Update - Outdoors

With 2.5 acres, there is a lot of work to be done, as you can imagine. Aside from cutting the grass the only other work we've done outdoors is we took down the attached shed. Back when this was a functioning farm, the farmhands ate and spent time in a building attached to the back corner of the house. The shed was in very bad shape - not worth trying to salvage it. There was also a concrete floor in only half of the shed - the other half was dirt. Rather than keep the structure up as a safe haven for the local wildlife (which Koby had chased several times), we didn then next best thing - we tore it down. We removed the glass panes from the windows, most of the siding then threw a cable around the structure and attached it to the back of our truck. Next up, was pedal to the metal and down came the shed!

As usual, pictures of the event can be found here.

Update - First floor

We've spent most of our time and resources fixing up the first floor which includeds the living room, playroom/office, bathroom, kitchen and dining room. The biggest change we made is to the floors. The playroom/office had a pretty ugly brick pattern linoleum floor (you can see it in a couple of the pictures in our flickr album). The living room had very old tiles, most likely asbestos. The dining room had an old dirty red carpet and the kitchen, which was updated fairly recently, had a tile floor we weren't crazy about. Rather than having a company come in and test living room floor and do an asbestos abatement, we put the new floor down right on top of it - a perfectly safe alternative. We took up the dining room carpet and kitchen tiles and found the subfloor to be in pretty good shape. The new floor went down right on top. We opted to go for 4" wide hickory flooring. It's a different look than oak or pine, and it's a much harder wood - which will certainly stand the test of time with our kids growing up in the house. There are a few pictures of the old flooring being removed and the new flooring being installed in the flickr album. I don't have any pictues online yet of the wood in it's finished state, but trust me it looks fantastic.

In addition to the flooring, I replaced the living room ceiling. The existing ceiling was tiled and not in good shape. Several tiles were loose and falling. Rather than try to find tiles that matched the existing, I tore down the tiles and put up sheetrock - a much cleaner look. The walls in the playroom/office were also redone. We took down the pine panelling and patched the sheetrock/plaster walls. As I mentioned earlier the kitchen was renovated fairly recently thus the walls and ceilings did not need any fixing up.

After the walls and ceilings were fixed up, we had the entire first floor received a new coat of paint. The only areas not painted were the bay windows in the living room and the staircase in the living room. I'm going to have to replace all of the stair treads and the handrail posts, so it didn't make any sense to have that painted if I'm going to be removing it anyway. The crown molding and base molding is not finished yet, so there are no pictures of the completed finished first floor project. Expect to see pictures and an update within the next couple of weeks.

Update - Alexis' room

Many renovation projects have transpired since the last post in September. I'll try to recap them all here and you can check out pictures in our flickr photo album here.

The last post showed the kids painting Alexis' room. That project took a big detour. A little background info: Our house in Bergenfield had natural gas and the folks who bought the house did not want to purchase our washer and dryer so we took them with us when we moved. Our new house does not have natural gas and there was a washer and dryer already connected in the basement so we did not bother connecting our washer and dryer from the old house. Very soon after taking those pictures of the kids painting Jennie had an incident in the basement with some local wildlife. If you asked Jen, there was a mouse the size of a cat that jumped at her and tried to eat her. In reality, it was a dead baby mouse no bigger than an adult's thumb in the slop sink in the basement. Never-the-less, Jennie's days of going into the basement alone were over (for now). To make matters worse, the existing dryer stopped working.

We decided to turn Alexis' room into the laundry. All it required was a little bit of plumbing work and a conversion kit so our dryer from NJ would operate using propane, which our hot water heater already used. The much added bonus to relocating the laundry is that it is now on the second floor - the same as our bedrooms. No more lugging laundry baskets up and down two flights of stairs.

Alexis has been relocated and now shares a room with Thomas.

Project 4 - Paint Alexis' room, day 1

A quick fix to Alexis' wall panelling will be to paint it. Thomas and Alexis lent a hand in applying the first coat of paint to the walls.

Project 3 - Fix leak in creamery roof

In the creamery we are using one of the rooms for storage. I replaced all of the broken panes of glass in the windows, however there were two small leaks in the roof that went unnoticed until yesterday when it rained. Even though the roof of the creamery looked fairly new and in good shape. What we didn't realize was that the roof was only repaired on one side - the side visible from the house. The other side was never fixed and thus has many holes. Luckily the roof over our storage arean only had two small holes. A small piece of sheet metal and lots of caulk are our temporary fix until we get the roof replaced.
Here is my brother on the roof about to seal the hole:

Project 2 - Clothes shelves

No matter how big or how small, I'm going to try to document all of the projects here on the blog. Unfortunately there is a lack of closets/storage in the bedrooms so we had to add some shelves.


The shelves were put up in a nook in Nicholas' room. They will be used mostly for my clothing temporarily until we get into the large renovation projects and rearrange some walls.

Project 1 - New Mailbox

First project for the house - install a mailbox. Nothing fancy, just a plain gray box on a metal post. Finished product:


I will be posting a bunch of photos in my flickr album also.