dkspaces "The Cabbage Blog"

The following were all done to the cottage, here is the list: rebuilt all exterior 2×4 walls, all new HVAC, all new electrical, new LVL’s in place, reframing of new kitchen, reframing a new first floor bedroom and bathroom and master bedroom and bathroom, all new exterior doors and windows. We were just getting ready to schedule insulation and drywall when……… OUR COTTAGE FLOOR FLOODED!!!!

It happened during a July thunderstorm that dropped 3 inches of rain in one hour. The cracks in the concrete slab started to ooze water everywhere. The water table is quite high along the west shore where our cottage is located. There was really only one solution, and that was we had to raise the 2200 sq. ft. cottage .

Jim being the master engineer, googled flying buttresses. It was 4×4 wood supports and a lot of bracing to keep the structure intact as we slowly raised it. The original exterior stone fireplace had to be cut away from the house so the the cottage could be raised. Many 2×4’s, and 4×4’s were used with GRKs to keep the two story structure in tact. We use approximately 32 automotive bottle jacks on the exterior walls and the interior center bracing. A laser level was used to shot level up the walls between the front of the cottage and the back of the cottage. With the help of our contractor friend Rich and our best friends Rick and Wendy along with our two girls and Josh, we spent the entire weekend slowly raising the 2200 sq. ft. structure. Here are some of the pictures from the interior and exterior of the Cottage Lift.

After about three weeks and moving our oldest daughter into college, we started on the foundation. a two block high foundation while the cottage was lifted.

From start to finish the foundation project took at least 2 months, but we have a new foundation!!!

After the purchase of the cottage, we knew that the layout would need to change. The kitchen as in other posts was closed off to the rest of the cottage with only a small opening into the log cabin room.  Other problems with the current design include:

-Having to walk through a first floor bathroom to get to the only bedroom on the  first floor

-No bathroom on the master bedroom side of the cottage

-a kitchen closed off from the view of the lake.

-only a toilet and a sink in the upstairs with the remaining three bedrooms

The original cottage layout, seemed chopped up.  You could tell where each addition had been added to the original log cabin.  So having worked with floor plans before, we decided that we would spend the winter months revising and planning the new cottage layout as well as the new placement of doors and windows.

In my design years I have used a few different software CAD design systems.  I recently had upgraded to the PUNCH Design software. Very user friendly and fairly reasonable to purchase.

So our first priority was  to basically take the first floor to the studs. Since the walls on the outside of the original structure needed to be rebuilt ( for  more on this read the blog on the foreclosed cottage) most of that was already complete.

We started with a plan to open up the main living spaces. The kitchen was closed off from the view of the water and only one 4 ft opening into the log room. The kitchen was dark with limited windows. We started with a plan to eliminate the walls and open the kitchen up to the log room by installing an engineered LVL.  Along the lake side we also needed to open the view so a second LVL was engineered on either side of the original log cabin. Jack Plates were used to hold up the demoed walls until the LVL’s could be engineered and put in place.  These Jack Plates were very important because they needed to hold up the roof and the second floor.

Below is the computer layout of the new space, both upstairs and downstairs.

After the new layout was designed, we went to work on the new window and door placement. I wanted more natural light in the kitchen as well as windows to maximize the view. Window opening and door openings increased in size from the existing windows. Our windows and doors were placed through Home Depot

Below is the second floor layout…

The kitchen in our original cottage was probably built in the 60’s based on the counter tops and the handmade cabinents.

 

 

The above picture is how the original cottage kitchen looked. The kitchen was very dark, with only two miss matched windows on the back wall. There was also a third window close to the main door into the kitchen, but it was very dark because of the screened in side porch. The main kitchen only had a small opening to the other parts of the cottage, and there was no lake view.

The flooring was glued down linoleum onto the concrete slab.  The concrete under the linoleum had started to move and crack from the years of settling. The picture above is me trying to scrape off the glued linoleum.  The entire cottage smelled of rot and mildew, not necessarily an appealing place to make or eat food.

The prior owners covered up the 70’s paneling with wallpaper, a great attempt to take the cottage out of the 70’s, but forgot about the modeled ceiling tile that remained, stained and damaged.

The picture above is of the dining area on the other side of the kitchen. It had a little build in in the right corner, when we tore off the 4 layers in the kitchen we found it to be the original log cabin entrance. More on the layers to follow……

The kitchen cabinets were not salvageable. After years of the cottage flooding too much mold had gathered, plus as we later found out, the kitchen sink literally leaked right outside the cottage onto the ground and the back wall of the cottage.  I  found this out one afternoon when I was pouring milk down the drain and wondered why there was white foam outside the back window. The kitchen sink only drained to the outside on the ground. YIKES!!!

SO WE DECIDED THAT THE KITCHEN HAD TO BE GUTTED!!!!

One afternoon Jim and I went up to wait on a foundation contractor, and at 2 in the afternoon we started to rip out the cabinets.

Something I realized early on in the remodel is that it is so so easy to tear things apart, but so much harder to put it back together.

With the cabinets now reduced to a heaping pile on the concrete, we proceed with the walls of the kitchen.  Just as a side note, during everything that we demoed and took out of this cottage, we only got 2 dumpsters for the entire remodel, just to remove the old windows, doors and ceiling tile.  Most of the wood we burned on on site.  Not sure this is environmentally friendly, but we probably burned at least 4 dumpsters worth of debris. At least it did not go into a landfill.

