Progress made during a month of Sundays

I’ve been a bad, bad girl.  I have not posted to the blog in almost a month.

In my defense, we have been working very long hours 5-6 days a week, trying to get the house down as quickly as possible since we have three more deconstruction jobs waiting on us to start.  Plus, Mark and I traveled two weekends in November, and that’s usually when I can find the time to write.

Nevertheless, I do apologize to everyone who enjoys reading posts from Living Vintage.  I’ll try my best to be more consistent in the future.

We have made a tremendous amount of progress with the old house in Rusk, but we still have a few weeks left to go, especially since Mother Nature has not been cooperating with us the last few days.

Here’s what we’ve done during the last four weeks:

We removed 22 old windows from the house.  Most are single pane windows, but others are 4 pane and 6 pane.  We’ll sell them or repurpose them into the greenhouse I’ve been wanting or some other craft project.

(Speaking of repurposing windows, check out my Pinterest boards for some great ideas.)

We removed several trailer loads of old shiplap.

During that removal process, we uncovered the old fireplace.  Hopefully, we’ll be able to salvage some of the old brick.

We also removed white and cream colored beadboard in one small room and the kitchen.

The HUGE attic fan was removed safely (thank God) using a pulley system.  It is that scary big.

It’s now sitting in our backyard.  It still works, and Mark wants to turn it into a shop fan.  He’ll do that if he ever has any spare time.

We removed the ugly vinyl siding …

… which revealed old 117 wood siding in excellent condition.

We also demo’d the cheap and deteriorated metal shed off the back of the house.

Here’s the “before” shot:

We salvaged the tin and some of the wood, but most of the wood was trashed because it was so rotten.

We also removed oak floors in two rooms.

Although they look in fairly decent shape, the subfloor is so rotten in places that Mark fell through so we stopped the floor removal process until later.

We took several loads of trash to the dump.

Never a fun thing to do, but with two people unloading it takes only about an hour.

This was completely unintentional and funny photo that I discovered when we made our last trip to the dump.  It sure looks like the turtle is begging to get out.

A few days ago, Mark and John started removing the 117 exterior siding.

We are nearing the point of demo’ing the front porch, and we still considering taking it down in one piece.  It will involve us renting heavy equipment, so we have contacted a few auction houses and antique stores to see if it has enough value to make the investment worthwhile.

(If you’re interested in it, please let me know.)

We also discovered and went through about 50 boxes in the attic.

Most of the stuff that the prior owners went to the effort of saving was trash.  I mean, literally.  Trash.  Old newspapers, empty coffee cans, and things like that.  But, luckily, we did discover some vintage goodies, which I’ll clean up, photograph and list on Etsy.  Soon.  I promise.