Finishing Touches

As promised, I'm going to share the (mostly) finishing touches on the back room.  I apologize in advance for the crappy iPhone pictures.  I, yet again, left our camera at a friends place.  Whoops.

First up, the fire place.  This is more kinda than mostly finished, but still, it's very important.

When we first moved in the house had an old stove style gas fireplace.

Gross, right?

Using one of our connections we were able to get a brand spanking new Lennox gas fireplace for only $700.  Comparable fireplaces in stores around us were easily $1500, so we got a really, really good deal.

We wanted to keep the fireplace in the corner to maximize function in the room, so, following the instructions, and using our big ol' brains, Derek got the framing done and set the fireplace in it's new home.

Isn't that better?  The only change that's been made since then was the addition of our Christmas stockings and some lights.  We'll be calling up Bill the Gas Guy soon to help us hook this guy back up.

Next up was paint.  Like our previous paint choices we wanted something that went well with all the other colours in the house.  Since you can see all the other colours on the main floor from the back room, it was important to us that it flowed.

We knew we wanted to go with a grey, so I picked up about a million different swatches and we started eliminating.  In the end we settled on Ashes from the Behr Premium Plus Ultra line.

I don't have any in-process painting pictures, so we'll move right along to floor!

We shopped around a bit for our flooring, going back and forth between dark flooring and medium flooring and back again.  In the end we settled for red oak flooring in a stain called Cappuccino.  It was actually a last minute decision.  We'd brought home a sample of red oak in the stain Walnut and were set on ordering it, but decided to take a look before we finalized the order at the next lighter stain colour.  I'm really glad we did too, because the floor we ended up with is just perfect.

Since there was still a good bit of work to do in the front half of the house, Derek started the flooring install just before the bathroom.

We worked together and the floor went down pretty quickly.  One of us would pick out the next row or so of boards while the other nailed them down.  We switched off a few times and in one night we got the hallway by the bathroom and about 2/3 of the back room done.  

We then finished that up the next day.  By then, it was Christmas!

Over the break between Christmas and New Years I spent a about 2 days putting a second coat of paint on the walls and caulking and filling all the holes/joints on the trim, and then priming and painting the trim out with a nice, bright, shiny white.

A set of brown-ish curtains from Home Depot later and we were ready to move the couch and TV into the room!

So, that's where we're at now!  We're officially moved into the back room as our living room, and the old living room is now the pre-kitchen.  It took Derek approximately 37 minutes to start tearing the walls down once we had the couch moved out.

Right now we're in planning mode for the kitchen, which will be the next big thing on the list.  Once we at least get a plan drawn up for the kitchen we can start moving along with laying the rest of the floor.

Up goes the ceiling!

I thought I'd break this up into a few different posts, but, well, we might as well just get this over with, right??

The last time I updated this thing (I promise to try and do that more often now!) we'd removed the hump between the house and the back room and put up all of the insulation.  The next step from there was to get the vapour barrier up.

Since we were planning on reusing the potlights that were already in the room, we picked up some plastic "buckets" to put around them.  Up they went along with some ventilation panels to put up at the roof.

From there we added Roxul insulation above the plastic and between the beams in the ceiling.

Then up went the poly for vapour barrier.

By this point you could really feel a difference in this room.  This was around the end of October and it was starting to get a bit chilly outside.

We had decided that we would not turn on the furnace until we at least got the vapour barrier up in the back room, so this was a big day for me.  That is, until I went to turn on the furnace.

Yup, nothing.  The thermostat was all lit up, the furnace was turned on, but it would not fire up.  Crap.

So, we spent another week in the cold, and had a call in to Colin's friend Bill, who just happens to be a gas guy.  I decided to double check absolutely everything before Bill came over.  I pulled the face off of the thermostat and lo' be behold, the pins that connect the face to the actual wires that run to the furnace were bent.  Apparently we hadn't actually used the furnace since we did wall tear down and thermostat relocation back in April.  So, crisis averted, heat back on, no gas guy required.  Yay!

When we'd pulled down the ceiling in this room we were rather perplexed by why they'd put up 2 layers of drywall with some strapping in between.  Well, as the first sheets of drywall went up with Tim's help, it became glaringly obvious.

What?  You can't see the problem?  Here, let me try and help.  The green line below is straight.  The blue line traces the contours of the ceiling.

Ok, so it's still hard to see, but, longs story short, a ceiling should not have "contours".

So, off to Home Depot the boys went, and up went a dropped ceiling.  The guys decided it would be a lot easier to drop the ceiling than to attempt to level up each joist individually.

The guys finished up the carpentry and got the drywall up on the ceiling.  I think they might have finally called it a night around 3 am?

Bright and early the next day we were up and having breakfast.  Tim had to be on the road by 10am and we wanted to make use of his truck to take advantage of a buy-2-get-1 sale on trim at Rona.

That's what $1000 worth of trim looks like.  Not that much, eh?

I guess I'll leave it there for now, but I promise to show you the (mostly) finished back room soon.