some skimpy shower/tub combo. I’m happy with our choice. There will be a jetted tub in the other bathroom. Check out this sweet old metal tank we found behind a wall in the bathroom. Something to do with the radiators, maybe an expansion tank? We’ll reuse it somehow, maybe a planter outside?

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Here are some shots of the framing for the second bathroom. This bathroom is shared by the 2nd and 3rd bedrooms on this level and only accessible through each bedroom (no common hallway entrance). This is a little weird, but the only way to make a 2nd bathroom work on this floor! Also a shot of the doors for this floor.

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We have started to think about stripping some of the paint on the trim and doors. Everything is white right now. I bought this orange citrus paint stripper that seems to work well. We tested one area of the staircase:

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We were planning to open up all the walls on the first floor. We are definitely taking down this wall, which used to have a pocket door (at one point in time)

We have reconsidered and might re-incorporate pocket doors in the front room. That way, we could leave the doors open most of the time, but close off the room for office use or possibly for a guest bedroom. When we pulled down the plaster we saw there was already a pocket frame (no door though!) built into one of the walls. We went to the salvage yard and found a pair of 30″ pocket doors that would work great for the new pocket door wall. The existing pocket door frame holds a 48 x 90 inch door … it’s a mammoth and will be difficult to find probably. There is one online (in Iowa) that I’m looking at, have to see how much $$ to ship.

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We started tearing down the wall between the sunroom and the kitchen. Well, not tearing it down, but seeing what was behind the plaster and drywall. We found exposed bricks under the drywall in the sunroom. And we also found a window. This made us think we want to open this wall up a little more (get rid of the column between the doorway and window). This would open the sunroom up to the kitchen more. I use the term “sunroom” loosely, I guess. It’s certainly not a sunroom now, there is no sun even though it faces west. Need more windows and doors with glass!

 

Last thing - we started tearing off the old laminate flooring that was covering the beautiful wood floors. We kept going back and forth on whether we wanted to lay new floors or whether we should tear off the old flooring and refinish. Mike answered that question when he started pulling the floor up. There is heart pine with a beautiful patina finish under the stuff, some came up easily after prying nails off, but some was harder to pull up, as it was glued to the floor. A few shots: