I Love the Smell of Sawdust in the Morning!

I spent my Thanksgiving holiday with my DH and my parents reconstructing an I-can't-believe-it-hasn't-been-condemned house that my parents bought.  It's a great house that I love, but it has massive termite damage and has been neglected for a L-O-N-G time.  The floor joists are so termite eaten that they look more like corrugated cardboard.  Scary!  Thankfully my family is very handy and can build anything.  My dad can even do all the electrical.  Most of what we did while the hubs and I were in town was try to get some of the flooring completed.  You can see in this picture how we had to use jack stands and galvanized pipe to hold up the second floor as we worked on replacing the floors in the first level.  I didn't actually get to work on this section of the house.  It was done before I got into town. 

I did get to work on some though! This picture shows the area before we did any demolition.  You can see the hardwood that we were able to save, and a damaged section that shows all the nasty termite damage!  We had to pry the entire floor up off the joists (subflooring and all) because the supports were too soft to give us the leverage to pry up the hardwood panels.  So we just pulled it all up in two big pieces and will pull the hardwood off the subflooring later.  Then we got to rip out all that damaged wood, clean up the crawlspace, and then put in new supports and joists. Lots of power tool fun!  I love nail-guns the best, but we mostly used the power screwdriver.  This is what it looked like after all the old flooring and joists were removed (and one new joist already in place!):

Once demolition was done and all the damaged flooring and joists were removed we went in and replaced the supports and joists and put down new subflooring (plywood sheets).  We've been able to save most of the beautiful oak hardwood that was used, so eventually that will go back down on the subflooring and will be refinished like the other floors in the house that didn't need to be replaced.  Here it is with the new joists and then the subflooring:

This is all a lot of hard work, but it's so much fun!  I really enjoy it.  I finally get a chance to help "flip" a house like all those shows I watch on TV.  Except of course they aren't planning on selling this house.  I can't wait to see it finished!  It has a lot of charm and character, and even with it looking as rough as it does right now, I can see its potential.  Thankfully not all of it is as rough as these areas are.  Much of it is just needs very basic repairs.  I'm hoping to get back up there this month to do some more work.  This is fun!