Fresh Start

So I didn't want to be one of those people that starts a blog and never updates it, but it seems I'm becoming one if I'm not careful.  I closed about a couple weeks ago with a little over a month to move out of my old apartment.  That meant that I had to quickly do all of the demolishing that I wouldn't want to do while living in it, but I'll get into that later.  If I haven't gushed an explanation to you in person, you're probably wanting to know more about the house.

1. It was built in 1891
2. It is around 1500 square feet
3. It is currently split into two apartments (one upstairs and one downstairs)
4. It has a small basement/cellar with a dirt floor connected to the crawl space for the rest of the house
5. It is located in the San Rafael national historic district

San Rafael is in the Five Points neighborhood of Denver.  From what I've read, I get the impression that San Rafael was built as a middle-class neighborhood.  It's been through some periods, but is doing fairly well now without being over priced.  The house is located about a half mile from the central business district and about a mile from the center of downtown.  Since I work South of downtown, I'm even happier that a light rail station is about three blocks away.  My long-term plan is to return it to a single-family home configuration.  In the meantime, I'm getting extra cash by renting the second floor apartment while I live on the first floor.  

Side addition

I hope the tenant doesn't mind all the extra noise.  So far, I've only been demolishing, which probably isn't quite as loud as remolishing.  I've removed almost everything from the single room sized addition on the side of the house.  I'm not sure what this addition has been in the past, but it was last used as bedroom and a main entrance and foyer for the first floor apartment.  Since I started, I removed drywall to reveal a door and window along the back wall, removed the foyer wall to open the room into one room again, took out the ceiling (it had no insulation or ventilation in the attic space) and removed a few layers of flooring.  It's now down to plaster and some very old, very worn wood flooring.  

Now I have lots of things to think about.  What do I do with this room in the long term?  Is the floor worth saving?  How do I identify wood type in (possibly) 100 year old flooring?  How do I go about leveling the floor?  If I build a porch off the newly found back door, should I rebuild the addition's roof to extend over this porch?  If I rebuild the roof, will I have enough room to install a strip of narrow windows along the top of the ceiling?  Obviously, my mind is running in circles.  I think I'll need additional posts when tackling all of these problems.    

Side addition halfway through the demolition process