Foundations and Piers

So, as part of our reframing of the back wall, we knew that we would have to revisit the foundation wall at the back of the house. We had also wanted to reinforce the floor framing a bit, too. Not changing any of the existing support, just adding a few extra piers to support the floor joists. As for the back wall of the foundation, due to the age and wear and tear over the years, we ended up needing to pour a new foundation support wall adjacent to the back stone foundation, so that we would have a good surface to anchor our wall to. This is a bit technical, yes, but the bottom line is that we have a much more robust structure at the rear wall and under the whole house now, which feels nice in a house like ours.

(Formwork for the back foundation wall being set)

(piers under the house waiting to be filled with concrete)

(Concrete truck arrives!!!!)

(Pier after it has been filled with concrete)

(concrete finishing for the back wall)

(back wall is set to cure)

(finished wall with new sill plate- yay!)

(finished pier and new post support.....)

That's all for now! More come soon! Up next, inspiration pictures of what we want some spaces to look like...). Bye for now!

Our House Plans

Okay, there will be more photos to come- don't worry!!! But, first it might be good to tell you what we are planning to do with our house. When we bought the house, it had be rented out for the past like 20 years. It was in nice shape, but needed tons of interior work, as we wrote about before. So we decided that since we needed to change so much of the home's infrastructure, like plumbing and electrical, we figured that we may as well change the interior things that we wanted to do before we moved in. Below is the floor plan for the house when we bought it. (you can click on it to make it bigger, if it is too small).

Before, the house had a funky three-quarter bathroom at the back of the house, off of the living room. It was small and a little awkward. Also, there was a laundry porch that was actually an enclosed porch with just a thin screen wall. So we decided that we wanted to open all that up. We moved the laundry and made a new location for the powder room. This gave us a new small back "sitting nook" as we call it. A perfect spot to sit and have breakfast and read the newspaper a look out the double french doors. Also, we added a banquette seating area to the kitchen and will switch up the living and dining rooms to work better.....The new plan is below:

So, we figured that if everything went really well, we would be finished after about 8-10 weeks. We started in earnest on July 26 with demolition, so that puts us about 4 weeks into it now, and we are hoping to be done by the end of September. If it keeps moving ahead, we will  be on time- hooray!!! Right now, we are done with the interior framing, plumbing, most of the electrical...We are in the midst of tiling the bathrooms and the kitchen cabinets are starting. Whew! So that's where we are...Next post will be back to the foundation and framing work that we did a couple weeks ago.

The story of our houses

It may be nice to give a little overview of our "Home Story"- that is, how we came to be the owners of two bungalows that are almost 100 years old. Like many first time home buyers, it has been a long journey to get here. We have been working at getting to where we need to be, financially and personally, and this past year has really made a difference for us. God really blessed us when I got a "real" job last summer, not the "jobby" (job-hobby) that Little Oranges had become. It is a great company, but wasn't helping us make any headway towards a down payment or any type of savings....so the job really helped us to get our feet on the ground. Plus, Manish has been feeling good and the latest scan (in mid-June) was clear, so we just feel so blessed.

On to the real estate hunt.....Well, we looked online for the past two years, but it wasn't until April of this year that we finally got a good handle on the financing and what we could afford. Loans have become a little hard to get these days, but we were fortunate to not have too many problems...just lots of little pieces of info that they needed. We started looking around with our realtor in May and looked at a good deal of homes (maybe like 15 or 20?). We actually made an offer on a different house first. It was mid-century modern, which is our thing, in Altadena. Nice a big (2,700 sq. ft.) and a great lot (10,000 s.f.). Alas, it didn't work out in the negotiation phase, but we knew that God had something better for us, so we kept looking.

(This is the first house that we made an offer on...)

On to the next homes...we saw lots of them...Here are a couple more:

(Great looking estate sale in upper Pasadena, great area.....potential?)

(um... not too good looking, oh- and the floors bounced)

(yeah, that's the kitchen floor..no appliances...not great. On to the next...)

(Nicer old 50's fixer in the lower San Rafael Hills area....we peaked in...)

(Awesome old eat-in kitchen, original everything...)

(Great yard, not huge, but nice....Alas, the house was already in escrow, as we found out..)

(Super cute spanish revival house in lower Monrovia....)

(Very charming, but kind of the best house on the street, right on an alley

and a slightly over-confident listing agent kept us looking....)

Then we saw this California bungalow in Sierra Madre. It was the first of several houses we were seeing that day, but it lingered in our minds....We loved the character of the house, the light, the way that we felt when we walked through the place. It was old...yes, but it was charming.

