Family Room Makeover

As mentioned in my previous post, this spring we spent a month remodeling our family room.  This is the "before" picture.  See the hearth under the fireplace that goes the entire width of the room?  It all started because we decided to take the hearth out before getting new laminate flooring.  If we were ever going to take it out, the time to do it was before putting down a new floor.  But the built in bookcases (and by extension, the mantel) were resting on this hearth, so that meant taking them down, too.

My hubs and all our boys, working together!

This is a blurry picture, but my boys insisted on having all their muscles' picture taken. ;)

We tarped off the rest of our house, but we still got cement dust everywhere during the process of chipping out all the bricks.

This was our bagster after just two wheel barrow dumps.

Making progress!

We lived with these two paint samples for about a month, and ultimately decided on the lighter gray color on the left.  The blue color on the right became our new school room color!

Once the hearth was completely out, we figured out how much brick we wanted to be left showing around the fireplace, whitewashed that, and then began putting dry wall up over the rest.

Doing all the final things to get ready to paint!  Painting had to be finished before the flooring guys came to install the new floor.  We did all the work ourselves, including the laying of tiles by my ultra talented husband, EXCEPT the laying of the new laminate floor.

I only wanted to move the books out of this big bookcase once, so we cut out all the carpet except the piece under this bookcase, did all the rest of the work we could in the room, and then moved the books out and lifted the empty bookcase up into our kitchen.  Once the bookcase was out of the family room we ripped up the last bit of carpet and painted the walls behind the bookcase.  This was all done the day before the flooring guys came, so we could move the bookcase and books back on to the new floor as soon as the installers left.

My husband was a rock star with the tiles!

Painting!

New floor!  I loved it immediately!

Then began the process of touch up painting, painting all the trim white, unpacking and putting together our new L shaped couch (which we were able to conveniently arrange delivery for the same day the flooring got installed), buying an area rug, and placing things back into the room.

What I have no pictures of (except this finished one) is the staining and hanging of our new mantle, and the hanging of shiplap above the mantle to make our "accent wall."  We absolutely love how it turned out!!  It is so peaceful and calming.  Less cluttered.  Enough seating for every member of the family (haven't had that in years).  TV at eye level instead of up too high (major complaint of our children for years).  It's just a room everyone wants to hang out in.  Which was kind of the goal.  Yay!

The flooring was the single most expensive part of the project, but the entire thing including the purchase of our new couch and easy chair, totaled less than $2500.

So, so, so happy and thankful for this space!

Good-bye Toy Room! Hello Bedroom!

After 12 years and the addition of a sixth child, we decided that the toy room space could be put to better use as a fifth bedroom.  So the purging began.  Doing our own little version of a TV show we used to watch called 'Clean Sweep', we are financing the making of the new room from things that used to be in the room itself.  Close to $300 so far!  We got the closet pared down to this:  (with lots of room around the corner for clothes)

We worked and worked to (mostly) empty the room and then studs went up..

...wiring was put in, and then the drywall was put on.  This is one of the cool things about being a homeowner ~ if we want to put up a wall, we can put up a wall!

Back when this was a toy room, this was a chalkboard wall.  Time to paint it over!  We are only painting this one wall for now. Waiting til school is finished to paint the others.

So even though the room is not "done done", it is now usable.  Just in time for a visit from my parents!!

Wordless Wednesday

Out with the Old, In with the New!

This is not going to seem very exciting to most of you, but is a huge answer to prayer and relief to us, and me in particular, and since this is my blog, I'm going to write about it! :-)

My husband has been employed now for eight months. In that time we have had to pay thousands (yes, thousands) of dollars to the water department for huge water bills. It is one of the things that has made our "catching up" so difficult, and has been incredibly stressful. During the time that my husband was unemployed our old hot water tank developed a leak, but it took us several months to figure it out. At first we thought it was a leak around the window from a bad rainstorm, but caulking that did not solve the problem. Then we thought it was the flange around our furnace vent on the top of the roof, but the furnace people came and made sure that seal was tight and we still had leakage on our basement floor. Finally we realized it was the hot water tank.

It is pretty hard to pay a huge water bill every month and save money for a new hot water tank, and just seeing the little trickle on our basement floor that led to the drain made me sick to my stomach. It was literally like pouring money down the drain.

But, finally, this was the month!!!

Our old hot water tank was taken to the curb where it was happily picked up by the metal recycle guy.


And our new tank was carefully carried in.



It was expertly installed by my husband and my dear friend Sally's husband.


