Old Stone House

Last night we gutted the basement. In a window of three hours my buddy Rudy and I managed to tear our every last scrap of drywall and framing and deposit all 1.5 tons of it in the driveway. What was the secret to our success? Firstly, we both grew up on farms so we know how to work hard. Second, we like breaking things. Third, we didn’t drink till AFTER we were done. Finally, we aren’t precious… We’ve watched a number of acquaintances attempt to reno their homes only to get bogged down trying to save absolutely everything! I do save things, but I’d like to think I’m a little pragmatic about it. I’m not going to try so save sheets of drywall, nor am I going to remove each nail from old 2”x4”s, nor will I attempt to rescue every electrical outlet. If I will be potentially replacing it, or at the very least, touching it – it goes. Naturally, if I encountered original pine floors, radiators, vintage light switches etc. I would do my very best to preserver that which I could. In our case, we were removing a blight someone else had added, so nothing was considered precious.

(more agony and joy…)

We are embarking on a new frontier – restoring the basement. We really cant call it restoring the basement for if we were really restoring it, we would backfill it with 4 feet of dirt, resurrect the coal chute and add a few families of raccoons. Likewise, it’s not really finishing, as the past owners already attempted to do that, and we are now left to remove their handiwork. It seems that we are refinishing… Either way, the undercurrent of everything I’ll ever post still rings true here; somebody did a poor job the first time so now we’re left to redo it properly… and we hate them.

(more agony and joy…)

Tearing out the bulkheads in the front entrance was the great motivator to restore the bathroom, however the budget had never been smaller. One of the promises we had made ourselves when we bought this house was that we wouldn’t drown ourselves in enormous debt during the process of restoring. We had no intention of ‘flipping’ the house (fixing it up only to sell it) so we could wait as long as necessary to start the bathroom project project.

(more agony and joy…)