Remake/Remodel

it's curtains (again)

2009-07-29T21:13:00.003-05:00

It's been an absurdly long time...but you know, things got pretty damned busy, and the last batch of curtains weren't the highest priority in the world. (In fact, the same fabric will be used to make a curtain for the window at the top of the stairs...still not done.) But here it is:

And that (if anyone's still reading this) is that. We've been moved in for about half a year now - it's wonderful. The only minor adjustment is we need to tweak the a/c system a bit to move proportionately more air upstairs...but it's not that crucial, and hopefully a simple matter.

That's it for this blog. I hope you've enjoyed it.

I will resist the obvious Couch Flambeau reference. For once.

2009-03-10T22:45:00.003-05:00

Rose sewed sheer curtains to complement the more functional, light-blocking set she'd made a while back - obviously, those were rather more necessary immediately than these. But they look nice. Two shots - one a dramatic one without flash, the other giving you a bit more even rendering of the scene.

We've been pretty busy with other things...and so the temporary bathroom window treatments have done for now. Those, and the hallway curtains, are all that remain...other than incidental things like artwork and the like which tends to get accumulated over time.

it's curtains!

2009-02-21T23:49:00.004-06:00

Our bedroom curtains are up (or at least the main curtains: sheers will be put up in a little while, as soon as Rose has time to finish them).

Here's a shot from the side: you can't really see our view out, due to the light blasting out the image...but still there's a sense of how the light enters the space:

the home stretch

2009-01-22T23:19:00.006-06:00

We've mostly finished rearranging the former library, now Rose's sewing/beading room (but generally known - for reasons made obvious in the photos below - as the "orange room"). Amusingly, it's sort of ended up as the repository for aging furniture (Rose has long-term plans to learn to refinish the wood): both the sewing machine table and the library table came from Rose's family, while the cabinet made from an old Victrola case was found at a rummage sale held by one of Rose's cousins, if I recall. The old futon's seen better days, but we probably don't need to buy two new sofa-beds when it's perfectly functional (and in fact, probably more comfortable than the new one mentioned a few posts ago).

We had to touch up the walls a bit...probably should have repainted entirely, as the paint doesn't match perfectly even though it's the same batch. Or maybe we just need to do a thorough cleaning!

The quilt in the top photo was made by Rose's sister Barb and was a wedding gift.

We also managed to add a few finishing touches in the upstairs addition: we mounted a large mirror in the walk-in closet:

And we found a place for a lamp we'd picked up from a friend's rummage sale when they moved to New York City: the lamp didn't work very well (it burned too hot), so I replaced the guts of it (with some clever improvisational adaptation of some parts and features) and now it works fine. Here's a dramatic shot, sans flash (with a stool in lieu of the I'm-too-lazy-to-get-it-from-the-downstairs-closet-tripod):

The last major thing we need to do in the main part of the house (basement rearrangement and editing is sorely needed!) is repaint the first floor bathroom ceiling. Our contractor on the remodeling job primed it for us, since the need for its repainting arose from some accidental damages they caused during the work, but since we no longer had the original paint and decided to change the color, really, that's more work than they reasonably could be asked to do under the circumstances. So priming it was the compromise.

We also want to repaint the walls on the first-floor back stairs and leading down to the basement...but that won't happen till spring. And lest this turn into an even duller, occasional document of various household tasks, I won't be detailing that work! Probably one more post for this, when the first floor bathroom's done...and that's about it.

more books, more furniture

2009-01-08T14:06:00.003-06:00

In my last (content-providing) post, I mentioned the books in the new, upstairs bookshelves. Well, I'd hate to leave that undocumented, so here are three shots of the books in place (which are a portion of our fiction library):

Also, we've begun moving up some of our existing furniture: this dresser, which my dad gave to us when he moved to a condo (it was his second wife's before that), fits nicely in this space:

bastards

2009-01-08T09:20:00.002-06:00

Due to a minor rush of spam comments, I've disabled commenting for this blog. If you have something relevant to say, and you're an actual human being, you can find an e-mail address here. But if you're some asshole trying to sell something - particularly if it's in a language I don't even read - I will send Yngwie Malmsteen to your house to unleash the fuckin' fury.

closets and shelves

2009-01-07T23:15:00.004-06:00

Since our old bedroom was superseded by the new one, what happens to the old bedroom space (a/k/a "the green room")? Well, originally, it was going to be a room for Rose's sewing and beading projects - but she realized that, hey, the library (or "orange room") has a big window and way better light (she's photosynthetic; I'm part-vampire), so it'd make better sense to move the library into the green room (former bedroom) and make the orange room her sewing room.

We have finished the first phase of that: moving the library to the green room. Well, part of it: some of our books now live upstairs (fiction, in fact). And as you can tell, there's more room on these shelves; I'm going to go through the books exiled to the basement as less interesting and see which ones might be promoted to the green room's shelves.

Following are three shots of the room and the shelves. The new blue Ikea sleeper bed is, in fact, the very foldout bed that you yourself might sleep in should you ever be invited to spend the night here at our house.

(Here's the library in its former, oranger quarters.)

We also have reinstalled most of our clothing in our new walk-in closet upstairs. A lot of our clothes were stored in the basement; and since we didn't expect this project to last well into winter, cold-weather clothing was particularly well-hidden away. (Rose was getting tired of the same two or three sweaters in particular.)

More rearranging to come...

a house is not a motel, or...

