Just a Little Blue House

before we started anything!

Our house is getting to the point of a face lift rather than a root canal now! By that terrible analogy I mean that anyone can walk into our house now and actually see what we’ve been up to rather than us having to convince people we’ve really and truly have been slaving away during all our weekend extravaganzas. Lately we’ve been doing things like framing out new closets and adding all the electrical work, so unless we show people they can actually turn the switches on and off and the light bulbs correspondingly go on and off (we hope) it kind-of looks like we’ve been working. Anyway, we have been working hard!

We decided it was spring cleaning time. We had tools, materials, and who even knows what else piled so high in one of the bedrooms it looked like we were about ready to have a bonfire. It was a mess. So we started late Friday afternoon with throwing everything off the balcony into another pile below. Maybe not the best approach ever, but it was rather cathartic chunking our junk. So we threw it all away as I would like to think, but its actually sitting in its third (haha) pile now waiting to be dumped (we’ll get to it eventually, right?)

Well, I got to sweep after that which makes me happy because its makes everything so nice and clean as our house can possibly be! Really, its counterproductive, but meh, it makes me feel better.

With all those ramblings, the BIG change we had this weekend was upgrading a normal door and window for a beautiful 6 ft. sliding glass door! It makes for a seriously pretty view onto the balcony. For those of your who don’t know- this balcony is connected to the master bedroom and about the full length of the room, a feature I quite like!

Problem #1 with this project, the door is beautiful, but huge and heavy…. So, me and Kellan- great team that we are – can’t lift the door with just the two of us and couldn’t fit it in the back of his truck because you can’t lay it down, it has to be upright however you transport it. Well, through Kellan’s company they have a 1-ton truck, which was unfortunately in the shop… Ergo we got it delivered- which was actually a great deal since the delivery rate is flat and so we tacked on 26 more sheets of sheetrock (the stuff that is 70 lb. each- hallelujah).

Problem #2- we still have to get the 210 lb. door from the ground to the balcony, uh huh. UH HUH. I like the role of cheerleader in times such as these! Well, thanks to Kellan’s guys- the five of them hoisted the big lug onto the deck- and were successful! Woo hoo!

Creation of the hole in progress!

After all that, the construction seemed really easy. There was an existing door and window in the space where the door was going, so before we got the door and everything, me and Kellan knocked those out and all the crappy framing that went along with it. The guy who built the place had some really interesting “techniques”?… Anyway, that was a fairly simple process which messed up my beautifully swept floors (sigh) haha just kidding. The hard part was putting the new header in place. The thing  was 6 ft long and who knows how many pounds. It’s a 2×12x72 board nailed to another of the same size and it makes the walls structurally sound. All that to say, we successfully lifted it into place, added the door in the hole, and enjoyed our new vista!!

Ta-da!!!!

Great weekend overall- we got working on the sheetrock afterwards and coated the floors with some more dust….

Oh well! Such is the sweet life!

We like it a lot

No worries things are fantastic in the Little Blue House! The venting I am referring to is the next major obstacle in renovating our kitchen! The previous owner/builder/designer anticipated building an addition which included a kitchen and living room. While I think it would basically work, we decided to do something differently. What was originally intended to be the laundry room will be converted into a full kitchen. One of the first things I did with the house was to flip around some of the plumbing so the washing machine could be located in a space in the bathroom. The dryer however is a much more tricky proposition.

The before-ish shot. We have the dryer pulled out to evaluate what we need to do

In order to allow the hot air, water and lint from a dryer to not build up inside, you have to vent the dryer to the exterior of the house. While this can be a simple job, there are a couple of complications with this idea. First of all by code you may not use a flexible vent line (used to be super common) to run through the ceiling etc. Secondly you may not use more than 25′ of rigid venting from the dryer to the outside vent. You also must deduct 5′ for every 90 degree elbow joint you use. Now if your dryer is on an exterior wall this is no issue whatsoever. If you are in a single story house this is also not a big deal. In the case of the LBH however it is a two story structure with the washroom towards the center of the floor plan and lacking any forethought from the previous owner of how he would vent anything like the AC or bathroom fan.

What made matters even worse is the fact that the owner tried to cantilever part of the master bedroom balcony by switching the directions of the ceiling joists and adding a structural beam. It might have worked had he known the right proportions needed to create something like that but alas, the balcony had to be supported anyway and the ceiling joists are all messed up. After standing in the future laundry area scratching my head for about an hour I determined there was only one possible way to go and that was definitely pushing the length restriction.

So I set to work installing the vent. One of the first things you have to do is assemble the vent tubing by rolling them up so the edges come together then kinda pushing down on the seam in order to wedge the tab side into the slot side. This actually proved slightly tricky at first to get the hang of but I got it. I then proceeded to drill/cut holes in the rafter blocking and then after a little bit of a second thought, cut a 4.5″ hole in the side of my house! Talk about not being able to go back on something…I found a very nice quality rigid dryer vent that actually looks pretty good so I installed that from the outside of the house through the aforementioned new 4.5″ window in the side of our home. From the inside I decided to put a downward slope in the vent pipe in order to create a bit of drainage in case water ever condenses within the vent which I thought made a lot of sense. After my slopes were all set I assembled 15′ of the vent pipe and used band clamps to secure them then taped up all the seams and connections with TRUE duct tape. True duct tape is actually a foil tape that works a lot better than the plastic stuff, at least for sealing up vent pipes.

Clamped and taped dryer vent!

After some careful maneuvering and making an effort not to knock things off of our shelves by swinging around a 15′x4″ vent, I managed to slide the vent up through the proper ceiling joists, through the blocking and into the receiving tube on the outside vent. Success! From the laundry room side of things i had to cut part of the vent short, add a 90 degree elbow (also taped and clamped) and then run another 5′ of solid pipe down to the center of the dryer’s spot. Success! The vent pretty much lined up perfectly. I proceeded to use plumbers tape/strapping to secure and hang the vent in the ceiling as well as secure it to the wall a bit. While I dont’ have any photo of the finished product result, we ended up using 2′ of flex pipe just to make the connection to the dryer a lot easier.

The downward portion that runs to the dryer.

Voila! We have a vent! We will eventually be running some sort of chase around it to hide things but for now it is completely functional. We also had to run a new 220V cable/breaker/dryer receptacle so that our shabby dryer will at least have some electricity to use (probably a good thing…) The dryer was moved successfully and we are very pleased that we are making some progress in the laundry room-to-kitchen conversion. One negative was the fact that we lost some counter space (the dryer top) in our makeshift kitchen but I think we’ll get over it!

Such a tragedy. All our displaced STUFF!

So, that is it for now BUT have no fear, we will updating a lot more frequently in the coming months. We have lots of news and projects to share. On a further note, thank you so much for everyone being so supportive throughout our wedding. You made our wedding so incredibly special and we feel humbled to have such a great group of family and friends.

Till next time…

Kellan and Rebekah Vincent