MOVING ON TO THE WALLS!!!

As I mentioned earlier in the post, the prior homeowner had covered over the original 70’s paneling with the wallpaper. So we thought that we just had to remove the paneling and that it would be an easy demo. If anyone has ripped off paneling its a fairly easy job. (in this cottage reno we have ripped off paneling in every single room of this 5 bedroom cottage). It was easy, but we found another layer of wall under the 70’s paneling, and it was 1950’s knotty pine paneling, beautiful but the bottoms  of the paneling had been damaged by the constant flooding. After carefully removing the knotty pine(I had plans for that later) and placing it in our garage. We found yet another layer behind the knotty pine,  1 x 10 wood clapboard siding. Below is a picture of the different layers in the kitchen. This clapboard was painted and was at one point the exterior of that part of the cottage.  One thing that always puzzled me during our renovations, was why in the world did they not rip off any of the old material. In fact throughout the cottage they just build layer upon layer. And finally behind the clapboard was brown Armstrong fiberboard insulation. In all we demoed the kitchen walls 4 times to get it down to the stud level.

 

 

 

 

To the right and left are the different layers in the cottage’s kitchen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOW TIME TO REWORK THE WALLS AND SHOP FOR CABINETS

Now I went into this renovation with the idea that I would try and get as many items on sale, at thrift stores or anything else that would save us money. Since this would be our weekend vacation home, bought as a foreclosure, I knew that the budget would be tight.  So i decided I would shop frequently at our local Habitat for Humanity.

After a few purchases at Habitat, I walked in one day and saw a beautiful full set of maple cabinets. Shocked at the number of them, I inquired about the price, they were $1200 dollars for all of them.  I could not believe it, sent Jim a text with a short video, and decided right then we were going to use these cabinets to try and say money in the kitchen. Below are the photos as they sat in the store:

Little did I know but it would be almost two years after I bought them at they would end up being put into the kitchen up north.

NEXT STEPS IN KITCHEN REMODEL…..

We decided that a new kitchen layout with new windows and doors were needed.  We spent the winter deciding where new doors and new windows would go as well as moving the side wall of the kitchen over by 18 inches

Then came the rest of the remodel, moving walls, new electrical, new HVAC, and LIFTING THE ENTIRE COTTAGE and putting a new foundation under it….

Thus our 2 yrs before the cabinets went in, more posts to follow…………………

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read More

Over Memorial Day 2016, we spent the weekend taking out the old windows that were falling apart and replaced them with new Jeld-wen windows from HOME DEPOT.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We replaced the top two windows in the front of the cottage with a door wall and smaller windows along the sides. This change will even allow us to put on an upper deck off the master bedroom. The smaller windows allowed for a change in the layout of the upstairs master bedroom,changing the entry from the stairs , and eliminating the large closet and adding a small master bathroom in it’s place. Below is the pictures of many of the modifications that needed to be made.

We rigged a pulley system to get the large door wall up to the master bedroom. Three on ropes pulling it up, both Jim and Rich(our friend and contractor) on ladder ready to stabilize the door before lifting it into the door rough opening.

Master bedroom window changes

Its been almost one year since we looked at and purchased a foreclosed cabin/cottage on Houghton Lake.

 

This 2200 square foot cottage was unique in that it had an existing ,intact 1950’s cabin smack dab in the middle of it. The cabin has two sets of stairs one going to the front addition, added on to the front of the cabin and the second going to the back addition,  added to the back of the cabin.

 

 

We have nicknamed the cottage “Cabbage” cabin + cottage = cabbage

We purchased the cottage in the summer of 2015, when the housing market in Michigan had still not yet recovered. The second home market was even worse, so many cottages that summer were for sale around the lake.  The cottage was in a bank foreclosure and listed for a very cheap price due to the fact that it had a “mold problem” and had been vacant for 4 years.

We figured that the cottage just needed cosmetic work, plus our dear family friend was in the mold removal business. Whatever problems we ran into with mold could be fixed with his help.

What we did not know at the time, that in the spring with the wind just right and the lake level up, the area around the cottage and around the other homes had a tendency to flood. This now would explain the “mold problem”. LESSON ONE.…….

So we now know that the lake periodically will come over the concrete sea wall and flood the existing area.  So our initial fix to this problem was to eliminate all the busted concrete around the cottage and sock tile the perimeter of the foundation. We installed sump pumps in the front on either corner toward the lake. With water draining into the sock tile around the perimeter we used the pumps to move water back into the lake. Problem solved…or so we thought…….

So now that problem was solved we went about trying to fix the interior of the cottage.  The upstairs was fine, just outdated 70’s paneling.  We spent quite a few weekends painting the 70’s paneling white and cleaning so we could stay there during renovations (our house is a 3 hour drive from the cottage)

 

Next came the main floor with all the mold problems. This turned out to be a bigger problem. As you can see in the side picture, we not only had mold but dirt and roots growing into the cottage once we pulled back the carpet.  From the years that the cottage had flooded, the sill plates had rotted away. Along with the sill plates, the 2 x 4 walls were also rotted. The  front of the cottage was only held up by two large nails.

This now explains why the windows were falling out of their sills. The entire first floor sill plates were rotted away, with no structural support holding up the two story 2200 square foot cottage.

Above is a video taken from the back of the cottage, where the kitchen had been. As you can see by this video of Jim, the wall is freely moving.  We installed jack plates(like the one in front of the window)  around the entire first floor perimeter, just to hold up the cottage.