With the wall tear offs completed, all I really had to do now was refinish the outside walls, replace the floor and the ceilings. However, since there wasn't any insulation in the walls, it was the perfect time to just tear off the wall boards and insulate them. Once I got all the wall boards off, it was, of course, very easy to replace the windows so I reframed the walls, put in headers, and installed new windows in all the exterior walls. Wouldn't you know it, while the walls were tore off just happened to be the absolutely best time to put in new wiring and bring the house wiring up the modern electrical standards. So, each little project begat another and so began the rest of 1999.
By the end of January I had replaced all the walls, windows, doors, and wiring in the front portion of the house. It was time to wrap up the project or just go for broke and do everything all at once. Replacing all the siding on the exterior of the house was already in the plans for the summer and so was a new roof. Another long term goal was to replace the heating system with a higher efficiency system that heated the whole house evenly. Since I was replacing several of the walls and floors anyway, there would never be a better time than the present to get all that done.
I found myself down at the library studying and becoming an expert in the design and installation of heating and electrical systems. Before long I had schematics drawn up of the entire home heating system, all the new ductwork, all the electrical circuits, and was heading down the road towards completion. Since the holes in the floor were a bit hazardous, that became my first priority. Because each of the rooms were built at different time and added onto the house, I had to tear all the floors out, right down to the subfloors. Because I wanted to also install all the new ductwork, I also ended up also tearing out the subfloor as well so I had all the flooring torn out of the first floor. It gave the basement a rather breezy feel to see the upstairs through the floor joists.
So, after tearing out all the flooring, I ran all the ductwork that needed to be inside the floor and got all the wiring installed. Before I started re-laying the subfloor, I decided to see just how level my floor was. I got out my line level, strung some line from one end of the house to the other and started taking measurements. Three days, four jackposts, two supporting walls, and after a lot of grunting, I had jacked 90 years worth of sag out of the floors and brought the supporting beams back up to level. I then laid all the 1" subflooring back down, screwed it to the joists and laid 3/4" tongue and groove plywood over that. That provided a nice firm subfloor for the hardwood flooring that would eventually get laid.
Since the furnace was slated for replacement, the only thing left that mandated the 18" square chimney that jutted through my kitchen was hot water heater. I discovered that gas powered, power vented hot heaters existed so I bought one and hooked it up. After a couple days of playing plumber, a couple more re-piping all the natural gas lines, and drilling holes through the wall for vents, I yanked the old hot water heater and furnace out of the house. A couple days later the long hated chimney had also been removed, one brick at a time. Ugghhh.
So, summer has arrived, the subfloor is laid, the furnace is missing, and the weather is nice. Rather than finishing up what I started, I instead turned my attention to the previously planned task of re-siding and re-roofing the house. Since the house had wooden siding that was already in poor shape, I had decided to tear it all off, put a half inch of foam insulation on all the walls, and then vinyl side over that. Since I had already torn out parts of the siding to replace the windows, I started with the siding and replaced all the siding on the walls that had new windows.
This little venture led me into the next "detail" which was where the windows would end up being in the new kitchen and bath. I spent a bunch of time learning all about kitchens and baths and finally decided that I didn't know much about kitchens and baths. However, I had a very finite amount of space for the bath and wanted to have the laundry in the bathroom so laying out the bathroom was pretty straightforward. The kitchen proved to be another can of worms of it's own. After learned a lot about kitchens and decided I didn't know much about them and hired a kitchen designer. We talked for a couple hours and I went home and resumed work on the house. A week later she had a design worked up. We refined it a little further to meet some of my desires and come up with a workable design. The kitchen was ordered and I went back to work on the house.
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