Upstairs Bathroom

The plumbing was leaking into the kitchen, of course from a joint in the pipe we couldn't reach from downstairs. So perfect opportunity to GUT the bathroom & make it all new!


The very messy bathroom before.

The bathroom after removing the fixtures. The subfloor was next, and removal to the studs of the wall in between apartments. In the process of removing a stray & very random looking knob & tube wire the power to all but one of the downstairs bathroom lights has been disconnected, oops.

Fall is coming

Yikes, tomorrow is FALL!

That just means lots to do around the money pit! We have already had a fire in the furnace, so that is up to speed! We began the surprisingly simple task of switching to insulated ducting. It was also incredibly cheaper than we had expected it to be. We are 90% done with that project. We need to run two new lines (for some reason we have 2 rooms with no direct heat vent???) and then decide what to do with all the uninsulated duct we have now! The difference was noticeable immediately, decreased noise and it feels warmer coming out. That should help out with our coal and wood use!

We also have the siding to finish the window project. It takes us DIY-ers a while to COMPLETE things LOL! But we should start work on that this week. We ordered some extra because there are a few other places that look terrible, even painted.

I should point out that when I say WE, I really mean hubby!!! I am busy painting my Parents house. Trying to get as much done as possible. It is going to look fabulous, but needed a LOT more scraping than I realized! Now I see the lure of vinyl... It may fade, but there is NO SCRAPING!

I will be working on my garden spaces too, the pumpkins need to get picked & the rest needs to get put to bed for the winter!

Hope everyone has a happy first day of Fall!!!

Been a while

There are lots of things going on at the Money Pit lately.


Painting - Momma got a new toy! It's a Wagner Paint Crew Plus Paint Sprayer #515010. It's my early Christmas present. Plus a must have for the amount of painting I will be doing before the snow flies.

• As much of our house's exterior as possible with the paint I have on hand
• My parent's house's exterior (future "Our" house)
• A couple interior ceilings
• Finish the trim for the bathroom the easy way!
  

We created a very nice outdoor eating area on the side porch. I would love this to be a 3 season enclosed porch, but I don't think that's going to happen now. We will paint & re-screen before the white stuff & we are going to use corrugated plastic to cover the windy end to keep the snow & wind off the porch over winter. It may not be the prettiest option, but it's the cheapest/best option at this point. If we get the screen up we'll be able to use it for all the warm days!




More of that painting, but this we me using a paint brush on a very tall wobbly ladder. It needs touch-ups before we screen, but it's not bad!

Boy do we have ugly gutters. It's a next year project, we're going to go around the corner from here. It never made sense that they didn't.






The hot tub! It's not frugal, but it's fun! It was also FREE (so sort of frugal, definitely cheap), except for the wiring, circuits, chemicals, and replacement for broken part... But $160 is not bad for a 400 gallon hot tub (oh yeah & 3 beers for the guys who helped move it).

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Painting the Money Pit

We began with the front porch 2 years ago and that's where it had ended. I was going to get to the side porches but just didn't.

But in prep of getting the hot tub from my parents house I had to fill the cracks in the block foundation of the side porch and painted it. So I just kept going.

I am hoping to get the lower part done this year all the way around, including the 2 other porches, at least as far up as I can reach. Not sure if we'll get the paint sprayer I want or not, but either way I'll get to what I can.

I was the one up on the ladder! I had to scrape off the old nasty peeling paint under the gutters. Of course being on a ladder is why there is only a little patch done! As you can see we still haven't finished the siding from replacing the window. I just didn't want to put up what was there, but I think I'm going to have to give in.


This hole has been next to the basement door since who knows when, long before we bought the house. It looked like there had been several patch attempts but not with the right stuff, so we picked up a bag of morter mix & hubby spent an hour "doing it right." At least what we think is right & looks nice. The next step will be to build up the rest and paint! The hole went all the way through along the door

Window Project

I posted a bit about the project here Busy Weekend. So I won't go into it in full here, but the Living room window is in & looks great!

I never dreamed that a simple window project could have us tearing 10 feet of siding off, but it did. So... gotta love living in a 140 year old house!


Semi before (I forgot to take a picture of the old wall after all the siding came off)

After:
I should have emailed Easy Gard to sponsor the post, but alas I didn't! It was just the cheaper choice at our home improvement store. I suppose I could have blurred the labels, but I haven't installed the good photo editing software on the computer yet.*** Best part was we only used about 20 feet of the 150+ foot roll so now we have lots of leftovers for the next siding removal project (South Turret before winter).

***I am so far behind in photo editing I should do this we have had the new computer since February!

Carnival of Home Improvement

Carnival of Home Improvement is hosted by Mortgage Low Down

I checked out #1 & there are some great submissions! I'll be back to check out 2 & see if I have anything worthy of submitting :D!