Normandy Park Restoration

Got a wild hair and decided to tear out the carpet in the sunken part of the living room.  I'd sold the dumpy couch I had down there this weekend.  Realized I don't like the divided look it creates, and never used it.  Once it was gone I decided to go ahead and pull the carpet out.  Part of the reason is that I need to determine if there are any water issues with that lower part before putting anything else back in there, so better to live with it out for a while to find out. Here it is with the carpet pulled out. The nails that were holding the carpet edging in were in the concrete pretty good.  Pulling them out made a little bit of a mess of the concrete.  Nothing serious, just some cosmetic issues.  I was surprised to find the concrete painted down there.  I wonder if that was the original look or not. Here it is cleaned up a little with some temporary furniture in place to make it usable. It does appear that the moisture is wicking t...

Managed to pickup a desk this weekend before the flu set in.  Found a desk on Craigslist for $100 that's perfect for the den.  Added some LED lighting to it.  The chair to the left of the desk is there so I can pull it out into the room for listening sessions.  Also got the stereo stuff in the room cleaned up a little, though I still need to remove the old stereo rack on the left side and neaten things up a little. Once I get over this flu I'll tackle that.

Since this house has a flat roof, with a LOT of big trees towering over it, proper drainage and maintenance of the roof is essential.  If anything that's the one flaw with the house.  Someone had put cheap plastic drains on the house, some not even affixed to it.  One actually fell off a little while ago, and I've been doing my research as to what to replace it with.  The solution was 3" galvanized gutters.  I just got one installed on the back of the house (which is a big mess right now, my gardener when MIA and I need to find out what's going on there) For now I just have a plastic extension on the bottom so that the water is moved far enough away from the foundation.  Once I get around to re-doing the back yard, I'll address putting proper french drains on it. Now that it's cold out, those back windows tend to fog up a bit, which may encourage me to put in the double pane windows sooner, as it's pretty ugly. Next will be the main front drain. ...

The short term need for an office in the basement was no longer there, and I'd been wanting to get the large bookshelf out of the master bedroom, so I reconfigured the basement office as a library.  I'll need to get a floor lamp for it later. Right now it's setup with some Ikea Expedit shelves that I've had for a long time, primarily due to their versatility.  I'll replace them later with something nicer, but no rush there. Also got the DIY sound traps up in the Den.

Been looking to downgrade the stereo a little, as it was more than I needed.  Found a pair of cheap Paradigm floor standing speakers to use and set them up in the den. ...and my really crappy drywall job there.  That will have to be redone. Happy with the setup.  I've found I'm using the den a lot these days, now that we have so little daylight.

Finally getting cool up here so I had the first fire in the fireplace since removing the ugly wood burning fireplace. The cat had no idea what it was.

Doesn't look like too much, but all of the subfloor is done (pending some plumbing work). For the near future, that is how my kitchen will look.  The cabinets are actually in the correct loction for my plan, including the sink. I'm dead set on DIY'ing the kitchen cabinets, and the only ones I can find with the DIY configurability I want are Ikea, however I found out last week that Ikea is changing their whole kitchen like in February, and the new system won't be compatible with the old.  Part of the reason to use Ikea, is that in 10 years, if/when styles change, I can just pop down to Ikea for new doors and hardware as needed.  Also, Semihandmade does very nice faces for Ikea.  So, I'm stuck with this until February when the new Sektion stuff comes out. Here is a shot from the reverse side.  The drywall piece there is the last one that goes in the half bath, awaiting some plumbing work before I can hook it up. Speaking of which I also finished the subf...

Kitchen subfloor is in.  Just a few edge pieces to do. Now that the flooring is in I can finally do the plumbing connections.  Still need to do the subfloor in the half bath, that will come later this weekend.  Planning to build a temporary bench for use as a kitchen so that I can get use of my sink back.

In order to do the subfloor in the kitchen, which must be done before I plumb the water and sewer into it, I realized I had to lay out the proposed kitchen, and remove the existing cabinets.  So, tonight I have this. Here I have torn aapartall of the cabinets that were on the back wall.  I've left the smaller ones as I can still use those, and they are small enough to move around while I work.  Along the back wall you'll notice I have paper taped up, and on it I have the layout of the cabinets marked.  Based on this I realized I'd need 2" of space between cabinets on the inside corner, but other than that the planned layout should work well.  Here is what's left of those cabinets. Needless to say I'll be doing a trash run on Monday.  I also got around to installing the window in the guest bedroom too.  It took longer than the other one as they have mounted the windows very close to the outside corner, so it took a while to remove enough siding to...

