Home Remodeling

Some build home by pouring in foundation first, we started by replacing roof, removing walls and then pouring in foundation. Sounds intrigue? Continue reading to learn more. In today's home remodeling series a day when we removed first wall and finished pouring in concrete for foundation for our upcoming bathroom.  I had a handy hands today, Guntars, we started our cooperation already last year, he helped me a lot with roof replacement works. The plan for today was following, to demolish old…

It happened a a few weeks ago, when digging a trench around the existing foundation I discovered a missing foundation for one part of our rural house. Back then I quickly realized I will use Fibo ceramsite blocks to boost construction works.  The other day I poured in concrete footing, and today was the day to add first Fibo ceramsite blocks over footing Hardened foundation footing It rained for the last two days, I was a little bit worried, could too much rain could make some damage for…

That day finally came - construction materials arrived.  We paused our construction works for about a month, because of a simple reason - lack of funds, or more precisely slow bank transfers, we did spent a lovely July harvesting mushrooms and even spent three days traveling around neighboring Lithuania to celebrate my birthday. One thing made me worried - it was already second half of August and we still hadn't started works on rebuilding walls for our old log house. Haven't I mentioned - we…

Right, today I found a fix to the issue we discovered earlier this summer - missing foundation for the some parts of our rural house. Some few days ago I bough a concrete mixer, gravel was already waiting to be mixed with concrete, now it was time to pour in footing for the missing part. All setup Concrete mixer, wheelbarrow with gravel, a shovel. yes pretty much the basics for mixing the concrete. Simple template for foundation Now its time to pour in a base footing, itš a bout 90 cm…

Today I decided to keep digging trench around existing house fundament to prepare works for upcoming concreting works. Yesterday I bough a concrete mixer and mixed first test of concrete, load of gravel were already waiting and of course a sacks of cement were bought. It was just a matter of shovel and hand work. And then the bad news came - our house is partly missing foundation.  It turned out that at the end of house, there is no foundation at all, for about 2,5 meters. Well that makes…

Another addition to my home remodeling tools collection has arrived (been bought at local DIY store) - concrete mixer FXA 130L - with help of what I'm planing to concrete fundament for our rural house.  Concrete mixer is a must have tool for any self home builder and I would say it should be featured at any rural house. Concrete mixer is the second useful tool after a trimmer purchase this year. FXA 130 liter concrete mixer unpacked Huge was my joy after this purchase, now was time to set…

This Summer I will need a lot of gravel and crushed stone for home remodeling tasks, mainly for foundation sealing works. Some time ago (while digging a pond),  I negotiated a few cubic meters of gravel from neighbor, who was sealing surface of the road meanwhile, it turned out that neighbors' gravel was not ideal for foundation as it consisted from clay particles, and we decided re-use clay/gravel for rock garden instead.  I had no chance but to look for other source for gravel and crushed…

Here comes another update on building a bathroom from scratch series in project home remodeling. The thing is - the house we got didn't pamper us a lot, and so for example I had to install new supporting beams, not to speak about changing a roof, prior to before ever dreaming about having a bathroom. OK, I had a vision about a bathroom once we replaced roof last year, but to actually feature bathroom, we have to build many new things, among them - completely replace old and rotten wood beams…

This Summer I excelled in concreting works, the major concreting works involves concreting stone wall inside our rural country house and concreting house foundation (more on that in upcoming posts from home remodeling series) In spare time from major home reconstruction works this Summer we decided to build a cool and fancy garden pizza oven, connected with a water supply (sink) and electricity - making a cool outdoor kitchen with a lot of space for not only baking pizzas but doing some other…

The never ending story with my adventures on home remodeling and building a bathroom continues. In todays part 3 I will tell you a brief photo story how I strengthened a beam on the stone wall. See part 1 and learn more how I actually concreted this stone wall, while in part 2 see how we actually installed first bearing beams above bathroom ceiling. I'm of course talking not only about bathroom, but about a stronger and stable house as well (as bathroom will be built later into this space)…