It doesn't leak gas or water (both good things!) and is giving us lovely hot water whenever we want it, and no water at all when we don't. Lord willing, this will be the end of our exorbitant water bills!


I am thankful!

Thank you to our dear friends who helped make this possible, and thank you to the anonymous person who managed to pass along to us some cash at church last Sunday! I don't know how this person (or people) are finding out exactly when we need money, but we are humbled and grateful and choosing to see it as a lovely, undeserved gift from God!

New Challenge

UPDATE:

We survived yesterday! Our a/c actually worked for a portion of the day, and we were able to keep the temperature inside the house under 80 until mid afternoon. We stayed in the basement until it was time to leave for soccer practice, and afterward the children ate lots of popsicles and had a water gun fight. Today it is cooler! Thanks so much for all your helpful suggestions.

Original post:

Remember when our furnace broke last fall, just after my husband got a new job after 9 months of unemployment? Well, now our air conditioner seems to be on the fritz. In the eternal scheme of things, this is not a big deal. But the last few days have been HOT here (nearly 90 degrees with high humidity) and today is supposed to be even hotter. So, we are having a hard time staying cool.

We're praying the a/c unit we have can be fixed, because if it needs to be replaced we're just going to have to be hot this summer (we can afford flowers for the front porch, but not a new a/c unit!). In the meantime, I am making homemade popsicles left and right, we are playing/working outside in the morning and doing schoolwork in our cool basement all afternoon today, the shades are pulled down on the sunny side of the house, and the windows wide open on the shady side, and we have all available fans blowing. Any other suggestions?

We Have Heat!!!

Wonderful, glorious heat! And our new furnace is so quiet, we can hardly hear it. It's amazing!

First of all, for Beth, I forgot to take a "before" picture of the laundry room, but here is the pile of stuff that used to be on or under the ironing board. I almost moved the ironing pile also, but decided to take the high road and actually spent about an hour ironing on Thursday! I had to explain what ironing was to Little Man because he'd never seen me do it before. :-) Now that the ironing board is cleared off I might actually iron more often!



After much banging and pounding down there, they got the old furnace out. It was a behemoth, original to the house, and only 60% efficient. I was so impressed with the workmen, they cleaned up the area really well before they placed the new furnace here.



Here is the new furnace in place. See how much smaller it is? You can see the new air filter case down on the floor to the left of the furnace.


We got a new humidifier too (our old one stopped working), and they decided to put that around on the side.


Ta da!! New furnace, air filter, and humidifier. Aren't they purdy??!! Down on the right, that little splash of red is our new condensation pump. It pumps condensation from our furnace, humidifier, and hot water heater up through a hose and over to our laundry tub.


Most of you may want to stop reading right here, but for those of you that want the particulars.....

We got a 95% efficiency Amana furnace with a DC motor. Right now 95% efficiency furnaces (all brands) are eligible for a 30% tax credit, so that is a happy thing. I learned that most furnaces use AC motors to run the fan. A DC motor uses much less power so over time it saves alot on your electric bill. A DC motor also means that the furnace is 2-stage. It fires up one stage for 5 minutes or so, and if after that time more heat is still being asked for, it will fire up the second stage and burn both stages (or heat exchangers) until the temperature on the thermostat is reached. This 2 stage method saves on gas costs because alot of the time in the fall and spring your house just needs a little "shot in the arm" to get it back up to temperature, it doesn't always need the power of the entire furnace.

I also learned that you can tell the quality of furnace by the details of the warranty. I guess I already knew this in general terms, but it certainly made sense when we looked at the warranties for all the different furnaces we were shown. If it has a lifetime warranty on the heat exchanger and a 10 year warranty on all other furnace parts, that is a pretty good furnace.

Of the furnaces we looked at and were quoted, the Bryant Evolution series was the top of the line. That is a 95% efficiency, two stage furnace with smart technology in it that talks directly to the thermostat. But it requires a $300 thermostat with the same smart technology in it so it can talk back to the furnace. That whole set up was $1300 more than what we ended up getting. Our new furnace, both stages, can be controlled with the thermostat we already had. We feel we got a very good furnace for a good price, and we are so, so, so, so grateful to our friends for their loan so we could get it!

I am delighting to wake up in a warm house!!

New Furnace Is Coming!!!!

The long awaited new furnace is going to be installed in the morning! We are SO grateful and excited and happy and thankful and humbled. And did I say excited? Are any of you familiar with that old chorus that says, "God will make a way, when there seems to be no way."? When we literally could not afford to buy a furnace, God provided a way through a loan offered us by dear friends. We are beyond grateful.

