This N’ That

This week, the contractors (very slowly) continued their work on the sunroom. The framing and supports are complete, but the windows and sliding door have yet to be installed. There was also some work completed on the exterior of the house. The gutters are removed in preparation for the new roof. They must have weighed a ton, because they hadn’t been cleaned out in years. The exterior painting was also done. The doors, trim, soffits, garage doors, and front porch ceiling all look much nicer than they did before. However, the roof will have to wait until the six inches of snow melts.

The most exciting event this week was the removal of the “mudroom” covering the back porch. In the beginning, we were only going to remove the small roof above the porch to make space for the painters. We used the reciprocating saw to cut through the roof, but it was a little sturdier than we expected. After an hour and two saw blades, we decided it would be easier just to remove the whole thing. So, we just kicked out the bottom, where it attached to the concrete, and threw it to the side. The reason why the saw could not easily cut through the roof was the six layers of shingles on top!



Over the weekend we started preparing the kitchen for the remodel. We moved the old appliances, cabinets and countertops downstairs. We removed the ceramic tile in the kitchen which was very tough. Under the ceramic are two layers of old tile. We don’t yet know if these are asbestos but we need to get someone to test them before we try to remove them.


The other work we did was to prepare for refinishing the floors and painting. This included removing all the molding and applying drywall compound to fix small holes in the walls.