Visible Changes
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