Thursday, September 18, 2014

TBT Sunroom - Rebuild

Over the last two weeks, we showed you how we needed to remove the back wall of our first house because it was completely rotted out and how we totally rebuilt it. We start this week with a refreshing look from the inside:



As you can see, we've studded out and installed two large windows, and opened up the space into a long (narrow) hallway. Since we converted our coat closet to a laundry room, we decided to create a space near the door in here for storing coats and shoes. Before that though we had to deal with the floor. Even though there was already a rough subfloor (not pictured, under this paper), we wanted to get a really nice smooth surface for our new floor so we installed a new subfloor.


When installing subfloor, it's wise to use plywood specifically designed for this purpose. It should be tongue and groove so that the seams don't rub (and creak), and it should be fastened with ring shank nails so they don't pop out... EVER!!!


As you can see, we have a beautiful door way to a 5 ft drop and a nice view of our crumbling in-ground pool.


Once we had the subfloor down, we were able to put the base in for our half wall and Cassandra went to work putting down the flooring. First, we applied a special adhesive that improves adhesion when using self-stick vinyl tiles... which we were using. You rolled on the adhesive and let it dry until it is tacky and then you can lay the tile.


Even though we were going to insulate this room, this space was still going to see more temperature fluctuations than the main house and so we wanted to have a flooring that would hold up to it. The self-stick vinyl tiles were perfect for this and they were soo easy to install. If we needed to trim one down, we could just score it with a knife and cut it.


Best part? They are designed to be grouted so they don't look like the sheet vinyl but more like real tiles. We intentionally left 1/8" gaps in between the tiles because we wanted this floor to look more like slate, so we then applied grout to the seams. A few short hours later, we had a finished floor!


Clearly, it needs a good cleaning. 

We also needed to get ready for what was sure to be a cold winter, so we applied a good amount of insulation to the ceiling and the three exterior walls.


This is actually a bit tricky, because the screws to hold up the insulation would, over time, pull through if we just screwed them in (gravity's a b*tch).. To prevent this, we used large washers to keep keep the weight of this foam board off of the sheetrock.


Speaking of sheetrock, we officially hate these huge plastering jobs and from experience, we aren't awesome at smoothing the walls. So this time we were smart and found a professional down the street who said they could do the whole space for $300. All we needed to do was get the right type of board (it was gray), and attach it to the studs. We were pretty psyched.


During the sheetrocking, we also took this time to frame out a small wall section for our "mudroom", and install all the necessary wiring for the lights. The wall shared with the house was the original exterior wall of the house (that originally still had siding) so we brought it down to the clapboard and attached bead-board sheets to lighten things up.


Things are really coming together now!




And then BAM: plaster. It is awesome when other people do work for you.



With this big step done, we were now able to start focusing on little things, like trim.




There were so many late nights and we were so glad we installed all those lights!

Tune in next week for the big reveal!

Do you want to see the whole renovation? Click the links below!

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