- 80% of your projects will cost you more than you thought and take way longer than you thought. One rule I've heard (although I don't think I completely agree) is called the 3/5 rule; if you do it yourself it will take 5 times as long and cost you 3 times as much and if you hire someone it will take 3 times as long and cost you 5 times as much as you thought. Grain of salt necessary.
- Your plans are just that: plans. Learn to deal with the surprises, whether it's a delay, a surprise cost (you budget for these things, remember!) or a given project magically takes you half the time you thought it would (see floors in the blue room).
- It's all worth it. This is my little piece of history. I may not know who lived in the house and when and I certainly don't know what memories, good or bad, Isthmus House holds but I do know that every old home is historic to someone and that makes restoring it and seeing it come back to life a gratifying experience one project at a time.
Okay, that's enough sentimentality from me for one day. The point of this is that I, too, have to deal with plans changing.
Friends and visitors to Isthmus House can tell you how much I despise the archway that was put in some time over the last hundred years between the living and dining rooms. It's not original, it doesn't even kind of go with the house and you could see exactly where an older opening had existed between the rooms from the cracks in the plaster.
As you can see though, we had one or two road blocks with just opening it up. Namely, a cool air return and, on the other side, a thermostat smack dab where there should have just been a nice big opening.
When we got air conditioning (side note: it's about 10-15 degrees cooler in Madison this week than average for July - I figure this is directly caused by the fact that we installed A/C), I had the crew move the thermostat location when the new one was installed and move the return register a bit closer to the corner. Plans to open the archway, you see!
I did all of this so that, when my family came to visit, opening the archway would be one of the easier projects we'd accomplish.
Ha.
First, we marked it off to make sure the new opening would be level, straight and pretty.
Then, we pulled out the reciprocating saw to go through the added wall. It should have been like cutting through butter. It wasn't.
I couldn't figure out why when it was plain as day that this wasn't original. The only thing that was, in theory and best as I could tell from trying to peek through the lath, holding this archway together was a bit of mesh and lath.
Or a beam. That's an option too.
There's header and support beams in this non-load-bearing wall. It doesn't really make any sense but it would be beyond challenging to remove everything I wanted to from here and it's really not necessary.
Instead, we squared off the archway (pulled out the metal mesh, drywall and some scrap wood formed to make the arch) and ended up here. We made a bit of a mess doing it, too...
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| Normally, I'd protect these floors a bit better but they're going to be refinished anyway! |
Already, cleaned up and squared off is better. The rooms look more open and it seems a bit easier to move around.
And now there's a new plan because this is one of those times to be adaptable. Hint: the walls are about to get a lot prettier.
You'll find out soon enough - stay tuned!
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| Reilly just couldn't be bothered with the change in plans |
And noisy. Don't forget noisy. :)
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