Little House Demolition Complete

Just another "Weekend Project" around the Simoni house. 

We often laugh about the fact that our "weekend projects" are often much larger than the average project.  Moving boulders to create a retaining wall, creating a beach on the riverfront, moving an entire garden in one day, and taking down a house.  No biggie ;)  After all the work this weekend, I can say we are pretty sore, tired, and bruised up . Demoing can be fun when you picture taking a big swing at a wall gripping onto a sledge hammer...whats not as fun is picking up all of the pieces of the house you just knocked to the ground.  IT IS A TON OF WORK!   

We decided to deconstruct the house a bit before just knocking it all down to the ground.  Brandon used a pitchfork to rip off the shingles, and I hauled them to the dumpster. Then Brandon started cutting out pieces of the roof until we had most of the roof off.  

 

Roof & Attic are gone.  Now onto the walls!

 

Getting close to the end of our first day of demo.  I don't think we took many pictures after this as it was getting cold and we were burnt out.  But we did have a bonfire which made for an awesome pic at the end of the night.  

-Day 1 of  Demolition -

                                    

  We tried to take down walls as whole as we could, as we found it makes clean up a bit more efficient to pick up large pieces of drywall as opposed to lots of little pieces of drywall and having to sweep them up. And although we really tried to keep the kids and dog away from the job-site, Landon was really enjoying demoing and using his hammer to smash up the walls.  Following in our footsteps.   

One thing we always seem to do is have fun together!

Last picture of the nursery we first brought Landon home to.  It was a beautiful nursery that was so special to us,  and was hand painted. It went on to be the kids shared room once Skylar was born.

 Brandon pulling down the wall

It got dark quickly and the pictures we did take were too dark at this point.  The little light we did have was from cell phones to help get the last of the wall down.  We had such a small area left and we didn't feel it necessary to bring out the big lights.

-Day 2 of Demolition-

This hidden gem was on the kids room window sill.  Apparently this was not the first time this room was shared.  Where ever you are Megan and Kayla we'd love to share this picture with you!  Taken in 1996.

There's bound to be an accident at every job-site.  Just glad it was the mac 'n' cheese at ours. 

FINALLY, the morning after pictures!  

GONE!

Next steps, clean up the remainder of the house then rip up the floorboards as best we can (for a future project), then start filling the crawl space with clean fill to prep for concrete work in the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading our blog!  Feel free to comment, and let us know what you think!

Stay tuned!

PHASE 2 - little house

Little House Demolition

Now we start Phase 2 of our house project. Some of you may or may not remember, but we are doing this project in two phases.  The main purpose of this was so we could live in our house (one of them at a time) while we did the work on the other.  Now that we are living in "the big house" as we call it, we are ready to start the demo on "the little house".  We were able to make the big house fully functional so we could live comfortably.  The house is not completely finished, as in final floors, and trim on doors, decorated, etc... but functional.  Here are a few pictures of our demo progress.  The goal is to have the little house down over the weekend, so we can have our concrete poured for our slab within the next two weeks.


              

Landon has been very into taking pictures lately.  (We gave him an old camera, and he just snaps pics of everything.) This was a pretty good shot!

Here we are... more to come as more demoing is on it's way. Stay tuned!

Bringing you up to speed part 2

WE HAVE BEEN APPROVED TEMPORARY OCCUPANCY!  

We received a phone call from our inspector that the county has officially approved us to live in our house.  WOOHOO! Although we had started moving some items over prior to the call (those items you store in the attic like holiday decor) We definitely kicked up the speed in moving over the rest of the house after that.  

PHEW...What a relief that was, as we were not quite sure what our plan B would be if we were not granted temporary occupancy.  Although the move took a lot longer than planned, we are in and have been sleeping in the house and living fully functional for about a week now.  (again I'm a bit tardy in my update, sorry) We are also in need of some serious organization!  TIME is what we need now! 

       The kids old closet... 

   ...The kids NEW closet

A few more pics of our very unorganized house. Calling all organizing experts! HELP! ;)

NEXT STEPS, little house DEMOLITION!!

Bringing you up to speed part 1

It seems to be that once we get busy with the house, and all hands are on deck, the blog tends to fall behind.  My apologies!  

Let's bring you up to speed!

                               

On the left is the hole that had to be drilled through the wall of the foundation so we could slip the pipe for waste to be pumped to the septic.  Right is the installed pipe. (and it works!)  

This picture may not look that exciting, but it's very exciting to us.  The dirt smoothed out again and grass seed spread shows where we had to dig to connect our house to the septic! This means everything is fully functional. Toilets, sinks, showers, etc. Yay!

Picture of the house, and what the landscaping is starting to look like.

Moving of our boxwood bushes so we can re-plant them in a new location so they will survive while we take the house down. 

So far they seem to like their new location by  the stone garage, they might just stay.

Emptying the house was a bigger task than it seemed.  For such a small house, this took a lot longer than expected.  I don't seem to have a ton of pictures of this task as I feel like we were just go go go, and didn't really hit pause to capture the moments...

Inspection Day

Good Morning!

I'm sitting here enjoying a cup of coffee working on a new blog post, but more importantly I'm waiting for our inspector to come and give us the go ahead to move in!  Cross your fingers and say a little prayer that all goes well and we can move in!   More to come soon! Stay tuned, and don't be shy to post a comment. We love to see who's following us!  

Also, do you see what just arrived? My dad's book!!! If you haven't gotten your copy yet, you can find it on Amazon!