Blogs at HomeRefurbers.com

92 Winnebago Brave #1: OMG

kittyhawk33 — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:06:46 GMT

2 weeks ago I inherited a 92 Winnebago Brave. “Mike” lived in an RV park that my step-dad manages for over 2 years. My 2 boy’s loved to go to Mike’s RV and listen to stories of his travels around the world. He even went on a pilgramage to Isreal. Mike was also a sergant in the Army (wich he retired from), so he had all kinds of storie for my boy’s. A month ago we were all heart broke to learn that Mike had passsed away, all alone in his RV. Unknow to me, Mike had spoke highly of my boy’s and I. So his 2 daughters and his brother decided they didnt want to mess w/ Mike’s Rv and his lil 95 dodge neon, so I inherited both. It has taken us 2 weeks to clean the inside of the Rv. I think Mike had a 3 bedroom house inside the 31 foot Rv. lol. We have set off 2 bug bombs and put out numerous mouse traps, but i dont think it did much good. We are still infested w/ both bugs and rodents. We also found a section of the wall that has been leaking for some time, unfortunately it seems to be behind the shower area. :( Alot of people are telling me that I need to just gut the RV and remodel everything. The carpet is ruined so it has to come up. One of the storage area’s under the seat at the table was full of clothes which got wet and molded. So the seat has to be removed. The mice have chewed tunnels through every cushion in the RV, including the driver and passenger seat. So the couch and all the chairs are going to need replaced. The pro’s about all this is that the floors are solid and the motor is strong. It runs and drives well, (we put in a new battery and the RV fired right up after sitting for 2.5 years!)

I have some experiance w/ remodeling a bathroom, painting and putting up drywall and such. But im afraid this is over my head. I would love to do all the repairs and eventually have a nice RV to go on vacation in. Do any of you have experience w/ RV’s? LOL Is it better to use carpet or tile?

I will post pics in the next day or two

Complete House Remodel.... #3: Up and Down....

Todd Thomas — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:16:54 GMT

Well one of the first things we needed to do was decide where we wanted the stairwell, now this house had a full walkout basement put on it years ago and the laundry area was in the basement,,,,they walked around the house to get in and than later on they cut a hole in the floor with a ladder….........now you wouldn’t think a stairwell would take up so much room…......we designed the stairs to go about 2/3rds the way and have a landing and cut back the rest of the way down.

Old stairwell…

That’s our friend Ron working on the stairwell…....

So after we got that done we snapped lines on the floor and moved them around until we came up with were we wanted the walls to go back and started putting them up….

Complete House Remodel.... #2: And the walls come down

Todd Thomas — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:45:36 GMT

After the clean up we put 2 heavy coats of Dry-Loc on all the basement walls, there were signs of water but I think most of that was due to not having any gutters on the house and the grade slants towards the house…..

After that we took all the walls down and had one big 1650 sq ft room up stairs with a matching 1650 room downstairs….the old houses here in Oak Ridge do not have any bearing walls, so you can move them anywhere you want and the great thing is that the hardwood floors run under all the walls as well…...

This is the 4th 30 yard dumpster….....

sorry for all the pictures, I figure they can tell/show you what is going on better than I can….

Complete House Remodel.... #1: The beginning.....

Todd Thomas — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:13:37 GMT

For the last 8 months I have been remodeling/building a home for us to live in, the old ”this is our last house” deal….I bought this house to fix up and flip BUT on the way to filling almost 3 dumpsters with trash and debris my wife said that this house felt like home and she loved the yard and location, our lot backs up to a green belt area, woods and it is at the 2nd highest elevation in town and we can see the mountains in the winters.

I am by no means an expert/master craftsman or very good carpenter, at times….but I love doing this type of work…..so we have COMPLETELY gutted this house, all that is left of the original house are the 4 outside walls about 1/2 of the rafters, and the hardwood floors, about 3,700 sq ft.and have/are putting it back together….so if you are interested I will bore you with our adventure into this, at times overwelleming project…now remember I have to work during the day to pay for this now that I’m not going to be selling this one…...

