My, have things changed!

We've gone a long time without working on this house at all.  But in recent days we decided on a bold new plan, a plan that drastically reduces out cost of pulling this together.......

 For quite a while, years, a small area of the second floor was removed for a vaulted ceiling.  It was in the middle of the house and likely would have been the entry or the dining area.

This is from outside after the windows were removed.  I can't tell ya how looong I have been wanting to see that happen.

 Here in another angle during the progress of removing more floor!

The ceiling above the dining room when it was still there.

 process......

The new upstairs will have a master bedroom and loft where the home office will be.

A little rest for the weary......

a couple of pictures from different angles.  3/4 of the upstairs floor is now gone!

You can see the dining room from up above here.

3 years later.....Let me correct that~it has been 4 years! and 5 months since we bought this place!

A little more than three years ago we bought this house.  It's been slow going!  We haven't done anything to the house for a little over a year!  But this past week we resumed work and hope to keep on a roll for the winter if we can.  Here's a peek at what we are working on now.

 We are enclosing the front porch to enlarge the house.  It will extend the living area 8 feet across the front of the house.  I'll put some more pictures but I hadn't posted in so long I couldn't wait!

rebuilding the front porch

We found it necessary to rebuild the front porch too, really annoying when so much has to be torn out to sort of start from scratch. Once the wood floor of the porch was removed the blocks could be pushed right over with hardly any effort at all. So this meant take them all down and put them back up. We will close this in and it will become part of the living room and kitchen, we plan to put a new porch beyond this one later. Getting this restructured now before winter is important to us because then we can enclose it and work on the living space inside this winter.

new framing

This shows some new framing in the back of the upstairs. The roof was sagging badly so Bruce "beefed it up" a little bit.