On the back of the family room is a small one-room addition that was built before we bought the house. The addition is only maybe 4 or 5 years old - we've been in the house 3. We had a huge water leakage problem around the window this spring, with our severe tornadic and thunderstorms - rain driving straight at the outside wall. Turns out there was no window sealing done, and we had suspected shoddy work on the addition anyway - AFTER it was too late to do anything about it with the previous owner, who did the work. ANYway - we took the damaged drywall and trim off today, revealing that the sole plates were rotted, badly rotted, plus the bottom perhaps 5 or 6 inches of those same studs are in various stages of rot. (not sure how long there were unnoticed leakages going on in that wall, in retrospect). I'm figuring the total length of affected sole plate is about ten feet. This also revealed that there was no plywood used for the exterior wall, just one piece of chipboard on each end - the remainder of the exterior wall is some type of black fiberboard only - no paper, no Tyvek, no plywood. Questions due to extremely tight budget: 1) Does the black board need to be replaced, should we assume the water damage affected that? No damage noticeable on visual inspection, but I think at this point we'd rather just replace it with new plywood anyway. So that's probably a dumb question! 2) For the sole plate rot - What are our options? Is it possible for us to replace the sole plates with new 2x4's, one small section at a time? We were thinking about this example: Tap in an extra stud piece over "good" section near the rot (these are short studs that run underneath the sunroom window on that wall). Cut out a section of rotted sole plate, remove the rotting stud and put a new sole plate piece in and new stud. Then move onto the next say 2-foot section. When that is completed, then put up the new exterior plywood and paper. 3) Are we overlooking anything in our line of thinking? Any problems you anticipate we would have? Husband has basic carpentry skills, but no real construction experience aside from closets, etc., so we are seeking your expertise and opinions on how to proceed. This is a good week for us to do this project, with vacation days and weather that will cooperate!! Thank you in advance for your advice. Dawn :)

Our basement stairwell runs between the kitchen and living room with the doorway directly across from the kitchen pantry which makes for a tight area. In order to open this area and provide an better flow to the finished recreation room in the basement, we are planning to remove the basement doorway, the stairway wall in the living room and about eighteen inches of the kitchen stairway wall. We will replace the walls with wooden rail and spindles. There is currently a glass covered ceiling light just past the midway point in the stairwell ceiling. However, once the living room wall is removed the stairwell ceiling will become part of the living room ceiling and we are uncertain how the current light fixture will look as part of the living room. We've thought about replacing the light fixture with something suspended --- maybe a pendant or a simple multi-light chandelier; but, we've also thought about can lights. Any thoughts or suggestions?