The Guest House, Trash or Treasure?
Renovate the guest house while less than 20% of the main house has been completed? What Are We Thinking! Well, the short story is a family from church needed a place to stay for a short time. After some thought, we decided to stop construction on all current projects and renovate the guest house in 30 days.

Yea! Right! What Were We smoking?

We started on July 3rd. Since it was previously used for storage, we had to move everything out before the fun began. Then we called in the troops and started pulling down walls... and everything else. Thank you Alex, Jason, J.W. and David! The amount of debris that came out of that little one room house was un believable.

As you can see from this photo, just like the main house, there is nothing between the clap board siding and the insulation (what little there was). When night fell and the lights were on in the house, you would not believe how many slits of light were leaking through the siding. Some large enough for small animals to sneak through.

This shot is looking through the studs into the cesspool of a bathroom. There were so many beautiful shades of green and blue fungus and mold growing in there I hated to upset the fragile ecosystem. We might have made a few bucks selling the ceiling to Saddam Hussein for some bio weaponry.

After we gutted the bath we just kept on going. The floor joists were so rotted if any one had filled the tub, it would have crashed right through to the crawl space. The outside corner of the foundation had also sunk almost four inches and I needed to jack that up. In the left of the photo you can see the three conduit pipes I ran to the garage. You can see more about all the power and data conduits in other sections of the site.

Here we can see the extent of the beautiful kitchen area. The fridge did work though.

Turning our attention to the Ceiling.

This is a shot of the ceiling rafters between the two front doors. The roof really leaked a lot here. In fact when we first took possession of the house there were eight pots, pans, buckets and Tupperware containers in the attic catching water.


Here we are looking up after the flooring in the attic was lifted. The porch roof is also gone. The damage here was really bad. You can see two of the rafters fell after the ceiling was down. They had rotted almost all the way through.

The front porch was a complete loss. Everything was rotted. Where the porch roof met the house roof was were all the problems had occurred. A large amount of rust under tar patches with rusty nails poking out everywhere.

After a lot of soul searching I decided to slightly change the profile of the porch roof. The original roof was "hipped". It sloped down on the two sides. There were so many problems as a result of the inner corners of this roof I decided to simplify the design. You can see it starting here. Once all the trim is in and tin on the top, I think it will look fine.

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