January 30 and 31

Another busy weekend of work at the Cundey household! It was 19 degrees on Saturday, but David, Bryan and I stayed warm with layers of clothes and lots of hard work. Here's David tearing off the many layers of siding on the front of the house. (This is the final wall to have old siding on it.)

Bryan worked on getting all the plywood on another wall, then started putting up Tyvek.

It started to snow around 3pm, but the guys kept working! We even got more help from a neighbor.

This is how the front of our house looked as of this afternoon. Yikes! But with renovations things have to look bad before they can look good.

This afternoon David and Bryan moved everything out of the living room and we started tearing down walls. We closed off this room with a wall of plastic to try to keep the dust out of the rest of the house.

January 23

Bryan fixed the roof so that you can't even tell that a chimney was on this wall only a week ago!

David's sister, Marney, and her son, Julian, came to visit for dinner tonight. Julian asked "Why dey have stickers on deir house?" I guess the Tyvek looks similar to stickers when you're 3 1/2!

How to Destroy a Chimney

David is blessed with many good friends, 2 of whom helped us all day on Saturday with tearing down our chimney. (Why are we tearing down our chimney and fireplace? Because it's old, poor quality, brings cold drafts in the winter, and the fireplace takes up a lot of space in our living room.)


Bryan and David used a hammer chisel drill to break the chimney apart.



Noah and Haley, the neighbor kids, watched the work for over an hour (while their mom and I were able to visit).



By late afternoon on Saturday, a lot of progress had been made! (We discovered that when the chimney was put in it had covered over an original window.)


David started working on the chimney as soon as he got home from work today. Thankfully it was much easier work than the top of the chimney. By 8pm the chimney was completely gone and he had nailed plywood to the outside of the house to keep out the drafts. What a huge change in just 2 days of work!