Moving On Up

Yup, we're working on the second floor now. We have moved our bedroom into one of the back rooms, stuffed the bathroom with extra stuff (including the two spare beds), and emptied out the two front bedrooms.

Then came the sledgehammers. Well, not quite, but you get the idea. We tackled the master bedroom first.

Part of that involved taking out the one window. To fix the problem from the outside, we mounted this quilt square that I made last year:

Yup, I have a maple leaf block on my house. I love it.

You know we always find head-scratchers when we take stuff apart around here, so look at the window:

 Notice anything?

Ok, it may be a little hard to notice since the picture was taken after Troy fixed it and squirted insulation everywhere, but there was no header on the window opening. There are some pieces of wood that go across the top, but it's not a header. They just span the space between each stud. Crazy.

And the closets:

Why build a frame when you want to add a doorway? Just cut the stud and put some trim around the opening. Craziness. (In the master bedroom that was done in a load-bearing wall.)

We also found some wasp nests:

That's a paper wasp nest on the left, and I guess a "regular" wasp nest on the right. Troy took one out for a closer inspection:

Just what you want to find in your walls, right? These appeared to be old. I think we sealed up the entrances when we did work on the outside a few years ago.

Once that bedroom was done, we moved onto the west bedroom which will turn into our closet and bath. I finished all but one last small section of wall today:

 It was very exciting to me to open up the wall between the two rooms.

And today I enjoyed opening up what was the closet space. Fortunately, we're going to be able to take out that wall because it is not load bearing. Although the layout is not finalized, I'm pretty sure that will be my bathtub/shower one day. (That is what is motivating me through this--my mantra of "master bath. master bath.")

All this work upstairs has made a mess downstairs. Unlike modern houses where the different floors are separated from each other, this house is "balloon framed" so there is one continuous space between the studs from bottom to top. So we have a lot of plaster falling down through those holes. These holes in the closet run along the stairs and go right through to the basement I believe:

At some point we are going to have to remove these doors, frames, etc.:

Hmm...adding one more door would make
this the Tardis (inside out).

That space will become part of the room. I think it looks funny from inside the rooms now that they are all one space:

Closet and spare bedroom doors.

Spare bedroom and master bedroom doors.

Maybe it looks more like the Tardis from this side. (Anyone got some blue paint?)

I also was amused to see this extension cord still carefully threading its way through the doorways.

We have a lot of lathe and plaster piled up behind the house. Troy found a dump that will let him unload it by the pickup truck load. Much better than putting it in trash cans!!