Before
This was about the skankiest room in the house. It was small and flimsy, the ceiling was low, the floor sloped, and it smelled funky. On close examination of the underside, we found that it was originally a porch that was covered over and filled in. It had multiple layers of flooring, stuck directly onto the original porch boards. And it had no proper footing, just a couple concrete blocks at the outside corners. So it was always cold in the winter and hot in the summer, despite our efforts with multiple cans of spray foam to seal up the cracks.
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The Plan
We decided pretty early on that we needed to put in proper footings. When planning for that, and actually living in the rest of the 940 sf, we expanded the project to a 12x16 room that would house not only laundry, but an office and a powder room. We went through many design iterations and finally settled on this. The addition is the appendage in the upper left corner.
We hired a drafting company to draw up the plans, but even with the detail in hand it took over 6 months of flaky contractors (defined by someone who looks at the job and the drawings, says they're interested in doing it, promises a quote, and then disappears off the face of the earth) until we found a Amish crew that followed through, and gave us reasonable pricing. A couple months later they were ready and we were too, so work could commence. |
Demolition
Demolition was in our scope of work, and our D-day happened on a hot, humid, midwestern summer day. We made a mess.
Here's where we started. We had scavenged some of the siding to fill in around the shrunken windows we installed in the kitchen and bath. I'm sure the neighbors were glad to finally get rid of the eyesore.
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With the siding and insulation removed, you can see the skeleton of the original porch. To enclose it, they had simply added 2x4s to the inside, crammed insulation into anywhere it would go, and covered it up with1/4" paneling on the inside and vinyl siding on the outside.
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The Amish boys we hired (I call them boys because they were young'uns, I'd say in their 20s) dug and poured footings. Shown here is one of our basement wall plates that was in the line of fire. Encased in concrete, it'll provide that much more stability. Also visible is one of two gas or water lines they dug up. The utility people had no record of what they were (they come from underneath the slab, so originate somewhere in the back yard?), so we just left them in as well.
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They built up the crawlspace walls with block, and sunk J-bolts along the wall to install the sill plate. They put in vents, and were going to cover the floor with a sheet of poly until we directed them to the drawings, which showed a poured concrete floor and no vents, since this space will connect to the basement, so we wanted it fully enclosed to keep nature at bay.
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We were rained out for an entire week. Then they arrived back on a sunny Monday that we both left to go out of town. When I returned on Thursday afternoon, here's what I found.
Pretty jaw-dropping what 2 guys did in 4 days, plus pour the crawl space slab. I was sorry to have missed the work in progress, but took some photos from the inside.
They scraped off 2 layers of roofing from the existing roof, and tied it in well with the new addition roof.
We flashed the door opening and installed the jamb and casing. The Amish boys hung the $50 Craigslist antique door.
Then they finished up the siding all around, weaving it in nicely on the back side to mesh with the existing. We then painted waterproofing membrane onto the below-ground crawl space walls, and installed a french drain around the foundation.
We painted the foundation tan to match the rest of the house. Some teens from church and a couple neighbor boys helped us build the small porch deck in front of the door.
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The recipe: landscape fabric + gravel + PVC pipe with holes facing down + landscape fabric + gravel. Then dirt on top to level out.
We then made a gigantic landscape bed around it. We scattered the "ashes" (stump grindings) from the sweet gum tree around the plantings. Free mulch!!!
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On we moved to the inside: Rough plumbing for the laundry room and powder room, with all their associated supply lines, drains, and vents; electrical outlets galore and plenty of ceiling lighting; and a couple heat registers and a cold air return line.
We worked hard to insulate and make the room air-tight. Our formula included:
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We couldn't think of a better way to spend a long holiday (Christmas) weekend than to drywall together. 26 sheets of drywall and 2 1/2 days of work did the trick. Bonus: we got free 5/8" ceiling drywall from work, due to some leftovers from a job that couldn't be reused.
Best Christmas Gift Ever (and the reason we hung drywall on a holiday weekend): Sis and her husband taped, mudded, and sanded all our walls and ceiling in 3 days.
This facilitated a painting party on New Year's Day, priming and painting the entire space. The main room is on the same color card as the kitchen, but a shade lighter (Valspar Lighthouse Shadow). The powder room is on shade lighter than that (Rising Tide).
The main room sat for a bit awaiting heart pine, which we finally found from a source that demolishes old houses and salvages the good bits. It was grimy stuff to start with, and was painstaking to install on the diagonal, but we knocked it out over 3 Saturdays. And lots of long boards meant minimal butt joints.
Sanding took us back to the original wood, though it's not an exact match to the rest of the house, it at least gives us a unified feel.
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A coat of Bona Sealer and 3 coats of Bona Traffic gave us a durable finish.
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