Sweeeet :)

Appreciation from the neighbor I helped roof a few weekends back.
He saw me admiring his knife and knew I liked using it, so he bought me one! What a guy!

Burnout..

I don’t know if it’s waiting on my electrical contractor, haggling with my roofer, or arguing with my “roommates,” but I’m getting burnt out..

As for updates: As you could see in the last post, the garage is enclosed and being used pretty extensively. The dormers I wrote about didn’t pan out for a number of reasons, the most important being that I can’t stand it when some aspect of a house stands out in a bad way. You know that house you drive by and think, “Wow, that little window on that BIG wall?” Or, “That _______ looks really out of place with the style of the rest of the house.”

I still really think a couple dormers would look good with the house. The problems we ran into pertain more to the pitch of the new roof than to the dormers themselves. As we ‘mocked up’ our dormer project, we found that in order to make the “face” of the dormers as big as I wanted them, pretty much everything else would have to look really bad. One of my trusty volunteers described the effect you see sometimes where the dormers jut out so far that there ends up being mini-hallways protruding from the roofline. Not only that, but then I’d have to buy windows to go in the dormers, and that decision was not one I wanted to make in a hurry. The whole thing could have been smoother had I bought the steeper 7-pitch trusses vs. the 6-pitch that I bought. Price difference: $200 per truss x 21 trusses. No thanks.

Long story short: shingles went on the garage without dormers. I can always add them later, though it will take a little more effort.

Which brings me to the issue of the shingles. I’m happy with the actual shingle I picked – it’s a good mix of black, grey, brown, and blue (if that makes sense) so it will hopefully go with anything. It’s the work that I am not happy with.. in retrospect.

Initially, I was in what you could call a honeymoon period with my new roof. I was just so dang happy to have it! Once the rose-colored glasses came off, I started adding things up. Not only was the end cost noticeably higher than the bid (with extra charges for nails and other materials that one might assume would be included), but the yard was a mess as was the house itself. Then, to top it all off, I have to pay for the dumpster they filled with the scraps. Again, you might assume this would have been included..

This is another reason I feel like absolute crap for hiring people I don’t know from out of town – there’s no accountability.. I traded that for a big, fancy crew that could slap a roof on in a short amount of time for less money than a local. Both of which turned out to be untrue. I’m disgusted with them, and with myself for going against my gut instinct.

As for new updates, I had soffit and fascia delivered the other day. That will finally close the gap between the top of the walls and the edge of the roof. I’ve decided on a siding material – I’m going to spring for the slightly more expensive cement board in exchange for spreading the siding project out over this year and next. That way I’ll get the new construction and a good portion of the back of the house covered in new siding, and I’ll take care of the front half – which is more labor-intensive – next year when I have the money to do so.

Oh, joy!

Shingles, garage doors, and other cool stuff

Since the last installment, we’ve made some pretty noticeable progress, I’d say!

First, the roofers are nearly done! In fact, they should be finishing as I write this..

Before..

That process proved to take a bit longer than anticipated – not only were there several layers to tear off the steep roof in the front of the house, but one of the crew members had a family emergency and the entire crew was unable to work for a couple days. I can’t complain about that..because I have a soul. Luckily for us, the weather has been absolutely terrific and I’m not the slightest bit worried. My mother, on the other hand, seems to think that I will be the coziest little bat hotel in the tri-county area. I had no idea how deathly afraid of bats the women around me are until we started this project, but we’re working through it.

Working away..

Nearly done!

Snazzy recycled garage door.

With the roof nearly complete – and a snazzy new/recycled-from-the-old-garage-garage door in place – our work on the house will really fly from here. We can use the garage space to its fullest potential now – storage, workshop, shelter, etc. My dad is already planning for the workshop he’s putting together out there. The joke is that once the house is finished, I won’t actually be able to park in my own garage because he’ll have it so filled with table saws and planers that I’ll end up in the street. We all make sacrifices. J

Inside the house, we’re building walls! Not only are we stiffening and restructuring some of the existing walls, we’re also tweaking things slightly, making spaces more workable, and improving the wiring, plumbing, and insulation along the way. It shouldn’t be too long before there’s new drywall hanging back here – who knows..maybe one day I’ll get to live here?

Removing the old windows between the laundry and the garage.

...and installing a door!

First batch of carpet coming up. Stay tuned for more!

Garage Roof Update

Just a quick note to show our progress from last night - sheathing on the garage!

Notice the East gable end toward the left, here. The pitch of the dormers should match the pitch of that peak.

As I said last time, the roofers should be here (and gone) before the end of the week. We'll actually be shingling the garage ourselves since the dormers won't be in place before the roofing crew gets here to do it.

We're going to mock up different shapes and sizes for the dormers - the idea at this point is to match the pitch of the dormer with the pitch of the East gable end seen in the picture above. The hope is that the addition will look more cohesive that way instead of 'tacked on.'

Fun, fun! Come back often - lots of updating to see!

Cats on a Hot, Steep Roof

It’s been a busy couple of days!

