Life on the Road

This house was built a long, long time ago (1940?) as a 1 bedroom, 1 bath bungalow with a decent-sized living room, little dining room, little kitchen, and tiny den (or something).  Very cute.

In the intervening years, it has been added on to… on several different occasions… not gracefully.  Now it could perhaps be described as a 2 bedroom, 2 bath with the above “main house” rooms plus a 1 car garage, two service-porch-ish areas, and a huge sunroom (or something) that is essentially useless due to lack of climate control.  The second bedroom and bath (and service-porch-thing) are like a separate “wing” or something, accessible from the outside, or by passing through the garage from the main part of the house.

The garage was tacked onto the side of the existing house.  This created a few difficulties, and nobody has ever bothered to correct them.

First, but not the project of the day:  The big room air conditioner in the living room vents into said garage.  Aside from whatever toxicity this may be creating, it heats the garage to a truly unbelievable level.  Of course in turn that heat is radiating through the walls back to the house (and the other bedroom on its other side), working at cross-purposes to the air conditioning efforts going on there.  (Wolf has installed a roof turbine to vent the heat out, and the new energy-efficient air conditioner we bought generates a lot less heat in the first place, so we’re making progress). 

Second, and the subject of the day’s project:  There were windows looking out that side of the house… and they just left them there.  Yep, with a lovely view of the garage interior.  Great.

So the first thing Wolf did was rip them out:

Then he framed in the hole:

And built a wall - complete with an opening for a new Energy Star air conditioner unit.

Yeah, we still need to plaster and paint…  but I’m afraid that’s gotten shoved down to approximately number 437 on the priority list.