Since winter is here - let's insulate!

Well when you have nothing but a house frame you can imagine its pretty cold in a house. Especially in the dead of winter in Michigan. After we tore everything down and all the framing was in place, it was time to INSULATE! This was fun. We chose to go with insolation that is basically an expanding foam. It goes in and expands to fit in every nook and cranny in the wall. This means no air is escaping and no critters are getting in. Troy was happy about this since, you know, bats.

It was pretty incredible how quiet the house became. and how WARM it got, pretty quickly! We were so excited to see the walls start to close in, so to speak. Next step - drywall!! 

Framing!!!!

We knew we would need some new supports going up - just had no idea it would be this much! Our contractor put in new supports almost everywhere. We had to put in floor supports in the basement and basically build new walls upstairs separating the two bedrooms ((you could knock it down if you pushed hard enough). We put in a new closet area and widened the ceiling heading into the dining room. We also rose the stairway doorway a ton. Troy & my dad literally hit their heads on that so it was a must!

At this point I was so excited that we decided to take all the walls in the house down & do all this work NOW. I couldn't even imagine living in the house & trying to do all this work. I thank you water damage above the chimney for getting all this going!

The amount of walls that needed to repaired and beams that needed to be replaced was incredible. Not that the house would have fallen down by any means but holy crap there were a lot of things wrong with the bones. We were starting to see the house build back up again, which was really fun to watch especially knowing we put in all that work to get to this point!