Late last week we started the process of removing the layers of old shingles from the back side of the highest ridge. From the beginning, the plan has been to reconfigure the pitch of the roof to make it not only more attractive, but more viable in the long-term. Parts of the roof back there had rotted over time as water seeped where it should not have - this should help with that!

So, with the help of friends and family, we started tearing into the house. Gray, light-gray, darker gray, green, and Cedar shake waited there to be pried off, thrown down, and hauled away. Once the steeply pitched sheathing had been removed, we concentrated on the flat/shed roof segments over the bathroom and the kitchen. Remember, the kitchen and bath were added on after the original construction of the house and several years apart from one another, so those sections were at different heights and used slightly different materials in their construction. Either way, we tore into them J

Layers of Shingles: REMOVED!

Busy place..

While on the roof, we decided that only the bathroom roof would actually need to be completely removed to make way for the new trusses. After working in the sun ripping, tearing, lifting and prying, I don’t blame the guys at all for making the decision to leave the kitchen roof in place.

Looking up through my bathroom "skylight"

Half tempted to leave the bedroom like this..

With the work nearly done removing the existing roof, our master carpenter (I refer to him as a “Goddamn Genius” at least twice a day) set out building up the walls that would support the new roof. With those sections level and square, we were free to drag the new trusses into place! Once this part started, things actually progressed really quickly.

Building the short walls for the new trusses.

Walls in place.

We carried the trusses from their spot in the front yard all the way around back to the north wall of the garage. They rested there until needed. We then lifted them up to the Genius who drug them along the top of the garage walls, onto the new house walls, and nailed them into place with help from Dad and another friend. Like I said in an earlier post: this is how we know we have great friends!

The overhang is technically called the rake, and it matches the depth of the original house.

Everything was moving along nicely until people started talking about the weather. Pesky weather. The driveway side of the roof was completely covered in plywood and partially covered with tar paper. The west side of the house, however, was only a third of the way covered with plywood…and that’s when the rain came.

We ran around grabbing tarps, hammers and nails and secured the tarps as best we could to keep the inside as dry as possible – though, I’m not sure you could hurt anything in there at this point.

Bedroom view from the laundry.

We decided to call it quits and reconvene the next day.

…And that’s when the rain stopped. Out of nowhere, a storm the size of West Virginia disappeared. Of course, we took what time we had to nap and recharge our batteries a little. My mom – the Goalsetter, as we’re calling her – rallied the troops and we were able to finish sheathing and tar papering the remainder of the roof and closing the holes we made when building the wall.

Good progress, right?! There's more!

Last night we met up after work and set the garage trusses in place, too. The consensus is: my house now looks gigantic.

Dormers still to come!

We’ll have more work ahead of us in the coming days. The roofers are coming soon, and we’ll be building a pair of dormers on the driveway side of the garage. Things really are shaping up!

It’s raining again today – check back in a few, and I’ll have more details!

Playing Catch Up

Hello again!

In the time I’ve taken between updates, we’ve hit a stall in our progress. At the moment, we’re waiting on a coordinated effort among the cement contractor, the electrician, and the electric company. Getting everyone’s schedule to align (even without including my own schedule) is proving to be a slight challenge.

What we need is this: the current electrical meter is attached to the side of the house right outside my side entrance – when we built the garage addition, we thought it would be awfully nice to move the meter to the alley side of the addition and bury the line through the backyard so it’s both out of sight and out of the way. This is a matter of aesthetic preference and practicality – we need the overhead lines out of the way if we’re going to re-roof the back of the house, let alone reconfigure the pitch of the roof.

Once we have our trench dug (32” deep – which seems excessive to everyone but the City code), we can bury the connection from the existing breaker box in the basement to the new breaker box/meter in the garage. The new breaker will connect directly to the incoming power source and will run the circuits on the back half of the house. Running the circuits in the back of the house from the breaker box in the garage will save a small amount of wire/money, but will save more with regard to time and energy involved in installation.

At any point during this process, the electric company is supposed to be coming to remove the power from the house, trench through the alley and backyard and reconnect the power to the new meter box at garage’s new meter socket. (I learned that a meter socket is a fancy word for high priced metal box. It’s the housing for the dial that records how much power you’re consuming.) In speaking with the territory manager, I found that the power company we have locally will provide 25’ of trench and 25’ of cable free of charge. Anything past 25’ is charged to me as the homeowner, but the charge is pretty minimal when you consider I won’t have an overhead wire getting in the way of the goings-on at the jobsite.

Once the power shenanigans have been resolved, we can get to work on the roof.

I’m in the process of finding a new roofing contractor. The one I had contacted and verbally committed to has more or less flaked on me…which is unfortunate because I received a great bid from him. So meeting contractors starts again. It’s not my favorite part – they’re pretty quick to tell me I should’ve just built a new house. It’s unprofessional to stick out your tongue at someone, otherwise I might.

