We've often thought it was an untapped resource and may make our property increase in value if we fixed it up to be useful. Our Trek daughter, Emma Grace, wondered if we might have been serious about letting her live there while she went to school in the next town Columbus. I was thinking it would be a good reason to fix it up a bit so we tentatively planed on that. Things for Emma Grace changed when she got engaged. She'd only need a place to stay for a month and a half. At the same time we found out about a couple who would be newly married and moving into the ward and needing a place to live just for a year. ANYWAY (this is a lot of back story!) the more we thought about it, we felt like it would be mutually beneficial to rent out the space to the married couple for a longer period of time and just give Emma Grace a bedroom and bathroom in our house for the month and a half that she needed a place.
By the time this was all figured out, it was mid June and we needed to have the place ready for the new couple by August. So we had a major project to work on fast. Our original thoughts were to do all the work ourselves so we could learn and practice on a safe, smaller-scale place that we weren't currently living in before we tried to do similar updates in our bathrooms inside our house. We scheduled out the remaining weeks of summer and tried to think through the building/renovation process and set out a plan.
Our first demo work started first week of June, and we started piling drywall and wood outside, and insulation neatly stacked inside for future use. We got a dumpster delivered a week later and hired Holden Gines to transfer our pile of junk from the lawn to the dumpster as we continued to work. Chris was still being paid to do research over the summer, and advising students so he would typically go to work early in the morning, work through lunch and come home mid afternoon to then go work out in the guesthouse. I'd try to be ready to hand out Max to the older kids to babysit in the house and join Chris out in the guesthouse every moment I could. I think this is the first time we used the phrase, "Max Duty" (a phrase we'd use for years!). Then I'd go in and fix dinner and Chris would come in to eat with us and then head back out. I'd put the kids to bed and then go out and join him working until we were too exhausted usually around 9 or 10 (or even 1:00am if we felt really pressed for time). We hardly ever got done all the work we hoped to, but Chris was patient and steady and assured me we'd get it done eventually. I get so excited at the beginning of projects and I push us both to start them and make it happen but then I often lose steam as the project wears on and getting behind schedule would make me sad.
The building consisted of 3 separate spaces: a room at the back, a hallway, closet and teeny bathroom in the middle and a small kitchen-type area in the front. When you first walked into the building, you would only be able to take a step or two before you'd run into a wall that housed the AC unit, then to the right of that was the water heater hidden behind a cupboard, and directly right of that was a tiny sink then the corner where an old piece of counter had been tacked up with some 2x4s and spread the length of the side wall under the side window. Our idea was to open up the entire space to create as much visual space as possible. This involved raising the ceilings by removing the drop ceiling tiles and putting canned lights in a drywalled ceiling, redoing the bathroom to use the space better, move the water heater to the back, framing in a closet area in the back to house the water heater, removing the wall that created the hallway and its closet, taking out the broken AC unit and instead install a modern, smaller unit that would hang on the outside of the wall in one of the rooms.
To make sure we could take out the walls we wanted to, we had our guy Vick Pitts who did our kitchen remodel come look at it and give us his professional opinion. He kindly gave us an hour of his time as he talked us through it. The only problem he pointed out was that in the hallway and in all the corners, they but the studs the opposite way so they protruded out past the drywall. Vick wondered if the whole building wasn't first some kind of carport/shed that had been extended to create the bathroom and front kitchen-y type space. Chris and I decided we could figure out how to chip out the protruding wood pieces or at the very least, drywall around them.
We hired out the AC install ($2000), and electrical work ($800) and also hired a guy to move the water heater ($800). Otherwise we planned to do everything else ourselves in the evenings across 6 weeks. We are some kind of crazy.
Demo is always fascinating for the kids. Charlie liked swinging the sledge hammer at the crusted, glued on vinyl flooring. Freddy liked whacking a hammer into the drywall, and Alec liked to come out and join us at night when all the kids were in bed, helping me carry drywall pieces out, or holding the flashlight for Chris.
This flooring was a BEAST. We tried so many methods to get it off: breaking it up with a sledge hammer, scraping it with special scraping blades for our sawsall tool, shoving our ice picker from Canada at it with as much force as our arms could muster, chipping it out with a hammer and chisel. It was brutal. The ceiling had TONS of wasps nests and we spent an entire night trying to replace the wire netting in the attic vents.
We had to reroute the plumbing in the little bathroom so the shower head could come out of a side wall... allowing us to take out the wall that separated the toilet from the shower. Now we could install a corner shower unit with a curved glass enclosure. Totally opened up the bathroom without increasing square footage! But this also meant we had to move the shower drain - cutting into and removing concrete, and installing new pipes/drain.
Then we installed the shower base and started hanging the cement board (with its layers of waterproofing) and drywall.
Hanging the big sheetrock boards on the ceiling with just Chris and I was impossible. We got some guys to come over for a night to help...Thank you missionaries and Troy Hurran!! After spending so so much time trying to chip out the protruding wood from those weird 2x4s at the end of the old hallway, we decided to just drywall around the protrusions in the corners. Its not the ideal solution, and I hate doing things not the right way, but we didn't have the right tools or the time to spend on something only cosmetic.
We decided mid project to move the bathroom door to the side a bit to allow space for the sink to go next to it along the same wall which would give more knee space at the toilet.
We spent endless hours mudding and taping and sanding - Spencer Leigh came over one night to help. We learned a lot about drywall and have decided that everyone we spoke to was right - its totally worth it to hire it out to professionals. Its not like we didn't believe them, but we just wanted to at least have tried it once. It didn't look too complicated and its really not, but mudding is seriously an art and the dust from sanding is terrible without the right kind of sander that vacuums it up as you go. I didn't wear a mask at the beginning and my lungs started to hurt anytime I breathed in deep for a few days. I took Chris' advice to wear a mask more seriously after that!
By now it was the end of June and we'd be leaving for a week and a half to go to Utah for a reunion and Gwen's baptism. It was SO hard to leave knowing we were behind schedule but we felt good about the progress we made and all the things we learned. Besides, we already had the kitchen cabinets safe in our garage, ready to install, we could pick back up when we returned....what could go wrong? ;)
