I can't DIY my way out of a paperbag but love watching the progress of those that can do so. I hope you continue to post tearing apart and then putting back together pictures. We gutted our house - well ok, we moved out and the GC and his talented staff gutted our house - but I loved watching the process of tearing apart and putting back together.

What addition did you do?

Haha, yeah blfenton I'm a renovation junkie; I love seeing before after photos. I also loveeee talking about my house.

Basically the existing roofline was problematic by design ( leaking, water back up) and the room was mostly unusable due to the ceiling height. Its an old farmhouse, unfortunately there was not much left character wise. We ripped off half of the top of the house down to the floors, built new walls, new trusses and a new floor on one side. Once we completed the shell, we rebuilt the floor joists on the other side. And then we finished the interior. Did I mention I was pregnant for the second half of this?

I'll give you the highlight photos (no idea where they all are on my computer), but here's a link to my blog that has a bunch more. It's nothing fancy, but I'm very proud of the work we did on it; including the numerous mistakes you may see or not see. I also got my hardwood floors and I now have an office area/art area and a place for (most) of my books. Basically I feel like a very lucky girl!

Before ( looking into hallway)

After (looking into hallway)

You'll notice the hallway is still not finished........we're coming back to that after we finish the kitchen and insulating the exterior of the house (downstairs).

After (facing the other way)

The bed is on the opposite side of the closet.

There's still a lot of finishing work that needs to be done --- we had to switch gears to other projects before the baby came! and when we finish the house remodeling wise, it will be finally time for an interior decor revamp. Hahaha, right now we are a conglomeration of hand me down furniture.

Anyways, asking me about my house is like asking me about my kid. I can talk foreverrrrrrrrr about it.

I'll definitely stay tuned, if the prize at the end of the tunnel is "contemporary rustic cherry with soapstone"! Love to follow these kinds of projects, gives me hope I might accomplish the same some day.

Sounds wonderful! We also DIY. It's a wonderful club that not everyone gets. For instance, today my husband is going to visit a friend who just had a heart attack.

The friend texted and said, excuse the house it's a mess.....I saw my husbands response: "if you have walls you're doing better than us!"

We started laughing and have decided we've only had completed walls here 1/2 of the time. Pre-civil war farmhouse.

It's quite a ride, have fun!

heatheron40, that "house is a mess" comment is hilarious. Feel ya there, do you have any photos of your renovation? I loveeeee historic houses, I have some great memories of going house hunting with my mother for years while she was looking for her country dream house. We have quite a few up here in upstate NY, I never tire of looking at the architectural details and craftsmanship in historic homes.

I'll see what I can do, all my pictures are on my computer and that of course is still at school! The phone certainly is not easy.

Do look in at the old house category, but there's not a whole Lotta activity there.

Another DIYer with an old house. To expand our kitchen, we took out the wall between the kitchen and what was originally the back porch, put in a structural beam, new plumbing, electrical, flooring, lighting, appliances, built an island, etc. It was fun and took us about 5 months.

There is a great a resource for old house stuff at The Historic District: http://www.thehistoricdistrict.org/

Diane

Power muffin, that is such a cool site. I'll have to add that to my must reads/weekly check ins.

anywho here is some progress photos. Once the mudroom is (mosty ) tiled,the contents of the kitchen will be moving into the mudroom and phase 2 will begin!

We have already found some surprises in the support/foundation so here's to hoping we find fewer surprises in the next phase.

Heres a a closeup of the multiple layers of flooring in the kitchen that have to come out. This is also the gap we have just hanging out until we build the new floor

The original hand hewn beam support the floor is fairly degraded due to water damage from the old roofline funneling water back into the house.

Is the parquet flooring coming out? When we redid our house we did keep the parquet in the kids rooms. I hope you don't have any more surprises - sometimes they're a good thing and sometimes they're not.

Oops blfenton, sorry never got an alert you responded. They only seem to work about 50% of the time. Yeah the parquet came out, mostly fairly easily. They glued it down, just used a roof shovel and bam!

Well we are solidly in the framing phase. We've been working on the floor now for about three weeks, quite a bit of foundation damage. This wasn't really a surprise but it was more extensive than expected.

This photo is from a week ago, before we finished cutting out the original joist and replacing it after repairing the foundation and putting a new plate in place.

This is the new plate before finishing the rest of the foundation repair in this area. Once we get all the joists run on this side, we can knock out the other side which should be relatively quick.

And then we will be racing winter to get the new windows framed and siding redone. Woohoo