Things are happening in the bathroom! Check out our fancy new insulation!
Below you can see the doorway to the master bedroom has been closed off– no going back now!
The old pipes are totally out and the new pipes are in!
I decided I wanted a vent fan going up through the attic, and the hole was cut for the fan I picked up from Lowe’s. Plus, below you can see the new frame for the door. (Same door that used to be the door into the master bedroom– we’re just moving it a few feet, that’s all!)
Beautiful insulation below:
And last not least, the wiring is going in for the sconces, vent fan, and electrical outlet!
I’m super eager for the walls to go up soon!! Ahhhh so exciting!
I’d love to see a plan of the whole house.
I’ve looked at pretty much every picture you’ve posted and find it to be quite an odd and interesting house. Some of it is obviously old, but it’s really hard to figure out just what part of it.
Some of the walls in that room are obviously later. The exterior structure is certainly not brick, it’s framing covered in what looks like tar paper which makes sense for a brick veneer. That was almost certainly done circa 1950-60. It looks like all the windows were replaced then too. The windows are definitely mid 20th century as is their framing, but some of the exterior studs seem to be full sized rough sawn lumber and show wooden lath marks.. I can’t tell if they are reused or if that was where they started.
The horizontal strips that make up the guest room walls indicate that they are circa 1940-50 and metal lath in your demo photos indicates a similar era. Can’t remember if that is more likely earlier, but I think closer to 30s-40s. Some of that depends on the area and how conservative the tradesmen. Around here, it is common for things to be 10 years late.
The real odd thing is the chimney location here and in the kitchen. Seems like the kitchen could be located in an area that was formerly exterior but I can’t make sense of that without a whole house plan. From what I can tell the entry hall leads back to the kitchen, but I can’t make out whether the first room to the right upon entry is the dining room or if it’s two rooms deep with a chimney between.
The chimney in this room is really weird in that is seems to be very close to the wall with window, really wide, and not far from another chimney. In this area old houses come in a pretty limited range of plans. 2 over 2 is quite common with a central hall. In those houses, the chimneys are between the rooms and the entry hall. 4 over 4 with a central hall usually has chimneys in the centers of the walls that divide the rooms. Some smaller houses were 2 over 2 with a side hall rather than a central hall. They are like 3/5ths of a 4 over 4 house since the side hall is roughly 1/2 the width of the rooms.
Your house seems like a 2 over 2 side hall grafted onto a 2 over 2 central hall with some additions towards the rear, but I may be missing something and I’m really curious. The oven like thing in the kitchen is really hard to figure. Most likely not an oven since neither its form nor materials suggest that, but still hard to make sense of without knowing what used to be in that location. A basement trip would shed some light on that, but maybe not enough to answer fully.
Anyway, you have quite a project. I’ve suffered through quite a bit of that myself, so can both feel your pain and get a good laugh when you stumble into the unexpected. One word of advice is to take a lot of picture of exactly where you put plumbing and wiring. Once those walls go up and get painted it can be really hard to remember what’s behind them. You never know when that information will come in handy. It can make a huge difference if you want to change something down the road.
Poor David and Lynne, so much work! But one day you’ll sit in your house and enjoy the life in it! It will be strange then without anything to renovate. We made the experience here. After many years of work in our house it was strange when we could really live in it. But now, after some years of doing nothing we have to start again – at least with painting the walls again.