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Plymouth House Grand Tour

The house is finally finished, and Bob takes us on the grand tour. First we tour the exterior; and see the finished landscape, the paint, the gutters, and the trellis. We also look at the finished basement.
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Plymouth House Grand Tour

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" One thing that I love about the trellis is that it plays off with the grid pattern inside the window here on our entry."

" Yeah it does. It ties them together real nice."

" Boy, what a difference it makes to the front of this house to have this new entry way on there. Do you remember what it looked like when we got started?"

" I sure do. It had that protrusion that just kind of sat out on the front of the gable end."

" Yeah."

" It came down this way here."

" So the gable end here went all the way down practically to the ground."

" Right."

" And of course it looks like a Swiss chalet, but it was also rotted."

" It was pretty rotted, so it actually was an easy task to get it off of there."

" Yeah. And then of course removing all that overgrown vegetation makes a real big difference. When you're gonna look at the front of the house and see it,--"

" It opens it up."

" Yeah."

" That's exactly right."

" And you can get----"

" Yeah."

" sunlight into the basement down there, but the entry, it's such a simple deal, you know. It's unheated space. It's nothing more than a mudroom,----"

" Yeah."

" but this door that you made----"

" Yeah, where I came out."

" which we built ourselves, you know."

" Had come out better than I thought it would. That's nice. I like that."

" Yeah."

" And I like that. A little bit of red paint there and all this gray facade."

" We didn't have to do much in terms of the actual facade of the house. The club boards were all right."

" Yeah. They had a little mildew that came off with some bleaching water. Yeah. The trim was in pretty good shape, though it's just a few feet on either end of the rakes, so we had to replace the rotted boards."

" Yeah."

" And we put down a new gutter on the top, a new fascia board, and new down pipes and you know a little new shrubbery on the front and you've got a brand new house almost."

" Yeah, that's all we did."

" Let's take a look around the back."

" Okay."

" And then we enter into what was a dingy basement space."

" Yeah, isn't this nice?"

" Which now has a combination of a buffet playroom, wreck oom and we got a bathroom that we added."

" Yeah."

" And if you're gonna improve a house, this is one of the places you want to improve."

" Absolutely. We already had the window down here, which is why we've picked this spot for it."

" Yeah."

" We just put in a one piece fiberglass shower, which is an inexpensive way to go and this house needed it as it only has a 1 tub upstairs."

" That's just a couple of hundred dollars."

" And this is something that I just kept my eye out for over here with this vanity and I had found a closeout sale over at [unk]. I got the whole shebang here for $120."

" Yeah."

" Which is nice, so we didn't really spend a lot of money."

" It's an economy job, yeah. Now, we're also lucky that although we're in a split level and we're just below grade, our septic system was dug down low and after, we could get the plumbing in there without having to do anything unusual."

" Right. They rock it in with that in mind."

" So here we've got a basement space that's 22 x 24, right?"

" 22 x 24, yeah."

" I remember what this looked like when it got started."

" This was horrible."

" Yeah. It was in---- It had the all-cement floor, and it had the old paint buckets and [unk]."

" The insulation was falling out, and of course it was a perfect candidate for improvement, but it had never been improved."

" No."

" So, what was the most important thing that we did was rather than carpet over a slab, we raised up the floor,----"

" Right. we put down insulation. We put a vapor barrier, plywood, and then this terrific carpet, which is kind of that berber feel."

" Yes."

" And then of course, we insulated and built out over the existing foundation, and of course put up drywall, and how much was the ceiling?"

" The hanging ceiling was 600 dollars."

" That's a bargain."

" Yeah. That was nice."

" 'Cause it's a good sized room."

" Yeah."

" And this is something else I wanted to point out. In fact, we used native pine that we obtained from a mill not far from here, and once we put it together and we sanded it, we walked away from it. You don't necessarily have to take nice-looking wood and put varnish on it or put paint on it."

" No, it looks beautiful, right? It will dock in over the years, but right now it definitely looks good."

" Yeah."

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