James and Kristin Whitt’s Corner

It’s been a while for updates on the house fixing uppers. It’s mostly been painting and touching up things. About two weeks ago, we started working on the back porch.

It started out as a repainting project. We wanted to paint the porch a white to match the rest of the house. We took down all the screens on the back porch and my parents offered to help by cleaning them up and repainting them. I had borrowed their pressure washer to clear out all the loose paint before we started painting.

After that I started working on the electric out there. The previous owners just had wires danging between the lights that was just painted over. I removed all that and added pvc conduit and put everything back up. I think it looks a lot better now.

I started using the pressure washer to get the loose paint off the back part of the porch, which was going well until I started spraying the box gutter area. The pressure washer was just shooting right through the wood. I also noticed that in one place they even had put metal up and painted it. I removed the metal and realized that all the wood of the box gutters was rotted out.

So now I’m in the process of just removing the box gutters and putting normal gutters up in their place. I’ve already removed most of them on the back section and I’m going to leave the side alone until I finish the back section (to get a good idea of what I’m going to do before doing the harder section).

I have pictures of the progress here.

We’re getting to the point where we are ready to lay down some sort of floor. The main room in the basement has a pvc pipe coming from the utility room that goes to the drain. There is no drain in the utility room. I haven’t looked at that drain before, so I did not know the condition of the drain. I noticed it was really rusty, so I started to clean it off with a wire brush. It ended up actually being rusted through in a few spots.

I’m in the process of digging out the drain and replacing it with a new one. Since I was already digging one hole to fix the drain, I decided to just go ahead and dig a second hole in the utility room and connect the two up. So I’m at the point where both holes are dug and I’m almost ready to put everything back together. Just waiting until I go can to Lowes tomorrow to pick up some 2″ pvc pipe.

We’re repainting and touching up parts of the house and I realized that we have no centralized place of keeping track of which colors each room is.

Kristin and I have finally removed all the branches that we had cut down last year from our yard.  This was a very large task still because at the end of the year, the side yard was still completely filled.  Slowly we got the branches wrapped up and put out to the curb.  We finished this last week.

So wouldn’t you know it, during the last storm half of a tree in our backyard came crashing down into our back yard.  I had to borrow the chain saw again and we spent about 5 hours out back cutting the tree up and putting it out on the curb.  The garbage man is really going to hate us.  Here are some pictures of what it looked like

In case everybody hasn’t heard yet, we are currently trying to finish our basement. Things are coming along pretty good. The basement is almost completely framed (the walls have been put up). I’m currently running the electricity and other wires (ethernet, phone, cat5, speaker wire). We decided to wire it for surround sound while we are at it. I’ve added a photo gallery with some photos of the progress of the basement.

Also decided to install my ceiling fan last night. The first thing that I needed to do was install a new ceiling fan box. I took the old one out, but while doing it a big chunk of plaster fell out of the ceiling. Doh. So now that needs to be fixed too. Finally got the box in, but since the ceiling needs repaired, I’m going to wait to put it up until the ceiling has been patched and painted. I also think I’m going to add more support for the box also.

What’s better than a nice, cozy fire on a frigid winter day?? We finally got our chimney cleaned last weekend and we’ve had a fire going non-stop since. It doesn’t quite heat up the entire house, but it keeps the living room nice and toasty.