When the going gets tough...and dirty.

We decided to take on some of the renovation work ourselves to feel connected to this house and ultimately to save some money. 
Brian (our contractor) had no objection to this - I think he felt sorry for us, the couple from the big city who were naive enough to believe that with some minor construction and a few coats of paint, we would have our perfect retirement home.  We ended up doing a lot of the demolition ( very dirty but strangely satisfying work) ourselves.  As we peeled back layers of flooring and ceiling material, we unveiled the history of the house.  The kitchen at one point in time was probably only a lean-to at the back of the house - a summer kitchen used only in the warm weather.  The wood stove used for cooking and heating was moved inside to one of the front rooms in the winter.  There is an old cistern below the kitchen sink which can be accessed from the basement.  This is where the floor damage was evident since over the years, water had been leaking in from that side of the house.  The staircase had been moved at some point in order to dig the cellar deeper.  There were bricks (rejects from a local brick works) inside some of the walls used for insulation.  No wonder the house felt cold during our first winter there.  In the front two rooms there was no insulation in the walls ( not unusual for a house built in 1890).  Stupidly we thought we could stop the furnace from coming on every 5 minutes by covering the windows with plastic.  This looked ridiculous when the walls were stripped back to the studs. 

Kitchen wall removal - brick insulation.

Replacement of kitchen floor required digging out about 18 inches of  dirt and rubble underneath it.

The kitchen is six inches higher now that 3 layers of ceiling and flooring have been removed.

 We arrived on weekends in our old clothes, tore the place apart and left covered in dust, thankful that we did not actually have to live in the house at this point.  I knew in my heart that we needed to strip the house clean before rebuilding (no cover ups) but I really was beginning to lose my vision of what I wanted this house to look like when it was done.  It wasn't until the drywall (about a year after the renovation began) started to go up that it remotely resembled the house we though it could be.