Top Down....Or Bottom Up?

Now that the pantry is finished, my husband and I were discussing what would be the next project. This resulted in a lot of overlapping and complications. 

• If we start on the downstairs bathroom, we have to fix the upstairs bathrooms pipes, since they are interfering with our ceiling in the downstairs bathroom. 
• If we build the missing wall between the kitchen and dining room, we may have to rebuild it down the road to add the master bathroom upstairs (the pipes will most likely need to be run through that new wall).
• If we finish the basement stairs the way we want, they are at risk for getting damaged and needing to be redone since we will be using the basement as our workspace (this was awesome while working on the pantry, by the way).

I'm of the mind to just work on the downstairs first, since it is already torn up quite a bit. On the other hand, I really don't want to have to do any of the work twice. Complicating matters, my husband wants to rewire the entire house. Thus far, we have found:

• new electrical cables wired into old cloth insulated wires; 
• fake outlets (meaning the outlets are there, but nothing is connected to them. What?);
• really weird circuits (like the bathroom all on its own except for the kitchen overhead light);
• we have a jump box in the master bedroom from when the house was converted into a duplex (and the jump cable runs from the basement to our bedroom along the exposed chimney. Great.);
• and old circuits that someone decided to just leave hidden in the ceiling, light fixtures, cabling and all.

We have removed all the drywall ceilings. The downstairs walls are primarily drywall, with a really nasty plaster technique on them that I really don't like at all. So these all need to be redone. I suggested to my husband that we just take the drywall down and flip it so that we have a smooth side to work with. Apparently this is not a feasible option. Sigh.

Upstairs, everything is the original lath and plaster, except for the girl's bedroom. Someone thought that rather than fix or replace the crumbling plaster, that it would be better to just put drywall on top. This means that all the moulding is now flush with the walls. Oh yeah....one more thing....they actually textured the woodwork with plaster. Like that was going to hide the fact that they put drywall on top of lath and plaster without adjusting the woodwork. Yeah, well, that did not work.

The upstairs is also not insulated very well, if at all. We can really notice the difference now that we have added a door to the bottom of the stairs. We are talking about a difference of at least ten degrees, if not more. Since we keep our thermostat set at 68, that means it can get cold at night.

So, back to our discussion. Upstairs? Or downstairs? Or upstairs.

I think maybe upstairs. We could insulate the rooms, reuse the original woodwork, refinish the floors. Yep. Our only cost will be disposal of all the lath and plaster, the cost of the insulation, and of course drywall. And paint. And stain. And shellack. And drywall screws. And we would have to rent a sander. And a drywall lift. Yep. This house is never going to get done.....

One Step Forward....And Two Steps Back

Ah, Mondays! Initially, I was really looking forward to this evening. Instead of taking something apart, we were actually going to start work on reconstructing the basement stairs. The plan is to build some doors for under stair storage and a closet. Plus, we were going to add balusters, 32 of them, that we were going to make ourselves out of some of the wood that we removed when we took down the paneling.

Our basement stairs get a lot of traffic and are not made of any really nice wood. Our plan is to paint the treads a nice dark, warm mahogany brown with white risers and balusters, topped with a painted banister the same warm brown.

This picture most closely represents what we are envisioning. Something with nice clean lines, but that can handle a lot of wear and tear. I was so excited because I felt as though we were going to move from destructive to constructive....but then I came downstairs to this....

 

At our house, Monday is laundry day....and so is Tuesday and Wednesday for that matter. With a family as large as ours, combined with children that change outfits at the drop of a hat, I seem to have a never-ending supply of laundry. Unfortunately, laundry is currently on hold.  A quick look prior to running out the door for work this morning led my husband to believe that the rubber coupling (?) that joins the original clay sewer pipe to the modern PVC pipe is failing. But he's not sure and won't know until he looks at it closer. After work. Tonight. And he has to work later than usual.

So now I cringe every time a toilet flushes, or we use the sinks, or, actually, anything that requires us to use water. Apparently, the clay pipe is the main sewer line for the house. Which means two toilets, one tub, three sinks and the washer are now on a limited use basis.

Great.

Just great.