Still A Work in Progress

So many of you have been anxiously awaiting photos of our new home. This may end up being a little long but, in this post I hope to show you around the inside after we moved in to let you see what has been accomplished so far. 

Let's begin with the view as you enter the front door. You walk into the foyer and straight to the back of the house will be the living room.

Don't worry, this is the worst looking and least finished part of the house! As you turn to the right and walk into what will be the dining room...

you see the one room downstairs that is most complete. We are temporarily using the dining room as a living room and church meeting room.

Walking through this room you come to what will be a guest bathroom. Since it will be one of the last rooms on our list to finish, I have claimed it as a school room for books, school supplies, and at least one student!

On to the next room, the kitchen. We are so excited that our kitchen is going to be spacious enough to hold a large amount of counter space with an island in the middle. David and I both love to cook and we love to entertain guests. Since living in the old house, we were not able to have very many people over at one time. Even then it was difficult with no table to eat at due to space.  In the new house, we also made room for me to have a small table near the window like a breakfast nook for enjoying tea while visiting with friends. 

For now, we hung our good old cabinets that we purchased twelve years ago when we first arrived in Krasnoyarsk and have now moved with us three different times. They suffered some damage while in the other house but they can hang in there until we save up for new ones that will work better in our kitchen.

As you can see we only hung enough drywall to hang up the cabinets. Technically, that is a cabinet in the middle of the room with the snowman tablecloth draped over it. It goes in the corner of the kitchen up above the sink but I am enjoying using it as an island and canned food storage area while it is down on the floor where I can reach into it better.

As we walk back towards the front door you can see the front door and more of the foyer.

Now, let's take a look upstairs. Our stairwell is incomplete and the stairs themselves are also temporary. We have to be careful walking up and down them as they are a bit steep and open  underneath which makes for really sore shins if your foot falls through! We know from experience. 

At the right as you come up the stairs is what will be Beka's room.

Beka's room

We ran out of drywall for the rest of Beka's room so, until we order several large items again to be delivered to our house on one truck (drywall, linoleum, etc.) we will not be able to finish it. We also have to wait in order to transport certain supplies due to the extreme temperatures of this time of year. 

The next room upstairs is the boy's bedroom.

No one has a bed in the new house because much of our furniture was damaged by mold and moisture. Timothy, our youngest son, had a very difficult time living in the old house due to the amount of mold that was on the furniture, walls, and other items. We have done our best to clean everything we have moved over to the new house. Timothy was very dependent on an inhaler and other asthma meds but he has greatly improved since we moved into the new house. Therefore we did not move any furniture or items over that we could not properly disinfect. Even clothes smell of mold so we have been disinfecting them as well.

Next to the boy's room and straight across from the stairwell is the kid's bathroom/laundry room. We had to make the best of this small space so we built two walls in the long bathroom to divide up the areas between the vanity, tub, and toilet area. The laundry room is a small room attached to the bathroom which will have a door to allow it to be closed off from the bathroom.

The above picture shows where the tub will go.  It looks small because we are installing a smaller tub in this bathroom so that we could allow more space for the toilet and vanity area.

The master bedroom and bath comprise the back half of the second floor of the house.

As you walk from the main bedroom area to the bathroom, to the right is a walk-in closet/storage area and David's study/office is to the left.

Closet/Storage area

David's study/office

These small rooms are also waiting to be completed. We use them to store tools and boxes in for now. 

Our bathroom holds a tub, corner shower stall, and a separate toilet room which will have a door on it.

We have not purchased the linoleum for the bathroom yet but we have found the design we want to purchase. We found a small remnant of the linoleum we like and brought it home to see how it looked in the bathroom before deciding for sure on it. I really like it!

Well, that is the tour of the house as is it so far.  Our outside temps have been -30 degrees Celsius and colder this week so even before they were this low, we stopped all work on the house. We are actually glad that we did not get more work accomplished before we moved in as we have had some problems with condensation. These problems are to be expected with our extreme weather. We still have to finish the ventilation system in the bathrooms which will also help. We moved in and have learned some things to do differently and to change, which we will be able to take care of in the Spring.

