Attic Reno

When Justin and I looked at our acreage home nearly five years ago during an open house, we remember entering the walk-up attic and dreaming about it becoming a master bedroom before we were even the home owners!  While walking through with a house inspector, he assured us it would be a project that could be completed.

 The attic has sat empty for five years holding only insulation to help with heating and cooling of the house.  Other projects took our attention first including adding an attached garage, new shingles, insulating the porch, etc.

 Justin, always looking for the next project, believed it was time to begin the process of putting our dream into reality.  He started by removing all of the insulation.  Folks, there was a lot of insulation up there.  He started by bringing it down the two separate flights of stairs, bundle by bundle.  Then things got interesting as he removed insulation from the ceiling that may well have been there for 50 plus years.  He chucked that out the attic window and we gathered it up.  The majority of the insulation we put into the attached garage ceiling.  The rest went to a friend who's dad wanted to use it in his shop.

 The next step was purchasing lumber and getting it up to the attic.  Justin made a lot of trips carrying lumber through the kitchen and again up two flights of stairs.  One night after small group bible study, the guys formed an assembly line ushering 2X6X10s and 2X4X10s up the outside of the house and through the attic window.

 Justin then worked on extending the rafters to allow enough spray foam insulation to meet code.  This was a tedious process involving many compound angle cuts.  Unfortunately, we'll lose some head room in those already low slanting corners, but we plan to use the space as best we can with built in drawers.

 The most glorious part of this whole endeavor will be an added bathroom to the house.  We currently have one shower/tub which works most of the time, but gets tight on Sunday mornings and when we have guests in the house.  Justin has been working on cutting out the floor where the bathtub will sit to "sister the joists" as well as allow the plumbers to do their work as needed in the floor.

 The plumbers have been able to run the piping down through the laundry shoot to the basement.

 Justin has also worked on raising the floor where the shower and toilet will sit to allow clearance for the drain pipes to not interfere with floor joist strength. 

We're definitely in the early stages of this.  My role has been to keep Kale content while his Papa spends a lot of time "up in the attic" as Kale says.  I'm looking forward to the decorating portion, of course...!  Check back for our progress!