New decks

Decks finished, railing is next! Here the glass panels are already in place but we were still not allowed outside. Those gaps were still quite big!

Work in progress (see in the upper right corner, the slats are not all in yet.)

Thank you, Leonard, Jason, Luke and Pete for the beautiful, clean, professional work you did on this project! We could not be happier with the result.

Another corner of the upper deck.

The kids' lower deck is larger than the upper deck and makes for a wonderful outdoor play area.

The back of the house, as seen looking up from the bottom of the hill... The lower deck comes out further and has three glass panel inserts. Under the lower deck is a new storage "room" with low ceiling but plenty of room for boxes and paint cans. Entrance door to storage can be seen in lower left corner.

2 years later, replacing the decks!

I don't think anyone is thinking we are rushing through the remodeling of this house. 2 years after we removed the old, unsafe decks from the house, we started the rebuild project.

Foundation for a storage area under the lower deck being poured one morning.

Storage under the lower deck shaping up.

The new storage!!

Here's the frame for the staircase to connect upper and lower decks...

I walked to the backyard to take this pix; the house indeed looks larger, much more complex but what an exciting change!

From the kids bedroom, one can already enjoy a great, new view. Slider doors were still blocked with large plywood sheets at this point.

Working on the railings, and frames for the glass panels.

Our slider doors were still blocked but we could not wait to go outside!

The new stairs connecting the upper and lower decks are beautiful, clean blocks.

Reupholstered dining room chairs

We have reupholstered 4 of our garage sale found dining room chairs! I am super happy with the result.

The fabric we chose is a vinyl actually. It is silver.

A close-up of the light reflecting on the back rest.

All these 6 chairs are from the same garage sale and all 6 of them are made of beautiful teak wood. Two of them were reupholstered years ago; they have regular fabric covers.

When it rains, it pours

Noticing that all these "before" pictures (below) were taken on the very same calendar day, I am asking myself, what were we thinking? The house was taken apart downstairs, upstairs and of course in between (we were re-wiring and getting gas to the new kitchen) at the very same time. One project needed another project done, and that one needed yet another...
Needless to say I am so happy that we are almost finished making a clean home out of this poor old fixer-upper house.
What a project of a house, but what a transformation!

An "after" version of the kitchen image above. Since this photo was taken, we have changed the light fixture! Not sure if I have a photo taken just yet though.

My favorite part of the new kitchen.

After remodel; the railing and stairway.

A little bit of woodwork

Our house was (first) built almost 40 years ago and that probably means these steps are about that age. The concrete slabs have been holding up very well but their wooden frames were so thin, cracked and rotten about 2 years ago that we decided to throw them out and just rebuild them.

Before installing these boards, we cut them to size and stained them with a reddish brown colored stain.

All the pieces were drilled and screwed together at their corners.

Thank you Silvestre for your help with this project!

Laundry in the garage

I have posted about the laundry room before but at that time I didn't upload any images showing how much work was involved. Well, I have found some more photos in the meanwhile; so here they are:

This is how it all started: we were remodeling the downstairs studio. This door used to lead from the garage to the studio, and it was right next to the laundry area. The small hallway used to be super narrow with a very low ceiling so we needed to move walls around.

The walls were already taken down inside the studio, but the plan was to remove them on the laundry's side as well. We might as well kill two birds with one stone, --wouldn't anyone?

As soon as all sheet rock walls were taken down, cables and plumbing had to be re-wired and moved.

New insulation material showing above laundry area and some new boards reinforcing the old columns.

Here the new entrance for the studio is shown, but the laundry door is not yet installed.

New, clean walls for the laundry, ready for washer and dryer with brand new wiring and hot/cold water!

New washer and dryer is now installed. A small sink with a new cabinet for detergents and cleaning supplies can be seen on the right hand side. Thank you, PL for the beautiful wood work. Doing laundry is no longer a problem around here :)

When the laundry door is shut, nothing can be seen. A small little issue: the entrance door of the studio (on the right) appears a few shades lighter in color than the rest of the wall and the laundry doors; it is likely because the wood is different... oh well, we say no big deal!

New bamboo stairs

Soon after we installed the new bamboo floor it was time to do something about the stairs as well. We bought bamboo plywood (plyboo) for the treads and regular (oak) plywood for the risers. There is no new tile floor here yet, only an old cut-to-shape black jute rug to cover the old.

The fresh new bamboo steps in place. I think this photo was snapped right after the treads were clear coated (see the tape on the edge of each riser.)

We changed this color later but this pix shows the risers stained in a walnut color. Today their color is "Bombay Mahogany" which happens to be the color of our trims and doors inside the house.

Here those "Bombay Mahogany" baseboards can be seen.
I can't tell for sure but I think here the risers are already mahogany in color as well.

Tile work done. Thank you, DG! I am not sure why we took this pix but it seems someone was getting ready for a snowboarding weekend...

No railing yet here, but finally the house started to look cleaner. This image needs to be placed next to the one I took soon after we moved in when we had all kinds of tools here by the entrance door. On that old photo one can also see the crazy shiny wallpaper on the downstairs wall (here the wall had already been painted white, actually "tortilla").

Bamboo floor install

I have just found these very old images from the time when we installed the bamboo floors in the house. The walls were still opened and the freshly exposed beam was still unpainted.

Another area where the walls were opened up and rebuilt was the pantry's corner. Here, the entire corner of the kitchen was rebuilt and a new sliding door was added. On this photo the old kitchen floor is still in place but the upper cabinets are already removed. Back then, was it 2005? we lived without a kitchen for 6 months but it looks like here we still had "half" of it working? (Honestly, it can get pretty soul-draining to have to live like this but we pressed on hoping every day that our house  eventually will turn into a beautiful home.)

Another view of the old living room's subfloor. I forgot about the floor lamp we used back then made of a camera's tripod and a clamp.

Finally, beautiful, new bamboo floor in our bedroom. We chose pre-finished bamboo since we already lived in the house and didn't want to have to deal with the odors and poisons of the finishing materials.

No more iron railing, but the new glass railing wasn't done yet either when this photo was taken. I think we had no railing here for a few years, at least a year and a half...

I will never forget the happiness I felt when I saw this for the very first time after returning home one day. It has been many years but I still get the goosebumps!

Another view of the living room, dining room area. The old deck and its old railing can be seen in the dark.

Driveway project

I found some images today showing how the driveway was remodeled a few years ago. They seem really old now, since they show the house even before painting, with less windows and with large dirt piles everywhere.

Cement mixer and some workers hard at work.

Drain (to our french drain!) still covered with plastic.

Driveway smoothed out, and almost done.