Also, we were not able to install a coal burning stove before moving in so our heat is powered only by the electric "stove" we  showed you pictures of in posts about our heating system. This "stove" does well at heating the house until about -20 degrees then it needs the added boost or support, if you will, of a coal burning stove to keep the house comfortable. So, needless to say, with these recent temps we have been dressing a bit warmer. We are definitely looking forward to warmer weather so that we can continue the work needed to be done and install the stove to be ready for next winter. 

Don't worry, there will still be more for us to write about!

WE MOVED IN!

The kids packed up their stuff on their own. They were so excited to move out of our old house!

We are happy to announce to any of you who might not yet know that we have moved into our new home! We finished moving the basics necessary to sleep in the house  in the wee hours of Christmas morning. I am still trying to find places for boxes so that I can take pictures of what parts of the house we are using and what parts we still have lots of work to do in, but I will do my best to post some pics real soon! We thank all of you who prayed for this event and helped us financially so that we could move out before the coldest part of winter arrived. 

Tearing the bathroom out of the old house

 When we moved into the old house there was no running water inside. In order to make life easier for his family, my husband built a very small bathroom in the main room which would be our living room/bedroom. We, thinking we would live in this house for a short six months while we built our new house, were fine with it being so tiny. It was like an RV bathroom, but we had the most important room of the house INSIDE and not outside. We appreciated this greatly during the rainy times and winter time. Not real convenient when we had guests, so we tried not to have too many since there wasn't room for them anyway, but it worked! 

However, that six months of building turned into SIX years before we were even able to move into the new house. 

During that long period of living "temporarily" in that house, we constantly fought the battle of mold and mildew. Our youngest son suffered from allergies and didn't do well living in those conditions. 

Once we moved into the new house in November of 2011, we moved our Sunday school ministry into the old house and the adults then switched to meeting in the new house. In order to have the old house professionally treated for mold after all most everything had been moved out, we started removing the bathroom walls to open up that corner and facilitate the treatment process. We had no doubts of what we would find when we began tearing the bathroom apart. 

Here is how it all looked.

Pictures are worth a thousand words, right? Now you know of one of the many reasons we are thankful to have finally moved out of this old house!

Mudding, Taping, Sanding and Painting

We have been so busy trying to squeeze in every hour of work we can on the house lately so I that explains why I have been away from the blog a bit. It is getting exciting to see the walls closing in now! We had to wait a bit to be able to order some more drywall to close in the bedrooms. Since the order arrived David has been busy! I have been excited to see our bathroom take shape once we were able to get the framework done for the small toilet room inside the bathroom.

I have continued my insulation and vapor barrier work on the walls which are shared by the bathrooms and bedrooms. 

As the drywall goes up, I now have a new job! David has taught me how to mud and tape drywall seams! So, he puts up each sheet and I go to work...

Mudding.

Taping.

Sanding.

Final sanding after finish mudding is dry.

Last but not least...PAINTING!

This is a waterproof base coat we are putting on all the walls to start out with. We will move in with just the white walls and then work room by room as we can to finish each room with its final colors and trim.

So exciting! I think I am going to love smooth, even, white walls! 

Heating System (Connecting it all together)

Even though I have not posted much on this blog lately about the progress of our home building, things have been happening...BIG, important things like the heating system to keep the house warm. We did suffer from sickness for a week or two and so we had to take some necessary time away from the work. Besides the terrible weak feeling, I just couldn't see myself installing insulation with a sinus infection. Just the idea of it all even sounded painful! However, now we are back in the swing of things and working away to get it done!

I know you will all be shocked to see that the weather here in Siberia already looks like this...

So, the time has long come for us to be able to keep the inside of the house warm so we can continue to hang drywall and other work that needs to be done in non-freezing temperatures. 

