JT Flokstra : October 2025

With the house being empty, the fun work (according to the guys) of uninstalling and demolition began.

Kitchen Before (ish):

Laundry Closet Before ish:

No more Kitchen....

No more closet... the guys had finished the kitchen removal the day before. Dad (Opa Flokstra) went back the next and took out the closet walls and squared off the arch into the living room.

It really opened up the area and view of the living room much more than I expected.

This is a room in the building behind the house that we hope to turn into Jared's office. It was also full of furniture, cobwebs and piles of dead bugs :P Originally I had planned that this would be my warm up project for painting and refinishing while the house was being worked on, but Jared noticed a significant bow in the ceiling which upon further inspection revealed that there is not enough supports for the ceiling.

So with the guys still in demolition mode, down came ceiling number one.

And ceiling number two... which I believe had a layer or two of particle(ish) boards on top.

It also came with many other treasures that were stored in the "attic" space, some squirrel evidence and old nut stores (hence the coveralls and masks).

There were times when we were in phase one of unloading the house where progress felt slow and the stuff didn't seem to end. But a few days of multiple hands on deck and bigger impact projects such as large furniture, carpet, kitchen and wall removal felt like huge wins that kept my heart up (even though this is work that kinda makes things worse before it gets better).

Looking forward to rebuilding together! But until then stay tuned for Demolition, Part two.

We started our empty the house project in kitchen cupboards, which were thankfully mostly empty already and then moved to the upstairs "attic" storage that was accessible by a few doors in the upstairs rooms. I started with taking a box out at a time and bringing them to the shop, which got old pretty fast. So next time I unloaded this whole Christmas and seasonal decoration storage all at once and sorted through it in the room before bringing it downstairs. This is a picture from when I unloaded all the boxes and was contemplating how I was going to get out of the storage area through the little door and over the mini mountain of stuff.

It was actually a cute little attic space once we got all the boxes out of it.

I did manage to clamor my way out and start sorting. Garbage went out one bedroom window onto the drive way (saved me some stairs runs), and donation items got bagged or boxed for when I had energy to do the stairs. We left PG just when it was starting to get the fall crispness in the air and arrived in Chilliwack to a very muggy and warm tail end of summer in September, so I found stair runs very draining and something that needed to be saved for mornings or cooler days.

There were 5 attic accesses upstairs, thankfully I started with the biggest one, and two others were empty, and the last two were much smaller. One of them had some left over school supplies in them, these felt bears were really neat, they came with a set of 5 words, and you had to match what the bears were doing to the words. Hazel really enjoyed the activity.

Next was getting all the little things and bedding down the stairs, at least it was easy enough to bag and toss, and then collect later. It was hard getting rid of so much stuff especially as a bunch of it is still usable, but we already had more then enough of our own bedding packed. So I was very pleased that I only ended up with one bag of items to keep (especially since saying "no" to free items is a weakness of mine).

As I sorted and moved items out of the house the girls have been having a blast playing with items I'm sorting, or the left over toys or just exploring. I did "lose" Jade for a very short amount of time, quickly looked in all the rooms and was about to look upstairs, when I asked Hazel if she knew where Jade was " she's in the chimney" she prompt responded.

Jared's old homeschool friend came over to check the place out, and got roped into helping move some of the larger furniture out of the house and into the shop. They got a good chuckle out of this island counter top that popped right off when they tried to move it. The quick visited turned into a impromptu BBQ and a neat time to connect with old friends, we even ended up visiting in the living room once it got dark, which just gave the emptying house a homey hopeful feel.

Papa and Nana also came over for a work bee. We removed more of the bigger furniture, took down window coverings and took out the carpet in the living room, master bed room and one of the upstairs rooms.

Living Room