Filling Crawl Space

Filling Crawl Space

In this update, you'll see Brandon is using a Bobcat to bring fill into the crawl space so we can eventually pour our concrete slab and start building the second side of our house. For those of you who didn't know, or forgot, we still have a whole other side of the house to build.  Last fall was the side with the bedrooms, bathrooms, laundry, basement, etc.  This fall is the side of the house with kitchen, dining, and living room, as well as the entry way and courtyard area will be started.  Below is a picture of the fill that we had dumped on our street side yard when our street was done over the summer.  Our street was paved for the first time ever this past July and they had to take about an inch of the material off to prep the road.  This ended up being a Win Win for all, because the county would have needed to haul the fill out and bring it somewhere else to dump it, using large trucks and having to pay for haul away fees etc.  As you see it was excellent for us as we would be needing fill this fall to fill in the crawl space once we demoed the house.  WIN WIN!    

We have made a big dent in the pile. We only had the bobcat for a 3 hour rental, so we weren't able to finish the project completely, but finished what we needed to, to prep for concrete.   I don't have a before picture but the pile stretched from one side to the other of the picture on the right. 

ONE LUCKY KID! He is getting to ride on all of these "toys" that we keep renting! Fun to watch them work together, and see their smiles.   

Kids making "snow" angels out of gravel.  They always seem to find fun at the job-site. HA!

Clean up!

Clean up day!

Although its great that the house is down, we still had a lot of clean up work ahead of us to do.  The next few days we spent cutting up large pieces of the wood floor, filling up our dumpster, and trying to clean up around the house the best we could.  Suns out guns out! HA! 

 

Working into the dark once again.  We really try to pack as much as we can into one day.  Then we get up and do it again until it's complete. 

I think I see a few more spots we could fill! :) We have officially only used one dumpster for this house demo. Impressive if you ask me. We really know how to pack them efficiently.

 Now, let's get this outta here...Ready for pick up! 

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!