Needed to work out the final layout of the kitchen before I could finalize the plumbing.  Here is the planned layout

Was in a tech seminar all weekend so I wasn't able to work on the house.  I think I overcompensated a little this Monday after work. All torn up.  I can't work to remove that vent pipe until I have enough time this weekend to deal with any potential roof leaks, so it will stay there for a few days.  I really needed to know what was behind the cabinets, and for some reason I lost the hot water to the sink when I pulled the old line.  I'm betting some junk came loose can got up into the valve there.  So, I decided to kill a few birds with one stone.  Tear the old cabinets out, verify the state of the plumbing, put the cabinets in an arrangement matching the current layout plan, live with that for a little while to see if it's the layout that I want to stick with. Here is the result with all of the cabinets in place Based on initial evaluation, I think this layout really works.  This shrinks the kitchen slightly, but it feels more usab...

For now, minus a few minor items I'll take care of later.  Very long weekend, but now the office, den, theater, and landing room are all wired for power and CAT6, drywalled, and all have scrap flooring that makes them 100% usable. Here is the theater, which I finished today As with the other rooms, I won't bother to float and tape these until I finish the kitchen an laundry upstairs.  I'll figure out how to hang the sound traps on the wall as well.  Man, I'm beat.  Might take a few weeks off.

Got the wiring in the wall unit fixed.  The lighting was already built in, but the wiring was very shoddy, so I cleaned it up.

The only major work I plan to do in the near future in the basement, is wrap up the drywall in the theater room, which I'll do tomorrow.  That meant I could finally clean up the basement landing room and make use of it.  The carpet is very cobbled together, but usable.  You can also see the hot water line hanging behind the love seat.  I'll hook that up tomorrow or early next week. It's come a long way from looking like this Right now I have no idea what I'm going to do with the room, or how I'm going to lay it out.  The painted concrete wall here, along the stairs, and in the theater will be veneered in stone, but that won't happen anytime soon.  At least now I have a space I can use, and I can even live down here if I get to a point upstairs where I'm refinishing the floors or something and need to avoid it for a while.  Nice to finally not have a huge mess in the basement.

I'm now calling it he den, it was the old temporary theater.  Now it's done-ish.  I've got the drywall in and put some used carpet and padding I got of CL into it.  Within the next 4 weeks I'll need to cut the hole for the egress window.  You can see it's framed for it.  To do this I'll have to pull down 3 sheets of drywall, some of the studs, and roll the carpet back.  The concrete saw sprays water as it works, so I'll have to account for that.  Then I'll put the egress window in, rebuild that window well, and put the other window in.  But for now, it's usable, and very close to it's final form. This is what it looked like when I moved in Here it is after I did the demolition And this is what it looks like now Naturally I haven't done the float and tape, and the "green board" which is blue, go figure, will stay that color until I do get around to doing the final drywall work in the basement, but it's not ...

First, I did a lot of organizing and now the downstairs office/library is livable Next, this may not look like much, but took a lot of work.  When I installed the old theater room door, it wasn't level, so I knew I'd have to redo it.  To do that I had to remove 4 large pieces of drywall, and several studs.  Now it's all back together, nice and level, and I've put the last bit of drywall on it. And inside the theater, I removed the old screen, and framed the West wall.  I've put an upper row of drywall up.  Will need to do the electrical and wire the CAT6, than have that inspected before I can put the rest of the drywall on.  Then I'll get some scrap carpet and make it a usable room like the other office.  In the image above you can see I've framed one of the windows larger, that is where the egress window will go.  I'll have to rent a concrete saw for that job, and completely rebuild the window well.

I'm still using a lot of old Ikea Expedit stuff for storage.  It works, and is flexible, but not fancy.  Been on the lookout for something better.  Ran across this on CL for only $300, and got them to deliver. Right now it's just staged in the open area of the basement.  I should be able to finish the framing and drywall in the old theater, and I'll move these in there.

Finally have a decent, usable fireplace.  The wood burning stove was removed a while ago, and I finally got around to ordering the parts I needed.  I also got up in there and removed all the crud that was left over.  When they installed the wood burner they just put a bit of flashing up there, and a lot of junk had accumulated behind it.  Even found what was left of the old damper. I still need to install a top mount damper, as it's pretty much just open right now, but I'll do that in the next few days.

Mostly, need to wire in the remaining outlets, but that's a 15 minute job.  There are a few drywall screws I need to add as well, and put some mud on them.  In these images I've just put rough mud on most of the existing drywall screws, I'll do the rest later.  All the drywall is in, and I put the scrap carpet down as well. I won't bother to float and tape, or finish the paint until I've finished with the upstairs.  This makes it a perfectly usable room for now, which is what I wanted.  I was thinking about drywalling the ceiling later, but I have to admit that I like the dark beams.  We'll see what I can come up with. The final dimensions worked out to be 9'10" x 12'.  Not big, but ample for an office, and if they bring sewer lines down the street I can add a closet in the workspace next to it easily. For comparison, this is what it was when I moved in. I would have made the office bigger, but you can see there is a significant fram...