Long Weekend

We had a heck of a holiday weekend, in the best kind of way!  We both took off Friday to extend the long weekend even more and get 4 good working days in at the house. (I somehow got out of working on Friday, though.)

Day 1: Friday

Charlie came over again to help Lee with the header (translation: the long thick thingy that goes up against the top of your wall so you can remove the wall under it for an open floor plan).

 This is the actual header:

 Bracing to support the wall as they were putting the header in:

 There she is!!  A nice wide opening between the living room/dining room & the kitchen:

The end result:

While Lee and Charlie were busy doing that, I took advantage of my free day and decided I was in the mood for some frozen yogurt - and I knew just who to call...

Day 2: Saturday

Day 2 was full of odds and ends.  Lee braced up the floor of the 2nd bathroom a bit, I spent a lot of the day cleaning up bits and pieces of junk that were scattered everywhere (especially under the house) since we were getting ready to cover it up once and for all.  Then we were able to get started a bit on the rest of the subfloor.

Day 3: Sunday

Sunday and Monday were the true definitions of "sweat equity".  We spend Sunday laying the remainder of the subfloor.

When we started it looked like this:

And when we finished it looked like this:

Uh. May. Zing. It feels so good to have a solid floor beneath our feet, it's almost starting to resemble a house again!

Day 4: Monday

Margie (Lee's mom) has been wanting to help for a while, and Monday was the perfect day for her to help out.  I didn't get any good progress pictures that day because we were too busy working, but the house was full of nails.  Nails lining the wall studs, attic joists, floor joists - nails EVERYWHERE.  Not to mention in the master bedroom there used to be carpet, which means there were rows of staples and nails around the perimeter of the room and going across the middle of the floor. 

Margie and I worked most of the morning on popping up all the staples and pulling them one by one with pliers.  While we were doing that, Charlie was working on pulling nails in the kitchen/spare room and Lee decided it was finally time to take down the ceiling fans and lights that were hanging from the attic joists. 

Then that afternoon it was a team effort of pulling the rest of the nails throughout the house - big job, dirty work, hot conditions. But, it's done!  Done. Clean. Smooth. Ready to go.  We felt such accomplishment after this long weekend and are thrilled with where we are at in this whole process.  I don't have any before and after pictures for this small stuff, but I do have a couple photos of our special helpers for the day:

 

So, in summary... over the 4 days Lee put in 36 hours and over 3 days I put in 26 hours.  Whew.  Great weekend, though!