We have decided to redo the house with a craftsman/mission/A&E kind of theme…... We do have lots of pictures if you like that plus I will try to give you some before and after pictures of some of the bigger projects as well…

Let me know if there is anything you would like to see/know about as well….or just tell me go away :-)...

here are some pictures from what the house was like when we first got it…..it was built in 1943…...

Renovating the bathroom! The unabridged story... #1: A 'funny' thing happened on the way...

Mark Shymanski — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:32:31 GMT

Life sure can throw you some weird curves…we are renovating our bathroom because an inattentive driver wrote off our mini-van.

Hello all, this is my first post here on Martin’s reno site, I hope it is as interesting as LumberJocks and this tale will be my, hopefully not too boring, contribution :-)

This all stems back to June 1st where my wife was shuttling our kids to assorted end-of-year activities, Lauren (my daughter) was safely at school but Jenn (my wife) and Paul (my son) were on their way to the Discovery Centre where Paul’s pre-school was having a ‘learn about nature’ activity about 7 km from our house. We don’t know if it was the ‘big city’ driving, or the distraction of the construction but a young women, from an even smaller town then we live in, plowed into our van which was at the bottom of a bridge stopped at traffic. In moments she’d caused over 11 thousand dollars damage to our van and even more to hers (her Mom’s it turns out). The great thing is every body walked away from it and only the vehicles were badly damaged. To make an already long story short we had to buy a vehicle in short order which means we re – negotiated our mortgage and found ourselves in the happy position of actually making smaller payments per month whilst actually borrowing more money..you have got to love low interest rates! Since we had the mortgage already opened up we figure we’d borrow a little more and do our main bathroom (which is currently in the trendiest 1980’s look) creating more storage and updating the fixtures to low flow toilet, and a whirlpool tub and shower. Being in a smaller centre doesn’t give us the best selection of fixtures/tiles/cabinets etc unless you want to deal with the big box stores. We priced out pre-built cabinetry for the vanity and choked on the $2000 plus price tag….being a LumberJock I said to myself and Jenn…”I can build these better suited to what we want and maybe even save some money. To my surprise Jenn agreed, so now I am designing, with Sketchup, the vanity and a tower of cabinets.

I will be posting pictures as things progress…psst you can wake up now I’m done! :-)

double smart house #11: update from this summer

Big Al — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:27:15 GMT

I visited the house to see what progress they’ve done on the house. they got the oors in, and the slab is supposedly finished. drywall is supposed to be done and the sidding is getting there.

apparantly they dont expect to finish til september. But, who knows…

enjoy!
Al

Project Pictures Upgraded

mbulla — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:38:24 GMT

Did you want to add more pictures when posting a project and you couldn’t? Then you will enjoy a brand new update of our project pages. When entering a project page you will immediately see a larger version of the main picture. And the best thing is that this larger picture is not cropped anymore. Also, there is a list of all project pictures in a thumbnail format. The number of pictures per project was increased to six. Just click on any of the thumbnails to view enlarged version of that picture:

Zoom Pictures button opens a slideshow view of the high-resolution project pictures.

Enjoy!

double smart house #10: Last week of work on the house

Big Al — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:34:15 GMT

It’s now Thursday, pretty much the last day of work on the house. Friday will be a lunch with the owners and we will say our goodbyes until grad later this summer.

So this week we are mostly drywalling, exterior window detail, and the green roof is now a roof-top deck with planters…

here are the pictures:

here’s the deck:

during lunch

This is our last full work day for this house… I will visit once it is later on the build. I know a few people that are working with the new contractor. So I will take more pictures later in the build.

BigAl

double smart house #9: April 14th

Big Al — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 22:00:31 GMT

4” XPS is in. and the roughins for electrical and stuff also. some of the sidding is also being installed.

4”XPS and rebar for the slab

Electrical roughins

the back of the house

the front of the house, the rest of hte hosue is getting horixontal sidding, not verticle

Basement Bathroom #3: Slowly closing on completion.

BeachedBones — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:12:21 GMT

Here’s a couple current pictures of my project. Still to do is wainscoting and trim, storage door and storage furniture, mirrors, door T&G ceiling maybe.