Say goodbye to the old, broken furnace.....in a few short hours it will be gone! And take a good look at the laundry room. It will never be this clean again. :-)

C-C-C-Cold!

Our thermostat registered 65 this morning, but it felt significantly colder than that in our bedrooms upstairs, with their non-carpeted floors. I know heat is supposed to rise, but.... it was VERY hard to get out of bed!

We have a meeting this evening with a salesman from one company, I have a meeting with another company tomorrow afternoon, and with a third company on Monday afternoon. If we go with a high efficiency furnace we can qualify for the government rebate program and get 1/3 of the cost of the furnace back at tax time. So that's attractive. But it's more money up front. We hope to have a decision made by early next week and the new furnace installed shortly thereafter. So we have several more days to go. It turned quite a bit colder here overnight so I think we'll be having lots of fires in our fireplace this weekend! (in between the soccer games)

Good News, Bad News

The good news: I cleaned out the laundry room and found a favorite sweater that had mysteriously made it into the ironing pile and been "lost" since last winter (I don't iron very often!).

The bad news: I had to clean out the laundry room so that the furnace repair man could make his way completely around the furnace.

The good news: We are alive and well after our carbon monoxide detector went off after turning on our furnace for the first time since spring.

The bad news: We need a new furnace.

The good news: Our furnace is 37 years old so us and all the previous homeowners got our money's worth out of it!

The bad news: We are not in a good financial position to buy a new furnace right now.

The good news: It's not the middle of winter and we are fine with no furnace for a week or so.

The bad news: There's no bad news on this one. It's all good!

The good news: Our heating bills will very likely go down dramatically.

The bad news: There's no bad news on this one either. It's all good.

The good news: Several friends have given us leads on reputable companies to get quotes from, and online sites that sell furnaces for less.

The bad news: Again, no bad news.

The good news: My husband has a job!!!!!!! We have a fireplace and firewood. I wanted to pull out my fall clothes anyway. And I needed to go through all the kids' fall clothes anyway too.

The bad news: No bad news. :-)

We are, indeed, grateful that our carbon monoxide detector did its job. As you know, carbon monoxide is colorless and odorless so we would not have known there was a problem were it not for the detector. It read dangerously high levels in the basement very quickly, and with our windows and doors closed this time of year, it would have continued to increase and make its way throughout our house. I shudder to think what could have happened if we did not have a detector. PLEASE make sure you have a carbon monoxide detector in your home! Two is even better. One near your furnace, and one in or very near your bedroom so that you are awakened if it ever goes off in the night. I have heard from several sources that the kind with a number display are best (not just a signal sound to alert you, but with a digital number read-out of what the level is). This is a good one for most homes. They are usually under $50 and that is a small price to pay for the safety of your entire family. They also usually plug directly into an outlet so you don't have to rely on battery power and remember to change the batteries every so often.

Consider this your friendly public service announcement. As well as sincere gratitude expressed from a very thankful heart.

Anatomy of a ceiling repair, stage 1

We had a weekend full of demolition and construction. It looked like a rather small crack. Really, how much work could it be? But before making his run to Lowe's, my husband had to cut out the bad part of the ceiling to know how much insulation and drywall to buy. So, we took out one of the beds from the boy's room and draped everything else. Then my husband got to work with his cutting tools. Here is the crack that started it all.

Cutting out a circular hole.

Getting help from son L and daughter G.

Surveying the damage.

The top part of the following picture clearly shows the particle board that is the underside of our new roof. In the bottom part of the picture you can see some damp and moldy insulation pulled aside. The roofers took out a top layer of insulation that was wet, but apparently there was more.


Next my husband cut a square hole and pulled out all the icky insulation.



Finally he was able to make his trip to Lowe's!! Here is the new insulation going up.



And after that the new drywall, cut to fit.

Ta-da!! The new drywall in place, ready for taping, mudding, sanding and painting. Or maybe not????

Unfortunately, this last picture clearly shows how the edge of the new drywall is a good half inch lower than the rest of the ceiling. There were no wooden studs right on the edges of where the new piece of drywall went in, so there was nothing there to screw it into. This coming weekend my husband is going to take the new piece of drywall back out, insert more wooden studs, and then put it back up. This took us late into the night on Saturday, and since there was drywall dust everywhere, we put C and L to bed in our bed and we slept on our hide-a-bed in the family room.

I'm very thankful for all the hard work my husband did to get the project to this point, and I'm happy knowing that icky insulation is out from above our boys' heads. Lord willing we can complete stage 2 this coming weekend and stage 3 the weekend after that!