At any rate, we got a pretty good deal on the materials for the roofing project. Trusses conveniently went on sale and there was an 11% rebate on most other building materials – including sheathing, shingles, building wrap and all the other odds and ends we will need. So, in an effort to save money and a little time down the road, we bought most of what we’ll need in the near future and then some. I likened spending all that money to ripping off a Band-Aid…do it quickly and it won’t hurt as much..

Update: Floored!

Well gang, the heat subsided long enough to allow my cement contractor the ability to pour a swanky new slab for the garage floor. I can’t tell you how excited things like this make me. We talked about it last night: the work inside - while fantastic and equally as necessary - goes by a little at a time. With projects like building a garage, you can have something hugely new and different at the end of every day! It’s exhilarating….and expensive.. But mostly exhilarating!

Speaking of budgeting.. I think we’re still in good shape. The major expenses were always assumed to be rebuilding the garage and hiring somebody to roof the house. Not only am I hiring the roof done because it’s going to suuuuuuuck to tear all those shingles off, but I also really want that to be done correctly. There is a pretty steep pitch on the front half of the house and there are a lot of intricate angles to deal with there as well. Better left to the professionals!

There is a strong possibility that I may get walls on this new garage this weekend – we’ll see! J

Mission

Having said all the warm fuzzy stuff in my first post, I should now focus on what will probably be the more interesting challenge of the entire process. How do I buy, update, and live in this house on a razor thin budget?

Story time:
Well kids, we’re in a recession. The trend the last few years has been this: kids go to college, these same kids graduate from college, and get a job… Or so we thought.

Not that it’s impossible, but it’s definitely more challenging to find work than it has been in the recent past. So – if you’re like me – you keep the job you’ve had the last year of school even though you’re underpaid, underutilized, and ready to leave. You spend your evenings searching online job boards, following up on applications, and looking through house magazines..

Until one day you decide to get serious: Time to call in a favor. You talk to a well-connected friend back home in the hopes he or she knows someone (who knows someone) who knows about a job.

My friend says to me, "What are you doing next Wednesday? You should stop by and we can talk about what you’re looking for.”

“Sure, I was planning to come home Wednesday, anyway! See you then!”

OK, the part about me planning to drive 120 miles to be home for the afternoon in the middle of the week may have been a fib. A white lie, really. Harmless. But this sounded like the beginning of a nibble.

Long story short, I’m offered a position with a company that values its people, its customers, and its community and I love my work. Five years ago if you had asked if I would work in insurance, I would have laughed at you. Boring. No chance. Today, I see it through different eyes with a changed perspective. I get to work with small business owners every day – interesting people doing what they want and love to do. These people are in a position to make differences in the communities in which they live, and I get to help them along the way.

An unfortunate side effect of this and any other recession is this phenomenon people in the news media are now calling “Boomerang Children” – the kind that leave only to return after graduation to mess up your basement and eat all of your Dorito’s. Well, in that way, you could also say I am fairly typical for my generation; a boomerang man-child. (That just sounds gross, actually.. I’m sorry you had to read that.) I was fortunate enough to get a job, but rather than rent I decided to live at home for a short while to save up for the down payment I’d been waiting for. I find it to be slightly demoralizing, but financially it’s the right thing to do. Hence, BoomerangBungalow

So. As the boomeranging man-child, hippie insurance specialist that I am, I thought it would be nice to provide some insight to those in similar situations. I’ve never bought a house before, and I would bet many of you haven’t either. So, how do we make the final leap to claim our own independence? And how do we do so in a way that is responsible, practical, and affordable.

The point of this is not to be pessimistic or snarky, or complain in any way. I simply want to provide an honest account of what it takes to buy and renovate a house – and to provide a place for anyone else who knows about such things to teach all of us a thing or two.

For the sake of honesty going forward (and because I believe in full-disclosure), I should tell you I paid $27,000 for that cute little yellow house. If anyone outside of rural America should read this, yes THOUSAND. Even for Iowa, that’s ridiculously cheap. Slightly more expensive when you consider it needed a new roof 40 years ago, the plumbing has issues, the wiring is in need of review, the detached garage is leaning like Michael Jackson in “Smooth Criminal” from all the rot, along with all the typical updating things a person would do to make a home their own.

There is also the matter of the neighbor’s house. Or..lack of neighbor’s house – no one has lived there in five or six years.. and they left mid-renovations. Pictures to follow, though not pretty. It has become a neighborhood nuisance with broken windows and doors and aluminum siding waving in the wind. Lucky me, we share a driveway. However, at some point in the next year (or so) the city has plans to demolish the house to make way for a new home (or my own gigantic vegetable garden...we'll see!) In total I hope to spend less than the $50,000 I have taken out at my local bank.

This, my friends, is where the games begin!

I plan to do most of the work myself – and by "myself" I mean with an army of friends, family, and willing participants looking for free beer and/or pizza. This is (as anyone who has ever moved a sofa will tell you) where you find out who your true friends are J

Enough writing for one day. In the future, this will be much more entertaining – more pictures, videos, etc. but I haven’t taken possession yet, let alone started demolition. Have patience! In the meantime, have a great week!