Ready to roll, we had our building permit and blueprints in hand. But the hardest challenge, we’d learn, was finding a builder.

It was a hard-fought few months finalizing architectural plans and applying for our building permit with the city. After much back-and-forth, we finally got approval to break ground. At this point, we found ourselves well into April! One of the biggest pieces of advice I can give anyone planning major renovating is this: it will take twice as long and cost twice as much as you’re expecting. Guaranteed.

Feel free to skip to the hulk smash photos, or take the scenic route and read our dramatic series of events below. It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure blog post today.

Finding a Framing Crew

Since we embarked on general contracting this project ourselves, we were banking on finding a good crew of carpenters. We wanted to do as much as possible ourselves, including the demo beforehand. At this point, we’d already lined up our own lumber supplier (Joe works in the construction field) so we only needed to find someone for labor — just building it. We only wanted the walls up and waterproofed and we’d take it from there. This can be really tricky! Harder than any of the pre-permit work, finding a builder was our biggest challenge of all. So many people want to do an entire house from start to finish and we only needed the framing work.

From the beginning, we were asking around, although there wasn’t much we could show anyone until we had plans in our hand. We had a lead for someone who normally handles commercial work only, but said they’d be interested in our residential job since winter was a slower time of year. I called him up and at first he was hesitant, but he said, “You’re persistent. That’s good.” Long story short, by April he told us we missed our window. This was a serious blow since he gave us a reasonable price. With three huge storms the past summer of 2017 in central Minnesota, there was a serious labor shortage. Some places are still catching up! On top of that, there’s a huge shortage of skilled tradespeople. We gathered about a dozen quotes and only a couple were in our budget that we felt were reputable. We had another lead from the winter who we had all lined up at a good price, and you wouldn’t believe — we got dumped again! Another one too busy… Now we were starting to really get nervous. We even half-joked about doing it ourselves, feeling a bit over-confident after our Habitat for Humanity stint… But in the end, we decided if it had to wait until fall or even spring, then we would wait. And if it wasn’t meant to be, it wasn’t meant to be.

And that’s when a true miracle happened. I was walking my usual morning route and saw a new house in progress. There was a sign in the front yard and I memorized the phone number. Without much expectation, I called them right when I got home. I left a voicemail saying basically, “Hey, I live nearby and need a framing crew for an addition. We have our building permits and blueprints.” I even noticed they use the same lumber company. Wouldn’t you know, the owner of the company lives only a few houses away from us and he wanted to meet us. They build gorgeous homes so I had my doubts about pricing. Mike seemed like a straight shooter and I told him we really liked his work, but we had a budget. He told us while they do build luxury homes, they actually prefer smaller projects close to home. Hello us! The fact that we had our building permit was another huge reason he was willing to take us on. (As we learned, working to get those can take a lot of time and energy). Just a small window in his schedule was all we needed. He was even cool with us doing all the demo and finishing work, and was happy to just price out framing labor for us. When Mike sent us out the bid, I couldn’t believe how fair it was. We were ecstatic! After seeing 10+ quotes, we knew this one was right on the money. We didn’t hesitate one second. So now we had a licensed contractor working with us, and a very well-respected one at that!

Preparing for Liftoff

Mike told us to get the demo going right away and to expect a crew in a few weeks’ time. We ordered a 30-yard dumpster just before the 4th of July and had our work cut out for us, literally.

Not too many people get this excited about a dumpster, but for us, this was the checkered flag to start after a whole year of waiting.

Trust me, it didn’t stay empty for long.

We recruited the help of Joe’s best friend Tim for the weekend to smash some walls down. Since we’d have to sacrifice one small bedroom to make room for a stairwell to the addition, this room needed to get prepped in advance.

We tried our best to plastic off this part of the house so sheetrock dust and insulation didn’t’ fly everywhere, but it happens. We basically needed to evacuate the whole upstairs.

In case you were concerned about where we are now sleeping, here you go. In the living room/kitchen on a mattress on the floor. I call it the doggy bed. You get used to it  :\

Here’s the hallway leading up to the new staircase area.

This wall went bye bye

This whole closet needed to get demo’d too

RIP closet and bedroom

And since the stairs would be going up, Joe had to kick the ceiling down too.

My job was using the prybar to get all the nails out of the 2×4’s. Not too bad actually.

The aftermath

We also had to rip out behind the fireplace of our basement to beef up the support here to meet code.

We actually had to rip out many fun places of the house including this small closet to run HVAC.

 

Sucking out Attic Insulation

Joe’s next task was to suck all the insulation out of the attic. Let’s take off that tarp.

First step was ripping up the shingles.

A messy job for sure.

He rented this insulation vacuum for about 4-6 hours.

There are bags that attach and fill with insulation. We went through two.

So much insulation. So many shingles.

So Joe spent a day up in the attic with a big industrial vacuum, sucking insulation out of the roof.

Here’s our closet. Joe’s boss even dropped in to help one day. Literally, his feet fell right through the roof here! He said, “That’s not what I meant by dropping in.” Yikes

Gloves, check. Mask, check

This is mostly pre-demo demo. The real fun happens when the roof comes off!

 

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