Monday, September 29, 2014

Spray foam insultation

 This past weekend Chris and his brother,Cale, began the process of putting in spray foam insulation. Thankfully, Cale is a spray tech and had the time to spend the weekend...plus a few more nights after work...helping Chris to get it all done.
The outside South corner of the house. This area will be built to hold the wood boiler and other equipment required for the radiant floor heating


This is the kitchen done.

This is the upstairs north grain bin.

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The living room ceiling being sprayed.

Spraying in some of the pallet walls in the back of the house.

All in all, spray foam insulation cost a bit more in the beginning but it will be worth it in the long run. It cost around $8000 for the material to spray foam it. We got the labor for free ( thanks Cale!..brothers are the best). I also got the trim painted on the back, it was too dark to take pictures tonight though.









Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Finishing the outside

I have noticed that I have not touched too much on the amount that we have spent so far. After the electric and buying the spray foam insulation we have come up with a total of $47,860 so far on our 3200 square foot house. There are only a few more big ticket items left to buy and then the rest of it will be a few hundred at a time. That price includes the fixtures for the bathrooms, much of the walls and ceilings for the inside,the kitchen cabinets, the doors and hardware ( in and out), and many of the light fixtures, all of which are waiting patiently in storage!

The last few weekends we have worked on plumbing and finishing up the outside of the house. Not much you can take pictures of when it comes to plumbing. It really is not all that exciting!
Someone has to finish painting the trim on the back of the house.....*cough,cough* ME!

The deck on the back is done. We will be adding a handicap ramp on this deck but just haven't go to it yet. The siding is painted but again...the trim!

Side view of the front. The wagon wheels are at some point going to be the side railing for the front porch. We got most of them at a garage sale for $10 a piece.

Around the inside upper edge of the porch there will be a shelf. On that shelf will be a row of these old telephone insulators with lights under them all. We picked up the insulators at several auctions usually only paying $5 for a bucket of them.

Here is the front painted....the light is not great because it is early.

Monday, September 8, 2014

Fine tuning the front

These are the colors we picked for the front of the house! We were trying to make whatever we decided on go with the existing red barn and outbuilding. That same red is on the roof of the grain bins too. The main color of the siding will be a tan and the trim a dark brown. 

The leftover cutoffs from the porches were put to use around the top of the front porch to cover the I-beams on the inside. I cut over 150 of them to nail up.

This is what they looked like going up. The little silver screw heads int he tin will be painted.

Ta-da! The door looks much better painted!

The long view of the porch before adding the small pieces of wood.

The siding was added to the sides of the porch. and trimmed out with cedar. ( we have a ton of leftover cedar so we are using it where ever we can.)

The little pieces of cedar are all up and the tin on the soffit is up also. The front porch has three can lights in the ceiling but will also have a shelf around the outside edge and a row of small lights under old telephone insulators.

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Working on the little stuff

Chris has finally been able to take a few days off and we have been working on finishing some of the stuff that has been started but not yet completed. Finishing the framing on the porch and getting it all closed up on the outside. We started to paint a little bit of the house. We picked out the colors because over Labor Day weekend they had a ton of sales on paint at the hardware stores.That meant that we had to try them out and make sure we liked them. Chris worked on some of the plumbing for the house. He is using pecs for the water lines. We had to end up buying two hot water heaters( we had two instant hot water heaters that we were planning on using but they pulled too much power for the service that we have here).


The following are pictures of some more decorative tin that we were able to pick up thanks to a friend of mine who has been keeping an eye out for some. The gentleman we bought it from only charged us $50 for the truck load of it, and he loaded it for me.






This is the building that the tin came off of before it was taken down. It was a building on main street in Appleton City from 1895 or 1896.


This is from the pile of decorative tin we bought from Frontier Village in Adrian. It was in the upstairs of a department store that they moved to their site and the upstairs had to be removed because it was in such bad shape. They saved the tin that they could from it and we were able to buy it. 

To go with the colors on the front of the house though,it had to be painted.

This is a picture of the in starting to go up on the front porch.

The back deck also got finished!!!! Now the ramp and stairs have to be added to it but that requires another trip to the store!