Exterior Home Renovation Part 1

As we head into our final weeks of summer break I feel like I haven't come close to getting all the boxes checked off my to-do list.  In this past week we decided we are going to finish the front of the house and complete the rest next year.  Isn't it hard telling yourself that you just can't do it all but since we have made the decision I have been able to look back and really see how much we have actually completed in such a short time and really it is pretty incredible.  

We have taken this house that has been very well loved for the past 30 years and have been bringing it back to life and really seeing the potential it has to be our forever home.  I mean really after all this work I am not moving till I am old and grey. 

We moved into our new house last October and during the winter we took the time to build a new bedroom in the basement so all our boys could be downstairs and fix up some unfinished items that should have been done long ago.  Working mostly on getting the basement up to where we would like it as the main level is going to take much more work than one winter can handle.  We had many conversations on which side of the house we should build our extension onto as well as how big, is it to small, is it to big.  How do we lay it out so that it matches well with the existing house.  So 

many decisions.  

This is where we started, I know not very pretty right?

While the garage works better as a shed and oddly there is no access to it from the main house.  The existing house has really good bones and a great layout, perfect for our family.

What we knew we wanted to add to this house since the day we first looked at it was a garage and with the space we have in the country we wanted to make sure we had room to grown still. Our fist decision was whether we put the new garage on the right side of the house attaching to the existing garage.  With this became a problem of creating an access to the main level and making a proper boot room in the old garage.  There was also the problem of all our main lines running underground on this side and having to change the way the lane came into the house.  Or we could go on the left side and make the back bedroom into a boot room, this would leave us with one less bedroom, but with the new room in the basement it is still a 5 bedroom house.  Ahhhh we went back and forward so many times and finally decided for the look of the house from the front and how the yard and trees are layed out we would put in on the left side.

This was an exciting day, the first sign of construction starting 

Because the garage was being attached to the house we needed to do a 4ft frost wall.

Time to start framing

This was really the scary part, trusting someone else to not hit the house.

  They got it all and and with no incidents

This is where we started to question our design, once the roof was on the garage there was a huge difference in the height and we were not sure how they were going to match and look like it should have been built like this from the star.  

Stay tuned for more.