February

February turned out to be rather un-momentous in all aspects of life, but one--the one that has taken on an extremely prominent place in our lives over the last year. Actually, I guess you could say it has ever since we bought our first house on Emma's first birthday. If you hadn't guessed yet, it's construction--ever more major remodeling on our home. And once again, it wasn't really, fully on purpose--at least doing it in February wasn't. Due to the fact that the 50-year-old asbestos tile shingles were falling off of our house and with the construction last fall that provided us with two new walls and a new garage with no siding, we needed to get our house sided. Living in a Historic District meant that whatever we did, it needed to be approved by the Historic District Committee. We had already gone through the process to rebuild our garage and during that meeting they had told us that they would not allow vinyl siding and whole-heartedly supported HardieBoard. We knew we couldn't afford it because it runs twice as much as vinyl, so we emailed the Hardie company to get the info to show the Historic District that they were being unrealistic and they would have to allow us to do vinyl. The Hardie Rep of Utah sent two contractors to us to give us an estimate. The one that actually gave us a bid also told us he had a job in March, so could he start right away in mid-February? Well, the estimate seemed unreal because it was affordable--just slightly more than vinyl. But apparently they knew where to buy the stock for a 40 percent discount and were willing to do it for cheap because they needed some work during the off-season in a slow economy. So after calling references, doing drive-bys to see some of their work at others' houses, and getting a comparative bid that was almost $10,000 more--we decided to go with them.

That decision threw me into a frenzy of prep work: getting permits, making sure the Historic District would allow it without actually having to go in front of the committee, trying to get financing, ordering dumpsters, deciding on trim styles, should we get pre-colored or just primed, and what about the chimney? One of the ugliest things I have ever seen on the side of a person's house was this chimney. Besides, it was cracked so we couldn't use it and it had been blocked up by the previous owners because it was too expensive to fix. When we opened it, we found that it was on the brink of falling in. Also we have an old picture of the house from 1899 and discovered that the chimney had been built over the location of two old windows, which we wanted to have back again. So, we knew we wanted it down, but we had planned on being able to do it at our leisure (haha) and not when the temperatures were still going below freezing every night. But we had an offer that was too good to refuse, so Jason and I got to work and did as much as we could before they came, but they ended up having to do the majority of it--which was better and safer anyway because they had scaffolding to stand on while working. So here is the photographic journey of the demolition of our chimney.

Jason had always wanted to try his hand at jackhammering.

You can see the silhouette of where the old trim was and it was still, more or less, framed for the windows.

We had the guy who built the garage come and frame in the holes in preparation for windows.This a comparison of the old shingles with the really old wood that was underneath. We would have loved to just restore it, but there were places where it was in bad shape and where is was completely missing (including the garage).And thus began, yet another, major remodeling project! I will post more when it is finished later this week so that I can show the before and afters.