Sunday, May 24, 2015

#1447 fixer upper: closets, bigger doorways and those shelves must go

MT has been busy at the fixer upper since the last time I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago. He is still making progress in the kitchen and the ceiling is textured. MT is getting pretty excited because within a couple of weeks (we think) he will be able to paint the whole main flow of the house. He still has some work to do to get to that point, but it would be great to have that done before our family vacation.


Most of the work he has been doing is in what I call bedrooms 3 and 4. (It is a five bedroom house.) Bedrooms 3 and 4 were additions, I think, and pretty poorly built. They were not on the same level as the original house, so you had to go down a couple of tall stairs to get into the rooms. Also, there wasn't any space in between the rooms, so you had to go into bedroom 3 to get into bedroom 4. Plus, if you will remember, because the floors had to be raised so much to meet the floor level of the original house, the doorways were like hobbit doors. In the past couple of weeks, MT has made the doorways regular size. I should have used my flash for the next photo, but you can see that MT is standing up straight. No more hobbit doors!






He has also built a little space so you don't have to go through one room to get to the other. This is what it used to look like. I'm standing in bedroom 4 looking into bedroom 3.

May 10 photo from bedroom 4 to bedroom 3 and main living area

In the next photo you can see two distinct doorways for each room.

May 23 photo of doorways to bedrooms 3 and 4

Bedroom 3 maybe didn't have a closet before, and it had little stars stuck on the wall.


Bedroom 3 on May 10
 Now MT has made a nice closet and removed the stars.

closet in bedroom 3




You can't really see the wall that had the stars on it, but the stars were in a pile on the floor. MT built the wall you see on the left there and framed the closet. Very nice. He also reframed the closet in bedroom 4.

closet in bedroom 4




As you can see, the ceiling fan looks extremely low because he had to raise the floor up so much. He will take down the fan.

Now he is working in the main living area as he prepares the room for paint. Here's an action shot!



He is perfa-taping across an iron beam that separated the living part of the house from the garage.

See these crazy little built-in shelves?




MT is going to cover them over and make a flat wall. The shelves are kind of ugly and not really in style anymore, so they have to go. I wanted to show them to you so you can appreciate how much nicer the wall looks when they are gone. 

I am constantly amazed by the work that MT has done on this house. Every week when I go there, it looks a little different and a lot better than the previous week. It's a lot of work and MT does it mostly by himself and I think he's pretty amazing.

Today MT gave himself the day off. It's his birthday, you see, and you shouldn't have to work on your birthday :) We have been relaxing and taking it easy today. We are so happy that tomorrow is a holiday and we can have an extra day to ourselves!

Happy birthday, MT! I love you!! (He never reads this, but I'll put it out there anyway!)













1 comment:

Kteach said...

Very impressive! He's a darn good worker!