Half of our living room ceiling is gone!!

We tore down the drywall and Kimsul insulation in half of our living room this weekend! I can't express how refreshing it is to know it's out of the house and won't ever come back!! That insulation reeked and because it disintegrated as it fell to the ground, it transformed into a dust storm which overtook our house so the smell still lingers (as does the other half of the ceiling).

The tearing down was most definitely the easy part. It's the picking up the dusty trash and the vacuuming and the dragging of the contractor bags to the garage that kills. The insulating goes quickly too.

Laundry

Who would have thought a laundry room would be so difficult? Considering that all of our return air runs around the space, the electrical panel is in there, the entire floor had to be replaced, the plumbing had to be done, the gas lines had to be removed from the old dryer, the furnace vent stack is in the corner and had to be replaced and framed around and all the ethernet was run from the bedrooms to the laundry room for us to put our hub in there and it has all new electrical, I'd say I'm pretty proud we got it done in 9 months. I can't believe it's been that long!! It's still not quite done, but will be in the next couple of days. We need to finish installing the base and need to create a dryer vent. We found out that there was none before, it was just vented with a flexible pipe to the crawlspace. Thankfully, I've got just the spot for the new vent. But as soon as that's done, we're in the laundry business!! When the final touches are done, we'll be 1/4 or 1/3 of the way through our remodel. Living room and kitchen are next!!

Progress photos

I have all of the photos of our house before we bought it and what we've done since - through last week on Flikr. Please check it out. http://flickr.com/photos/19011594@N02/

Condensation

So we have a problem. A huge problem. The 7 1/4" of space above our ceilings is wet, wet, wet and no amount of ventilation can fix it. I'm thinking we're going to have to rip down the wet, moldy drywall and have it filled with foam insulation. This is something unexpected. We originally thought a ridge vent would do it, but there's just not enough air movement, especially once we add any sort of insulation and I don't think it'll work. Otherwise, we demolished our kitchen island. I will post pictures soon.

The beginning

Yes, my husband and I own the Cliff May rancho pictured on KCmodern.com's driving tour. This poor, 53-year-old beat-up beauty was forclosed and turned over to HUD. We fell in love when we didn't have much in our bank account and then found out that we didn't win the house after all because we had missed HUD's bidding period. I don't know whether we willed it to be so, but somehow we weren't all that surprised to find that the winning bidder's deal fell through. We were able to submit an offer afterward and won it!!! Since then, we've pretty much been broke. Thus begins the love/hate relationship that exists between us and our dwelling.