Our second fixer upper, Main Street House, is currently a 3 bedroom 1 bathroom home, but not for long.
Our house has a totally unfinished attic which we plan to turn into a new large master bedroom with on suite bathroom, adding about 240 sqft of livable space!
The fact that we could add a bedroom and bathroom was what really sold us on the house… the three original bedrooms in the home are all the same tiny 10’x11′ and that doesn’t really scream master bedroom. And with the boyfriend owning more clothing and shoes than I do, the small size becomes a problem.
And even though we’re not entirely sure we’ll ever sell this property the fact that we could get more in re-sale down the road isn’t a bad consequence of adding on either.
But finishing off the upstairs isn’t as easy as it sounds. We actually need to build a dormer to accommodate the new bathroom because the attic is just too narrow to add a bathroom as is.
Down the road we’ll probably wind up adding built in closets, shelving and drawers for storage, but right now we’re focused on laying out the floor plan.
So that’s the gist of the master bedroom renovation. It’s a big one!
1/24/2017
Rain, Wind & Snow
Fascia Boards
9 Buckets
Yesterday was spent working on other projects in our apartment remodel, like the concrete countertops and butcher block breakfast bar, but I wanted to give a quick update on the master suite remodel!
Snow
At the end of the day on Saturday, the guys had gotten it as water tight as they could (temporarily) because yesterday we had torrential downpours and wind and today we’re expecting snow!
Rain
So before we left for the day we check on the waterproofing (aka caulk and Tyvek) and were pretty surprised that we only had one leak… but we laid out three buckets because the one leak was running down the ceiling joists and onto the floor in three different spots!
I’m really hoping these leaks were just because of the driving rain and aren’t going to happen every time it rains – we just realized we have to leave the dormer in this temporary state for way longer than expected.
Fascia Boards
We realized we have to replace all the fascia boards on the house because they are currently 2×4’s. This doesn’t always pose a problem but in this case we need to change them to 2×6’s. Unfortunately, our gutters need more pitch so with the 2×4’s we run out of wood to screw to because there’s only 3-1/2″ of wood instead of 5-1/2″ to bite.
So replacing the 2×4 fascia boards with 2×6’s is going to hold up getting the roof replaced but we’re so used to surprise problems like this it doesn’t even phase us.
9 Buckets
It just really (like really really really) sucks because it’s absolutely pointless to start any renovations in the house. With the additional three we added yesterday, we now have 8 buckets catching water upstairs but it sometimes makes it way to the living room, where we have the 9th bucket.
Here’s what the dormer looked like at the end of Day 4.
Have a Happy Day!
1/21/2017
Wrong Weatherman & Dozens of Decisions
Hey guys! Today is the morning of day 4 of the dormer addition!
I’m home this morning icing and heating my knees… because you know old age.
The guys are over at the house working on the dormer as we speak. And yes, it sucks that it’s a Saturday but here in Pennsylvania we’re supposed to get torrential downpours and heavy wind at some point over the next few days so we have to get it buttoned up.
Wrong Weatherman
We also would have been farther along but we got caught in the rain yesterday and had to tarp the dormer because all the rafters weren’t up yet! We weren’t expecting the rain until way later in the afternoon and it was pouring by noon! The floor was absolutely SOAKED. But it dried out and the boyfriend did a really good of securing the tarp down and preventing the rain from coming in. (Something he did on top of the roof in the pouring rain bless his soul.)
We had to round up 8 buckets (yup, we’re bucket hoarders) and use them to catch some drips here and there but other than that, the house stayed pretty dry.
So aside from the rain mishap the dormer addition is going really well.
Dozens of Decisions
But I never realized how many decisions need to be made before any framing even goes in. For instance, I need to know if I’m doing a tub or shower and what size. I need to know what size vanity, the length, width, depth AND the height with countertop. Which means I have to know what kind of countertop I’m doing and how thick I want it. Am I doing a closet? If so, how deep? What size door? Speaking of doors, what size bathroom door do I want?
And then there are the decisions that I didn’t even know were options!
Do I want a flat ceiling or a vaulted ceiling? If I do a vaulted ceiling what kind of light would work on a slant? What size trim do I want… there might not be enough space between the window and the top of the counter to do larger trim. So then I could change the size of the window to make larger trim work. What size then? Single hung, double hung? Grids or no grids?
So as you can see, there’s a lot to think about when doing a project as big as master bathroom addition… which means a lot to research about! So that’s what I’m off to do.
But first, here’s a picture of what the house looked liked at the end of a rainy day 3 (on the left) and one of the outside before we had to tarp it (right).
Notice how dark the floors are? They’re usually a much lighter color but in the picture they’re still soaked so they look super dark. And check out all the buckets!
Have a Happy Saturday!
1/21/2017
The Renovation Begins
You may be asking yourself “did I read that right? Did they do a dormer in the middle of January?” Let me back up and start from the beginning.
Our roof is leaking. When we bought the place we thought we could squeeze one more year out of the roof but 3 weeks after closing, during the first heavy rain, we realized we had some minor leaking which meant we had a major problem… we had to do the dormer and the roof before winter.
Spoiler alert… that didn’t happen.
For various reasons that I could spend the next 4 paragraphs talking about, we never got around to doing the dormer, which meant we couldn’t do the roof.
And then winter hit and we didn’t get 3-5 consecutive days where the weather would be above 40 and not raining or snowing for almost 6 weeks. (We needed 3-5 days because with only one guy helping us out it could take that long, and it won’t be completely water tight until the roof is on.)
But because the roof is a major priority we kept a watchful, waiting, hopeful eye on the weather and then bam! The weatherman reported that this week was going to be unusually warm and we weren’t going to see any rain until Friday afternoon. So we dropped everything we were doing (including my butcher block and concrete countertops 
) and jumped over to the dormer project.
So we’re one day in and we’ve already made a lot of progress, even though there’s just a gigantic hole in our roof, I can see a beautiful master suite in my future.
Here’s what the project looked like at the end of day 1.
I listed just a few of the tools we used today below. We love every single one of these puppies and could not have gotten the job done with out them… although to be honest, I didn’t help much today! I was off doing other projects… I can’t wait to show them to you guys!
P.S. We just bought the Makita circular saw last night because we thought ours was down at a job-site over an hour away and we knew we’d need it for today. So instead of spending the time and money in gas running to the job, we bought a new one. But it turns out, the saw never made it to the job and was returned today! Isn’t that how you always wind up with so many duplicate tools?