Putting together a heating system is quite a task as I have learned! First of all, you need a plan. So, my great hubby drew it all up after giving it much, maybe even months of thought. 

 Then, you need to find a place to buy the parts cheap enough and go crazy buying bags and bags of...parts.

Here are the bags.

Here are the parts.

Big parts, little parts, parts that open and close (valves).

The next step is to begin connecting all the parts to each other using this plastic welding tool. I had never used one of these before but now I know how to use this tool for sure!

This time we were able to use the table but often we were standing on ladders and whatever else to reach up high and connect pipe sections. It was quite comical at times and thankfully, we escaped with me only burning my hubby twice!

Once the main stretches of pipelines were connected, David began working on connecting the major valves, filters, pump and other larger components before we carried them downstairs to the basement for further...connecting.

Once all of our main pipe sections were hung in place in the basement and connected up through the floors to each radiator, we could work on the most important part of the system.

David connecting the in-line filter to the system.

This white box is the electric heater that heats the fluid which flows through the pipes and radiators. Initially, this heater alone will be used to heat our house. The pipes we buried in the ditch we dug from the house to the old "banya" on our property  (which we described in this post), will eventually connect a coal burning boiler stove to the heating system inside the basement to provide heat for the house. We will purchase this stove as soon as we are able. The valves are already in place to allow us to change the heat source over from the electric stove to the boiler stove with little or no problems.

As soon as our circuit was complete and all parts were in place, we were able to begin pumping the fluid from this large container through the pipes!

Although it sounds exciting, the work is not over. The next step is to find all of the air pockets trapped in the system which can block the fluid from entering and exiting the radiators. You also must run around and check for leaks in each of the radiators as they fill up. A little difficulty initially is normal with this type of system. However, once it is set up and the fluid is flowing smoothly through the circuit, those warm radiators are a real blessing! Other than one possibly damaged at the factory radiator, we are up and running with all of the radiators in working order downstairs and two working upstairs. We still have a few to connect to the pipes already in place and each room will have a warm radiator! 

So, do you know how hard it is to be patient and not want to move into a nice warm house, even though it is not ready?! 

Trust me, very!

Septic and gray water drainage

Another item that we were able to mark off the to-do list; gray water drainage ditch dug, lines run and connected to the tank. We now have both the septic lines connected (we dug those as soon as we had the basement foundation poured) and the gray water connected. The septic tank itself was dug before we move into the existing house we are now living in. Then we had the lines in place to connect at a later time.

Inside basement view of lines

 Last year, we dug another tank on the back side of the new house for the gray water so that all the other water drainage from the washer, sinks, and showers would not fill up our septic tank as quickly. 

This is definitely a good thing to get done before the weather turns colder. Now, all of our necessary digging and outside work is done! Well, until Spring comes around. Then we have some serious landscaping to do! 

Front Door to House and Basement Door Installed

This may not be too thrilling of a post to read, but we were very happy to have recently been able to purchase and install the front door to the actual house as well as a basement door (fire escape exit). In a previous post we showed the front door to the porch after installation. Here in Siberia, the winter weather demands several doors in order to prevent frost buildup and drafts. These vinyl doors are insulated to keep the heat inside the house and the cold air out, just like we like it. 

Front door - photo taken from inside the house.

The basement door is a shorter one because it will not be used very often. We mostly wanted to have a fire escape exit in case of an emergency. It exits out the back of the house to a small covered area as you see in this picture - (bottom left side of the house).

David foaming in the door.

It isn't pink, it's white;  just the sun shining in. :)

There's only one little problem...we found out that the factory installed the wrong lock mechanism in the front door. So, the handle which is delivered in a small box separate from the door does not fit. We initially thought it was just the incorrect handle and so they met with us to give us the "proper" handle, and it was wrong as well. But, such is life sometimes. We are waiting for them now to come to the house themselves and take care of their mistake. We will keep you posted on this one!