After delays for updated FEMA maps, a divorce, the rona, and shortages I finally have a rough start date for when the last big project at home is going to start. Looks like it'll be the beginning of February. This one is going to be big, so here's the details.

Here's a drawing of the house as it currently is.



This project will rebuild just about everything from line #4 to the right. The only things to the left that will be touched are a few windows to be replaced/opening enlarged, replacing the deck, and closing off where the front door is right now and turning it into a wet bar area.

Here's what the floorplan will look afterwords.

• The entrance to the house is moving to the room at the bottom/center of the drawing. It will have double 8' doors and high trapezoidal windows above them.
• 125 gallon aquarium (6'W x 21"H x 21"D) will go in the wall between the foyer and den. It's obviously thicker than a wall so the remaining 16" will be on some built in bookshelves in the den.
• The den (above the entrance) is currently shaped like home plate, it was the original garage and offset from the house at a 45 degree angle from the rest of the house. It's getting squared off so the room can actually be used for something.
• Weatherhead and meter currently located at front of house where the entrance will be will be relocated to the side of the garage, run from the pole to house will be buried.
• The garage is getting some repairs and improvements. It was added as a ~900 sq ft carport and later converted to a garage in 1979. Trusses running the width of the room are not designed to be garage door attachment points, bad tie-in with the rest of the house and some wood rot fixed, big electrical upgrade + HVAC.
• The roof + rafters, floor and ceiling joists everywhere except the garage are being removed and replaced with an improved design. It's a train wreck where the original house + 2 additions all come together and this is the easiest way to straighten out that mess. This is the new design.

This means some huge changes to the front and rear elevation but I'll save that for the next post.

Everything's basically ready to go on this once windows are picked out. They're what defines the entire timeline for this project and I'm supposed to hear back about those early this week. I'll be glad to see this mess finally get started soon!

Congrats on still having money after a divorce!

Milwaukees Best Light said:

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Congrats on still having money after a divorce!

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Having custody of the kids changes a lot of the math that people are used to hearing about. She still got an enormous amount. A rental in a red hot part of town + well over 6 figures cash. I kept this place and my retirement.

South Carolina is different from Texas in that pre-marital assets go with whoever's they were beforehand unless commingled during the marriage. That helped out a ton when it came to retirement and pension accounts.

Demo starts today. I wish I was able to keep the garage this empty all the time!

Oops, for some reason I thought I'd updated here more recently.

The first stage of demo is done, that's anything that can be taken care of without removing the roof or otherwise making the place no longer relatively water tight.

Den looking into future foyer is pic #1. The new front doors will go where the windows are. This is the room that was raised in the late '70s when the garage was converted so they had space to run the water lines, power, and drain for the W/D and water heater. All kinds of cool flooring was still in place down there. The floor will be built back up to the same height as the rest of the place during the project and I'm keeping the water/drain lines in place for a garage sink.



The perimeter of the foundation for the den expansion has been dug along with everywhere else, and rebar is in place. It's supposed to be inspected either later today or early tomorrow. All the talk about squaring the den of with the rest of the house may have been a little hard to follow so maybe this helps some.



More back yard stuff, this time for the deck. The back door is the only one that's even close to being usable right now. The kids and I move to a trailer in the front yard later today.



The garage is picking up a couple of columns. It was either this or multiple 30+' foot long pieces of steel that would've cost who knows how much. They won't be very intrusive and I can run conduit and air lines on them.



New front doors go here. The orange outlines the concrete landing / two stairs to get up to them. The roof for this lower section is coming off and completely change shape. It'll all make more sense in a month or two.



This is now where the front door *was*. It was really fun watching them remove the landing. The sidewalk running to the street was actually built on top of an old sidewalk that wasn't high enough with the rest of the yard so the total thickness was around 7". I don't think the builder believed me when I said it was going to open up to the crawlspace but there it is. I'm going to take advantage of the easy access down there to run lan cable to the office and den from the media closet.

The wall with the address sign will be extended to the left so the house will pick up a couple or three sq ft. This is where a wet bar of some kind will go.

More to come, there's a lot of activity going on this week!

Roof demo is upon us and there's a lot going on right now. This is how it looked at the end of the day yesterday. One really stupid thing that you can see is how when they added the garage as a carport in the '60s they just attached the rafters to the side of a fascia board on what was the eve of a roof. That's the part of the roof that felt especially unstable whenever I'd go up there.

We're up to 4 different kinds of shingles covered up by people adding stuff over the years. A light colored gray/off white -> something with green, brown, and gray granules -> brown -> the current dark gray stuff put on 20 years ago that makes the attic super hot.

We've come a long way in the last dozen days. Right now rafters are going up, walls in work, and it looks like they're working on tying the rafters on the right side of the entrance to the roof over the garage.

So far so good with the rain. Only one leak and it was minor. It's great seeing these big piles of lumber in the back yard start to melt away!

Next up is plumbing, pretreating for termites around the inaccessible crawlspace, and getting the subfloor in.

The place is finally dried in. The new roof is a really light silver, basically the whitest color available for evergy savings. The A/C runs noticably less and the garage is cooler so it seems like a good call.

People did a bad job tarping the roof last week and water came in, so I'll get new insulation and maybe the floor refinished in the area with the round table. I was around to mitigate damages immediately and all of a sudden the builder is very glad that I'm still here because otherwise nobody would've caught the situation for days.

Subfloor is in and the foyer/garage wall is being framed along with den exterior walls. We're working towards windows right now.