(Above are the Living and Dining Rooms)

(The kitchen and the breakfast nook)

(The front bedroom, a Jack-and-Jill bathroom, and the back bedroom)

(Three-quarter bathroom off Living Room)

(The original back laundry porch, just screened in basically)

(View towards the front house from under the avocado tree)

(view towards the back house...It is much cuter in person...I will add

more photos of it soon!)

(Back house Living Room)

(Back House kitchen...small but workable with a great vintageWedgewood stove)

(Back House Bedroom, and there is also a

bathroom adjacent to the bedroom...)

We knew from the beginning that it would take some work. From the start, based on the physical inspections, we estimated that we would need to do a good deal of work including at least: new plumbing throughout, all new electrical upgrades (there was even some original 1912 wiring around), upgrading all the plumbing fixtures, renovating the kitchen, adding a proper laundry space, adding some additional framing supports, running new power upgrades to the back house....whew! And that is just what we imagined at the start. Even with Manish as an architect and my working for a building company, we weren't sure if we could take on this challenge. But we knew it would be worth it. The house was great, the back house would be a perfect office for Manish and a great place for guests to stay when they visit. Also, the neighborhood is great...there are like 20 kids from 2 to16 on the street and we are walking distance to the main street area (like 1 1/2 blocks...). We knew that it would be worth it and so we went for it!!!! And that brings us to the current state of renovation that we are in....We will continue to keep updating with more stories and photos....So much to do and so much to share!

There was a kitchen here once....

Oh what fun!!! Seriously, for so long we have dreamed of designing a kitchen of our own. I think that having a dishwasher for the first time will be awesome, for everyone :) So, the kitchen... Yes, when we first saw the house, we loved the light in the kitchen, the window to the backyard, the adjacent laundry porch. It was quaint and seemed like something from the past. But, maybe more the 60's past, and less the beautiful cottage bungalow kitchen full of old cabinets that you might expect in a 1912 home.

(The photo above is the the breakfast nook in the kitchen...simple, but

with a great big window.....At the top of the post is the way our kitchen

looked when we bought the house)

When we moved in, we knew that we would have a little project ahead of us with this beauty. We already knew that we were going to have to redo the plumbing and the electrical throughout the house, so we knew that we had all the excuses we needed to turn this retro kitchen into a dream. But of course, you have to get through "ugly" to get to beautiful. And that brings us to the present....Enjoy the progress.

(First, the drywall came off)

(then the cabinets were gone, and they pulled up 4 or 5 layers of linoleum!)

(And then it was empty... and little traces of the past started turning up)

(We found the traces of where the oldest kitchen wall used to be...

Looks like the original kitchen was only like 5' deep by 10' wide...cozy!)

(Here is what looks to be the original color of the kitchen floor under all

the layers of linoleum and vinyl... a very pretty deep green paint.)

(This old piece of newspaper was pasted to the ground...It advertises

Raisin Bran for $.11 and Corn Flake of $.07...when do you think that was???)

Moving the "stuff"

Here is a little break from the construction shots. We had a lot of help moving our stuff to the new house. So many people from our church came to offer hands and trucks and packing skills....It made a real difference. It was so fast and fun- not what you expect! Eve still, we were amazed by the amount of things that we had accumulated....crazy. We piled most of our things on the great platform that our friends helped us build. (the platform has gotten even more crowded since this photo was taken)

The renovation begins....

Welcome to the joys of home-ownership! If moving was crazy, renovating is crazier... We have lots of sympathy for all our friends and clients who have gone through this process. It is fun and excting, but also mentally and physically draining at times. The past week and a half were pretty busy. We finished the sewer line about 2 weeks ago. Since then we have been working on several things at once. We started work on the interior renovation of the home. That means tearing out floors, removing old fixtures and getting the house ready for upgrades. We also removed a large portion of the back wall of the house to prepare it for putting in a new set of doors out to the back yard. So much going on....For now, here are a few shots of the work as it is moving along:

(this is the back wall of the house that was really just an

old enclosed porch for laundry that we are redesigning....)

(the inside of the back porch/old laundry area)

(this is a picture of the back porch when we bought the house)

(here is the porch, through the kitchen...they are removing the

old water heater and the back wall)

(this is the door from the back porch into the kitchen,

that is coming out, too, to make room for the new laundry area)

(here is an example of the type of wood framing members that were

used when they built the house 98 years ago....wow!)

(um, yeah, there used to be a wall and a couple of doors here...

This is when wondered if we were maybe going a little fast?...)

Okay! More to come.....