Bye-bye asbestos, hello friend

I still seem to be writing these posts for the previous weekend after we start the current weekend's projects. This week is no exception, but I'll keep what we're working on a secret for now.

We got the asbestos pulled out during the week, so first order of business was assessing the damage. We have subfloors in the kitchen and dining room (well, technically, subfloor in the kitchen and beams in the dining room. We'll have to add a new subfloor at some point.

subfloor and beams in dining room (beams only was in the section that was added on after the original house was built)

giant holes where there were knots in the board...they are holes directly into the raised foundation crawl space. We'll have to get those covered soon.

We're also short one ceiling in the living room now as well. We were worried about what that would result in but we were actually happy it happened, because it revealed that the swamp cooler pipe from the art room ceiling was just one of a network of tubes that are still in the attic, even though they are not working or connected to anything. 

the duct in the lower left corner is connected to the tubes waaaaaay in the back that you can just barely make out

we found that our range hood is nicely venting out to the back of the house, and not into the attic as we feared.

swamp cooler tubes

We had a visitor last weekend: Scott! So naturally, we put him to work. The guys started with removing the panelling in the living room, then proceeded to tackle taping off the computer room, pulling up carpet upstairs, and taking down all the kitchen cabinet doors

we're ready to tackle the panelling 

behind the panelling? More panelling!

lots of nails

luckily, behind panelling number 2 was drywall. 

removing lots of nails. and yes, i've been told that i'm hyper with the fancy mask, but i like my lungs.

lots of nails in the wall, and we discovered the panelling was all there to cover up a weird hole that was flush with the drywall.

tackling the carpet

we left the padding as a drop cloth for painting, but we will be removing that this weekend, since we won't have the drywall repaired before we need to move in.

yay! the hardwood floors are in decent shape (minus any holes from tacks, naturally.) 

cabinets, sans doors

While they were tearing down items, I was still working on the kitchen cabinets, continuing to plow through the shelf lining (which i officially hate now). After that, I moved to putting up the first coat of paint in the computer room.

found this momento in the bottom corner of the pantry cabinet...vanilla butternut cookies anyone? 

while I don't like cabinet lining, i thought the design of the instructions on the back was pretty fun! from another part of the instructions: "IT COVERS! IT DECORATES! IT PROTECTS!"

the paint color in the computer room was really hard to photograph. Its almost the same shade as the current paint, but it's a gray instead of a peachy color. 

one room, 2 brushes, 2 rollers, two paint trays, 1 gallon, 3 hours. killed it.  

removing kitchen doors

29 kitchen doors later..

our peek-a-boo cabinet

tired scott

the fridge will need to be Scott height. ...maybe slightly shorter

Holes!

First, there was a hole in our posting schedule, since I got halfway through a blog post on the mobile app, but didn't finish it and it didn't save. oops! So just in time for this weekend, I'm posting LAST weekend's adventures.

Eric went to the house a couple of times during the week to prep for the asbestos removal. That included removing the remaining grandma drapes, and unscrewing every faceplate in the house:

And then this happened last weekend:

Trench in the planter bed

BIG hole!

view of the hole that goes under the walkway and into the planter bed

The hole was not dug by us, but by the plumber who was fixing the sewer line and eliminating the multiple root intrusions from the tree on the other side of the yard. go roots.

While the plumber worked on the outside, I kept busy with (re)painting the master bedroom, to cover up the one wall of dark blue we didn't like and the rest of the white walls with a nice midtone gray:

Starting to paint over

I apparently don't like to paint with my shoes on.

I even made a friend!

When I finished the first coat of paint, I was about done with that task for the time being, so I moved on to making a mess stripping wallpaper in the art room (which I'm not supposed to be starting working on yet):

Wallpaper layers 1 + 2

The first layer came off very quickly!

And then I found layer 3. 

For now, the art room looks worse than when I started, thanks to the retro 70's wallpaper. 

From there, I moved on to something that was bugging me (literally) since the day we got the keys. All the windows in the house were cobwebby and many had dead flies lying around (ick.) So I popped out the screens and started sweeping down the window frames to get rid of all the built-up grime.

sticking my head out the window to peek at the other dormer.

I couldn't resist having some fun and sitting on the roof, since I had very easy access from the dormer that is shown above, where the two parts of the roof meet.

We did take some time off from working to celebrate my birthday and eat a LOT of food! It was yummy. When we got back to working on the house, we found a few more holes that we missed filling the first time around and filled those in, started on the second coat of paint in the master bedroom, then shifted work to the kitchen. We started pulling out all the old and dirty kitchen liners from the cabinets. We will be living with the kitchen as-is for at least a year before we make decisions on how we want to renovate it, so we plan on washing down the cabinets and adding a coat of paint for a cosmetic update to the kitchen. We plan on painting the wood white and the back wall a bright turquoise. If we think that the hollow doors won't handle putting on new hardware, then I will most likely spray them with an enamel spraypaint.

This lining is being a bit pesky and will take some extra work.

A paint scraper, some patience and a lot of ripping sounds lead to fairly easy removal of most of the linings

On Monday, the asbestos guys started their work in sealing up the house for removal. They work FAST! By lunchtime nearly every room was sealed off with plastic, and I forgot to take pictures but it is reminiscent of all the scenes in alien movies where they quarantine an area. :) By the time the gas company guy showed up to turn on our gas, everything was fully taped to the point where he couldn't turn on the gas because there was no access to the furnace. So we have to wait another week for the gas to work.

The asbestos work is done at this point, and tomorrow we get to see more holes. We will now be without flooring in the kitchen/dining room, a ceiling in the living room (too many asbestos layers), and some drywall and all the air ducts and registers that were insulated with asbestos. Photos to come.