The Porch....What were they thinking???

The Porch....and all that concrete!

Just in case you thought we had given up, we have been waiting for the guys schedules to open up to start on the demo for the porch. The McShane house has this giant concrete porch on the front that wraps around three sides. It is a huge amount of concrete!

This is the front ( you can see the 3 windows)

North side on the porch...

This is one set of stairs...the other is on the north corner.



Well we started the demolition of this porch, I think it was added around 1950. Im not sure why they added it. It doesn't really go with the style of the house. After the porch was added it caused water to leak in and the foundation to fall. 
But anyway, the demo of the porch is ending up to be very interesting.

Here we go..... Taking out those overgrown bushes made a huge difference! They wont be back!

View From the driveway

From the Front

You can see here the progress here. The porch wall is about 18" tall.

North side of the house

From the front of the house

The wall is gone....(north side of house)

So this next picture is about where they ended for day one! I talked to the workers and got some interesting info. The stairs were solid concrete....I asked "is that normal?", and with a sly smile the worker said "no ma'am". He said it took them about 3 1/2 to  4 hours just to jack hammer the stairs out!  Plus, he said the stairs had some whole river rocks IN the concrete! I have no idea if this was usual for back then but the workers found it unusual for sure!

The stairs used to be there.


Here we are at day 2! 

Front of house....

This is the south side of the porch, second set of stairs are gone


This is where it gets a little interesting. This picture below shows the jackhammer at work, notice the thickness of the concrete. Most of the porch was about 8" thick. In this picture below.... the concrete is about 12"-14" thick. The guys were having a hard time moving it to the dumpster. CRAZY!

Huge chunk of concrete!

South side of house.


On a side note... We found this old medicine bottle in the dirt under the concrete. I can not believe the jack hammers did not break it. To bad the label is gone and the stopper was missing too!!! We have also found a ton of marbles! We can only assume kids have been rolling marbles in that front room for decades.

Things should start moving along now. We are finished with the move and we can concentrate on just one house.....not three! Phew! See ya soon

An Update....

Update to the Summer Kitchen...

Hey! So I finally made it back down in the room below the summer kitchen with my camera. I snapped a few pictures so you could get an idea of what the room looked like. Its hard to tell real size but I am about 5'5" and I could stand up down there. Obviously the teenagers have tagged their names down there....so Paige, Erin and Dylan class of 2000....you are so cool :/

You can also see some water pipes running from one corner to the other, I don't know when those were done...I'm guessing 1988 when the house was connected to Carmel water? I wish they were better pictures but I think you can get an idea.

You can see the ladder...

I am almost standing behind the ladder in this one

I am standing right next to the ladder....

The Fence Is Complete!!!

One Project done....10,000 other projects to go....

Well, we finished the fence and it looks so much better. A little bit of paint and its going to look gorgeous! We are definitely going to keep with the white theme of the fence. We are under a covenant to keep the outside looking historical, and I don't have a problem with that at all. I couldn't imagine painting the fence anything but white. I sure hope my kids like to paint! I will post the after its been painted pictures....so stay tuned. 

Front of house

Westfield Blvd road frontage Looking North

Looking South

The corner of 101st and Westfield Blvd

Taken from across the street

The Fence! 

So one of the biggest differences that people will notice is the fence. My hubby and his dad worked all day on the fence that surrounds the property. It is the signature of the house! Im not sure when it was put in...but people recognize the property by the fence

Fence repair so far on 101st street side

Working hard...

It looks so much better already!

You can see in this picture how the fence is falling down.

My daughter and father-in-law working on the fence

101st street side of the fence

The Kitchen!

So we removed the old siding and framing for the windows, and look....it is going to be a much larger kitchen! I still haven't figured out what the layout of the kitchen will be (if you have any ideas let me know)! You can see from the pictures that it opens up the kitchen quite a bit.

Standing in the the existing kitchen looking into the dining room

Standing in the dining room looking into the kitchen

Again, standing in the dining room looking into the kitchen

looking into kitchen from dining room

On a side note, when we removed the plaster wall in the dining room we also had to take of the old wainscoting that encircled the room. This stuff is the real deal! It is all like 1" thick and has a lot of coats of paint. Needless to say we will be re- purposing it somewhere else in the house. I LOVE it!!!

Original wainscoting 

 On another side note, as we took the old clapboard siding off we thought it was interesting how they put the house together. Under the clapboard were these diagonally cut 1"thick (like really 1" thick boards....not like todays lumber) Of course I tole my husband to save these in case I want to make some funiture out of them! They are Awesome!

The Summer Kitchen Ceiling

While My husband worked....

I decided while my husband was tearing out the wall in the kitchen, I thought I would see what was above the drop ceiling in the summer kitchen. 

The Ceiling Before

There was about another foot of ceiling, but I did find some big hooks?

There were 3 hooks in all in the larger of the 2 rooms. I wonder what they were used for?

The ceiling after....

 I decided to start on the walls after I tore the ceiling off. The orange and maroon faux wood paneling HAD to go. I was hoping for brick walls.....and they were there. They had been skim coated but I can deal with those a lot easier than the paneling.

One wall

I did find that whoever chiseled out a bigger doorway.....I think these were 2 seperate rooms at one time

A Little Demo Day

The Kitchen

We started the demo in the kitchen this weekend. The cabinets that were in there were.....smelly!!!! Oh My! 

We knew this was an addition to the house, but we are still trying to decide when the addition was added. When we removed the cabinets we got a huge clue. The family name was written on the back of the cabinets. I remember seeing this name when we did some research on the previous owners. I think the cabinets were custom made for them. I believe the cabinets we removed were not the original. I did find one layer of wallpaper under the existing wallpaper that looked about 1950's??? I have included a few pictures so you guys can keep up...

Kitchen (looking into the house)

Kitchen (looking out)

 Demo

We stared demo-ing the wall that the kitchen shares with the dining room. We figured this was an exterior wall at one time....and as we started pulling plaster off we discovered.... The old clapboard siding!

Wall between kitchen and dining room

Old clapboard siding under the plaster

As we kept taking off plaster we discovered there was a set of windows behind the wall. The actual windows were removed along with the frames but the holes were still there!

Old windows in previous exterior wall

The old clapboard actually still had some paint

Same wall looking out.




We are planning on removing this wall to make the kitchen a bit bigger.....stay tuned!