Monday, July 19, 2004

Our (Winchester) house

When our house was first built in the 1870's/80's it was a 4 room house. Living room and kitchen down and two bedrooms up. Sometime in the early 1900's an addition was built on which included a new kitchen, dining room, another bedroom and bathroom.  By the time I bought the place back in 1991 it was had been abandon for about 10 yrs.  The only major things that needed to be done was new plumming and replace the hot water heater.  Thanks to Ace Hardware for giving me the low down on putting in plastic pipes, it only took a weekend to get the new water lines ran.  Other than that it was all cosmetic: patching plaster walls, painting inside and out, and major cleaning, and clearing all the overgrown brush ect. from around the outside.
 
Then I met Scooby.
 
Scooby is a jack of all trades and can do practically anything when he puts his mind to it, building, plumbing, electrical ect..   Well after our first year together we tore off the small 7 by 7 back porch and built a 10 by 18 enclosed porch. (The one we now use as a summer living room)  Then Scooby didn't like the way the kitchen was.  It had already been screwed up by past renovations, so Scooby built all new cabinets ect. and we also knocked out the wall between the kitchen and dining to open the two rooms up for better entertaining.  These rooms are almost done other than small detail work.
 
Then there was the ordeal about the stairway upstairs.  It was so narrow and steep that it was difficult to get even a boxsprings for a single bed upstairs. So we started thinking about building a new larger stairway.  We wanted the house to look like it hadn't been added onto, or in other words we didn't want it to look architecturally raped.  So in order to do this we not only built a stairway but a computerroom/office downstairs and above that a room that will be a future bathroom. That project alone took over 2 years to complete.  Oiy Vei 
 
This new project: The back part of the roof needed to be replaced because it was starting to leak and the new walls in the kitchen was starting to show water stains because of it.  Well Scooby of course, with his "While we're at it" view on things talked me into building on two large dormers on the attic space and also a large 10 by 20 open side porch that comes off of the bedroom downstairs.  Now that we got the dormers built, the attic is so large, we're thinking of making it our bedroom.  I swear its the largest room in the house now. But anyway with the new dormers and porch it created more roof lines which take more detail work to do.  Then of course when it's really hot its impossible to do any roofing because when the roof is hot it fucks it up to stand on it.  Double Oiy Vei
 
I told Scooby that this is it, no more additions. Once the roof and the siding is done, thats it and besides we really need to get the place done before fall of 2006 because there are rumours at work that when my contract it up that our dept. will be no more and that they will be hiring an outside cleaning co..  Once again "Capitalism Sucks".   I'm not too worried about losing my job though because it will be the kick in the ass I need to get us the hell out of Michigan and do something else. 



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