theBusheys.com > photos > 30 Prospect Parkway Renovation

Over the summer and fall, we spent all our waking hours renovating this old house in our new city of Burlington, Vermont. Unlike our previous renovation, which stretched out comfortably over 5 years, this one was compressed into 5 months. We were successful in the end, but there were more than a few really low points along the way...

June: The view of the house as it was when we bought it.

The day after we closed, we started tearing down the walls. We removed the wall between the small kitchen and small dining room.

We ripped everything out of the kitchen, stripping the room down to the studs. Notice the lack of any insulation in the walls.

This is an old bees nest we found in the wall. The house suffered from major water problems, which in turn led to problems with carpenter ants, rotted wood, and bees nests like this one.

July: The first major piece of exterior work was a whole new roof. The existing roof had no overhangs whatsoever, so water runoff and infiltration was a big problem. We constructed a new roof on top of the existing one, framing out for new eaves.

Inside, we added a structural beam so we could fully open the space between the kitchen and dining room.

Upstairs, we removed a couple back-to-back closets, shown here, to open up some space that would become our master bath.

We easily filled 2 large dumpsters like this one. Also, notice the new roof eaves in this photo, perfectly shading the front windows just as they were designed to do. One reason we bought this house was that it has really good southern exposure.

August: There was a small half-bathroom on the first floor that we complete gutted, in part because we needed to open the walls to run new plumbing to the master bath upstairs. Here, Karen works on patching the hardwood floor.

The house had a screened-in porch that we had planned to simply close in, but we soon realized it wasn't worth saving. We tore the thing down and built a new 2-story addition on top of the existing concrete slab. Here, we are foaming the floor before we close it up.

September: At this time, we rented a u-haul truck and drove it to IKEA in Massachusetts to pick up our entire kitchen. None of the boxes were more than 3" high. Everyone who saw this thought we were crazy to want to do something like this.

After the experience of the new roof, and the discovery of the empty wall cavities, we decided to tackle the exterior shell. We decided to remove all the vinyl siding (which was poorly installed in the first place), and remove all the original wood siding beneath (much of it in bad shape). Here you can also see the new addition going up, to the left, where the screened porch used to be.

The first floor will be our home office, and the second floor is an extension of the master bedroom.

Meanwhile, inside we finished the rough framing, electrical, and rough plumbing in the kitchen. We installed a new garden window and had all the walls sprayed with closed-cell foam insulation.

We removed the loose rock-wool insulation from the attic and had the entire space sprayed with foam.

In the bedroom, we began framing for the new master bathroom. This is the back side of the wall where the vanity will be located, around the corner from the sleeping area.

The exterior is now completely stripped, revealing the existing black celotex sheathing beneath. We insulated the whole house with blown-in dense pack cellulose. You can see the spots where they drilled from the outside between each stud, then filled the holes.

October: We've painted the kitchen and now we are starting to assemble the IKEA kitchen cabinet boxes.

For our kitchen countertops we decided to go with a new material called Paperstone. This is a composite material made from recycled paper, and is very strong. Here, it cantelevers unsupported at a sitting area. The cutout in this island is for the gas cooktop.

This is a view into the new kitchen. The cabinets are all assembled and the appliances are installed. We also installed new cork flooring. That letter on the counter is probably a bill.

November: The exterior is clad with new hardi-plank fiber-cement siding, which shouldn't need painting for 30 years. The electric department hooks up the new 150 amp service, and we can finally move in.