Another Project

David, one of my nephews, likes to build things to save money. He is building his own airplane, which I hope he will finish before I am too old to go up for a flight. Like me, he also likes to work on houses. He has an old house, one of the first built in his subdivision. A year ago he put in new landscaping and touched up the house and tried to sell it, but no one was interested  as it really was in no shape to sell and needed a huge amount of work; like a new roof, new windows, and some other rather major renovations.

Let’s begin with the front of the house and show three pictures of what it was like August 19, 2009 after he tore out the old landscaping and put in new.

The above picture is the left front corner.

It seems rather strange that a house would have two main front entrances, with an additional one into the garage. David is going to eliminate the right front entrance and reuse the space.

The above picture shows the garage end of the house.

Before I arrived on July 21, 2010, David had put a new roof on the house, rebuilt the chimney, removed some of the brick from the side walls, - Removing brick from an old house is not normally done, but in this case it was a good choice. – installed a new door and window on the front side of the garage, and put new siding on the garage. The garage end of the house now looks brand new.

In addition to removing the brick from the front of the house he removed both front porches and created quite a pile to be trucked away later. Someone has already asked for the old brick and porch concrete for fill and will truck it away.

The right front entry was removed and the corner of the house was built out to make the two walls straight. The old entryway and the space from the old porch were added to an old half bath to provide enough space for a nice full bath and a laundry room. In place of the door, a window to the laundry area was installed. 

This is where I entered the project. After taking Zuhua to the airport in Chicago, I continued on to Batavia, NY, to provide a helping hand for three weeks. When I went to work that first day I found there were piles of brick to be moved, brick anchors to be removed from the wall, tarpaper to be taken down that was behind the brick, and nails to be pulled that held the tarpaper on. We got that done and still had time to remove the left front window, cover the left front of the house with a moisture barrier and install the new window, as seen below.

That leaves two windows and a door to do on another day.