#diyreno

This weekend was interesting! We always said on a bright and sunny weekend that we'd take down the chimney in the back of our house and this weekend was it. Take down a chimney?! Yes, begrudgingly we *had* to take it down. I was in love with this feature, but 1) it was non-functoning, 2) had a ton of wood rot behind it, 3) creepy crawlers akin to small aliens were coming in between some of the cracks [shudder] and 4) our insurance company gave us a deadline by next weekend to take it down. Sigh. Also, when it was touched, it moved... no need to have a widow(er)-maker on our property!

So, my father-in-law is as close to a saint as it comes. He has been teaching us how to re-do a lot of our home, and hopefully we will be able to download all of our knowledge to our children when it's their time to buy their first place. We will, like our parents suggested, to buy something a bit newer because as we've discovered (and were previously told by just about everyone) old house, old problems. The saying is true. Don't think it doesn't pertain to you!

We still have the other half to take down, but will only do so after we clean up some of the first mess. You can't see in this picture, but we will also now need to fix our retaining wall... it was blown out by the tumbling chimney. Looks like we'll have a new outdoor seating area sooner than we thought (yes!!!!)!

But, the good news is out of all of this - the brick is in really good shape and we are trying to save as much of it as possible. We desperately need to do some updates to the front sidewalk, and think that these original pieces to the home will be absolutely perfect! Where you can reuse and recycle, it's always best. Also, saves a good deal of money.

Here's what we did! I swear, at some point, it will all look like it's coming together rather than just coming down :)

The chimney went all the way up past the top dormer's roof line! You'll also may be able to see where part of the chimney impaled our retaining wall and pushed it out about a good 12" in some spots. We had to dig it out by chipping off brick by brick. 

And here's the other part of the chimney in our back lawn. The force when this came down was incredible (and kinda scary!). 

When we were in the beginning stages of planning our our master bedroom remodel, we truly had to plan out every stage. Developing a floor plan (there's a great, and FREE, room modeling/layout program named SketchUp - go get it people!) that was a life saver while trying to see how our room would look. Below is a 3D model - SO COOL - of what we were thinking it 'may' look like. Of course, ideas evolve, but this is kind of what we were thinking. It might help make sense of some of the pictures in my previous blog post from today. 

Here, you will see the tiny built-in's we are planning to create. Although I'm not sure I did this completely to scale, you still get a good picture! We'll be placing sconces on either side of the bed as well, to add different levels of light - from what we've seen on the blogs known as layered lighting. Sounds cool - will see ;)