The Door

The door, like everything else, took considerably longer than I could have ever expected.  I new that I wanted to use this old barn style sliding track that I had purchased back in college for my rental and never used.  It came all the way from Kansas and I'd been storing it in my garage for about 5 years.

Here is what was there before.  The bottom of the door started to wear out, so I had to do a little temp fix on it, to keep the dogs out of the garage.

The Studio Demo

At every point of this project I've contemplated hiring some help to get things wrapped up.  This was one of them that I kept coming back to.  The problem was that I always felt I would run into these points where I would just have someone standing around waiting for me to make decisions, so I ultimately never did get any help moving debris.  It made me stronger right?

So to start into this part of the project, I wanted to get as much of the place pulled down as possible before renting the dumpster.  I didn't want the dumpster sitting idle in the driveway while I tried to figure out how to tear something down, so I got it to a point where I had as much debris next to the studio as still get around and then I started looking for dumpsters.  After looking through several different companies, I was blown away on how much they wanted to for 20 yarder ($350-500).  I ended up using Ponce Services.  The didn't have the absolute lowest price, but it wasn't the worst.  I wish I would have asked if the price was with taxes, since it came up to around $430 once Texas got his cut.  So when they delivered it, I was totally amazed that the driver was able to get dang thing in our driveway since it's barely truck width as is.  One thing I didn't think about until after the drive was gone was that the bar to open the door to the dumpster was on the same side as the fence!!  My only option was to pull out some planks on the fence and see if I could get it open.  No joy since the bar would have to pass thru one of the posts of the fence.

So I stopped worrying about that and started loading it up.  I was really suprised that the 20 yarder didn't hold as much as I would expect.  I got the studio down to the floor and didn't have anymore room, so I called the company and had them pick it back up.  Not sure how I will get ride of the rest, but at least it's down to the ground and not a problem.  I'll have to finish the job before I can work on the fence....

Finally got the roof all the way down!  I wanted to save those door, so I have to be a little more careful the rest of the way.

Wall Repair

I torn down the old stairs back in October sometime.  Then I had to start repairing all the water damaged siding on that same wall of the garage.

This required a lot of gentle removal of the siding to preserve wood that could be reused.  Once I got down to the studs, I made the decided to rebuild the wall too.  The existing studs at some point had some water damage along the sill.  One of the previous owners just simply tacked another 2x4 on the side of the other and replaced the sill.  The sill wasn't attached to the concrete and the studs were a total mess.  I started on the end by the door and began pulling out all the framing around the existing side door.  I new I wanted to open up the door to about 4 foot, so I went ahead and framed in for a custom door (more on the door later).

Once I got the door framed in, I continued down the wall, shoring it up, removing the old wood and replacing it with the new.

Next was to replace the siding... Since the wood was in pretty bad shape, I decided to go ahead and replace it with new wood.  Luckily the local Grogan carries the old 6" pine siding with the same profile in 16 footers. The cool part is bring home 16 foot lumber in a Prius!  Almost like a Tundra, except it gets 45MPG.

Then all the wood had to be primed.  I primed all sides but the front, figuring it would be easier to paint the front once it's on.  After getting everything primed I started hanging.  Luckily my neighbor was nice enough to let me borrow all his tools I needed, so the siding went up pretty quick.  It did rain a few of those days and since the days were getting shorter, I wasn't getting a lot of daylight after work.  Had to tape up some plastic over the wall a few days since the front wasn't primed yet.

Once I got a chance I laid a couple coats of primer and then Karen put down the first coat of the blue to match the existing.

Studio Or Door?

So the next decision was whether to start tearing down the studio behind the garage next or get the door finished.  I had a pretty good idea of the design I wanted for the door, which involved using the table saw a lot to make all the lap joints. Since the only room I had for the table saw was in the studio, I started the door first.

What's happened so far on the remodelling

So pretty much one Saturday a few weeks back, I woke up and decided to start on the backyard renovation. I decided to start with the most dangerous part, which was the stairs to the garage apartment. The basic problem with the stairs was that they were built out of none treated wood that was painted on all sides and also built on the wall of the garage without any flashing at all to keep water and leaves from getting in between the stringer and the garage wall.  Here are some pics of the problems (the Befores)

As you can see the stringer is in direct contact with the siding.  Also the existing siding for some reason appears to be pieced together. 

Since the stairs and porch were in really bad shape it only took me about an hour and a half to turn it into a pile of wood.

Catch up!!

So it's been a really, really long time since the last post. To play catch up about the last 4-5 months:

• We've decided to go ahead and work toward getting our house ready to sell and start looking for properties. We think we can get anywhere from $50-100k more for our house then we would spend on a lot.
• We put and offer down on lot on White Oaks. It turns out the lot is in probate, so we're going to keep looking around.
• We've also started working on cleaning up the backyard since this is part of the house that needs the most improvement.

That's pretty much the gist of the last 4-5 months. We've looked at a lot of different lots in various areas. We're trying to keep it to, the Heights, Rice Millitary, or Montrose right now. All the lots in this area range from $150-250k. So we're shooting in for the mean or lower if we can get it. With the economy what it is, builders haven't been eating up all the lots like in the past. So this is definitely a benifit for us.

Next posts will be all the work going on to get the house ready for sales.

Can we keep it near $100 a sq. ft.???

We're really looking for the help here! We've only spoke with one design/build firm so far. They basically told us if we GC the project ourselves we could keep the cost down. We're definitely interested in doing as much work as possible, but I'm not sure with working full time, if we can handle all the inspections, dealing with contractors, ordering materials, etc. To be honest after visiting the Houston Code Enforcement site, I don't see how a General Contractor does it. This website is a spiderweb of documents and different costs that look like they could all add up to around $10k only. This was pretty amazing to me that the city charges so much for all this. I'm hoping that I am reading this all wrong and that someone reading can ease my worries here.

Anyway, back to the plans. Like I said before, we've looked into one firm so far. MDGI, recently renamed as StudioMET. Still trying to understand why the name change. Anyway, we really like the designs of their houses and have gotten a lot of what we want in a house from looking at there various homes. I haven't see a lot of reviews on them besides these two (positive1, positive 2) and this one (negative). We've played around with the idea of locating some of their homes and sending letters to them to see what they really think about the houses. There are a few of their townhomes down the street from us on Jackson Hill. They look pretty good, but one of them seems to have had some pretty bad structural settling that has cause some pretty bad stucco cracks.

Some other architect's we're interested in are Intexure, and MC2, but still looking. Suggestions?

So what the hell are we looking for in a house? Well we want a more modern home with a very open floor plan, but we don't want cold modern. Most of that we will handle with interior decor, but we don't want the place to feel like no one lives there. We're estimating that 2300-2500 sq. ft. of which we want a master suite, two bedrooms and one office/bedroom, with 3 bath. We should be able to fit all of this in two floors, however, I would like to add a unfinished third floor to improve the resale of the house later. This space could be finished to add another bedroom, a studio, theater, playroom, whatever. I just feel adding this space would be a prudent idea to keep the taxable square footage low but have the option of growing over time.

One design element that we're really interested in, is having the Living Room, Dining Room, and Kitchen all open to each other in a straight line, with one wall open to the outside, preferably with a pool. We have some rough drawings that I will try to post here soon. I'm struggling a lot with the front elevation as well as the large amount of glass that I want that I know we shouldn't have.

All and all we're wondering if we can get all this at that $100-110 range and how much we will need to do to get to that price point?