New Project

The new year is upon us and the holidays are over so it's time to get off my butt and back to work on the house. The next thing I need to do is get the kids rooms done. We have a room at the back of the house that's 13x16 with a 5.5x3.5 extension where a wood burning stove currently resides. I'm going to turn the space into two individual rooms for the grandkids. It's going to be a long project so I'll be doing a series of posts. I'll be doing framing, wiring, maybe some concrete, interior and exterior door installations, window installations, sheetrock, stucco, carpet laying and finish work. Plus deconstruction. It's going to be fun.

Here's the room. To the left and back is the cubby where the wood burning stove is. It needs to come out and the brickwork taken down. That large window at the rear will also come out and be enclosed. The black lines on the floor are where the walls will go in. I laid it out on the carpet so I could get a sense of space and layout, the old carpet will be pulled up and disposed of before any framing is done. This picture was taken from the doorway to the kitchen.

This is a door that looks out on the front porch. I still have no idea why this room was built with a second front door but what you gonna do? I'll take the door completely out and frame in a small window for Baby Girl's room.

The slider door that leads to the back porch. That's coming out and I'll frame it in for a hinged exterior door instead. You can see that there will be a small corridor leading from the doorway to the kitchen (on the left in the picture) and the kids rooms as well as the door to the back porch. That will allow me to add three feet to the length of The Boy's room. The black line on the floor shows where the north wall will go.

The 10 foot window that needs to be removed. I'll take it out, frame in the opening, remove the exterior siding and eventually stucco the whole south facing exterior wall. I have to do this for two reasons. First, it's impossible to frame in the rooms with the window in place. Second, that window gets a lot of sun in the Summer, making the room very hot. This will allow me to cool these two rooms much more efficiently.

The bricked in cubby. I'm of two minds about this space. After taking out the bricks and getting down to the bare stud walls it's plenty big enough for a single bed. But I may yet decide to blow out the left side wall, pour an addition to the concrete foundation and re-frame in a new corner making the room completely rectangular and getting rid of the cubby all together.

Here's a better look at that cubby. The curtain on the left is covering the slider door that's coming out. What I'm considering is blowing out that wall and corner on the left there and essentially creating a new corner for the room.  It'll add 16 square feet to the room but I can't decide if the added work (It's truly a pain in the butt to do) and expense will be worth it.

In the meantime it's hammer and chisel time. I'm going to save the bricks for another project down the line. I'm not a hoarder but I never throw away anything that may eventually have some use.

I've started the tear out but am a little under the weather today so no work is getting done at the moment. I'm sure I'll feel better tomorrow and be back in the mines again. This is one of those capitol improvement projects that not only absolutely needs to be done so the kids can have their own rooms when they visit Grandma and Papa but will add two bedrooms and increase the value of our house. I'll keep track of my expenses and post the final cost in case anyone reading the build has ideas of doing something similar. I should be able to do the total remodel for under $2500 depending on whether or not I expand the room and have to do concrete.

More later.

Six