2009-01-03T22:08:00.000-06:00

Last night was our first night sleeping in the new bedroom - complete with new bed, sheets, pillows, and blankets. It's always a little odd, sleeping in a new place...perhaps odder when it's your own. You realize that all kinds of little details and rituals need to be worked out and reimagined: where stuff goes, habitual motions, gestures, etc., and of course the obvious getting used to a new bed. We discovered, for example, that the eyebrow dormer lets in a lot of south light later in the mornings: this won't be a problem on weekdays when we get up and go to work, but if we want to sleep later on weekends (and we do), we'll need to find a way to dim that down, without just slapping up something that blocks the light all the time. And of course, we discover minor things that either need to be changed (already, we moved one of the shelves in the closet, partly for cat-related reasons but mostly for functionality) or that we would have done differently had we been able to live in the space before building it. (Dammit - I knew I should have done that Sims thing...)

But for the most part, we're incredibly pleased: Rose's design mostly works exactly as we'd hoped it would, and we're so happy finally to have been able to do this.

new bed assembled, plus some other new items

2008-12-31T11:00:00.004-06:00

Aside from the usual holiday concerns, we ended up spending quite a bit of time securing the shelves - and, in particular, securing the corner piece we put on. (We probably should have planned simply to slide one shelf behind the other - but it's really surprising to me that Ikea doesn't sell a square cover and hardware to go over the resulting corners when people prefer not to lose half their shelving space by shoving the shelf into the corner behind the adjacent unit.) Unexciting photographs, however - wow, look, it's a carriage bolt, and a piece of tile!

Here's the new bed, from two angles:

We got this lamp as a gift - I'm not entirely sure this will be its final location, though:

And here's another shot of the bathroom, looking a bit more lived-in with towels and such (although really, so far, it's not...):

more furnishings

2008-12-21T22:30:00.006-06:00

We assembled the new sofa...

...and installed the ceiling fan and light:

This was the replacement ceiling fan. The original order would not have worked: the lighting sales guy made a mistake and didn't realize that the low-ceiling adapter we needed was not compatible with the remote we also needed. The wiring was already in place assuming the adapter...so we couldn't use the fan at all, since without the low ceiling adapter it was too low to use, both by code and for our comfort. But it also proved too huge for the space - something we didn't realize when we'd ordered it. So when the mistakes gave us the opportunity to replace the ceiling fan with a unit that could use both a low-ceiling adapter and a remote, we went with this much smaller fan, which fits the space far better and is plenty efficient for our needs.

a date with Ikea

2008-12-19T00:20:00.004-06:00

I've built the bookshelves and the little storage cabinets that go under the main bedroom window...

Cats just won't stay out of the photos:

I had to lie flat on my back to keep my own reflection out of this shot:

cats roam free!

2008-12-16T23:19:00.008-06:00

Finally, our second floor is finished! There's still some work to do (construction caused some minor damages to the ceiling of the first floor in a couple of places, which the crew is fixing; and the concrete at the base of the demolished chimney needs to be jackhammered away and filled), but essentially, what's left involves us assembling furniture and moving in. (We're also switching some things up on the first floor - I might as well document that process here over the next few weeks, to wrap things up.)

The completion of the work, and the absence of strange people tromping around in big boots, means we are finally able to let our cats back into the basement...and to explore the new area. There's nothing there yet (and closet and bathroom are temporarily off limits...some loose wires awaiting a replacement fixture in the bathroom, and packages covered in tape - which Lumen eats - in the closet), so it's big, echoey, and scary...as Oranj demonstrates, with his confused protest in this shot:

Here's a glowy-eyed Lumen, bravely exploring the new (and still rather dusty) territory:

Lumen walks about where the foot of our bed will be:

Oranj at the top of the stairs:

And finally, Oranj in the foreground, Lumen in the background, with a nice view of the front of the space (the alcove will be lined with bookshelves, and there'll be a sofa facing that window):

What do you think happens when a door is closed - truly evil in the eyes of cats - for six months, and the cats can hear that there are humans on the other side, talking and doing things?

Note the nice raw wood - claws are sharp! (That's the door at the back of our kitchen, which we closed to confine the kitties to the first floor for the duration of construction.)

handrails

2008-12-10T21:38:00.002-06:00

We originally weren't going to put in handrails, being young and healthy...but seeing some older folks try to navigate the stairs - and discovering that it was pretty much required by code - changed our minds. (And then we remembered that someday we'll be old, too.) So here they are (not fully sealed and finished yet - and all the blue tape marks various paint touch-up spots, which should be happening tomorrow.)

metal and glass exact

2008-12-09T21:25:00.000-06:00

Our glass shower enclosure has been installed. Here's what it looks like:

more doors, more floors

2008-11-30T23:02:00.004-06:00

The end keeps getting nearer, as a lot of detail work continues. We've assembled the preliminary contractor's punchlist of all the outstanding items, most of which should be completed next week, the rest of which we'll walk through with the contractor shortly after that. What's left after that point is our own work: assembling and placing a lot of furniture (most of which we bought at Ikea), and rearranging the two downstairs "bedrooms" (currently a bedroom and a study: the bedroom will become the study, the study will become Rose's "crafts" room). That should be finished by Christmas, if we can find time to put everything together.

Here are some photos: the stairs were sanded and refinished, and they look like this (still some trim to be applied along the tops of the pieces on the wall):

The door hardware has been installed on the two pocket doors: the single one on the bathroom door -

- and the set for the closet:

yesterday upon the stairs...

2008-11-25T23:56:00.004-06:00

Work on the stairway has begun. Below are two views showing the existing wood, sanded but not finished. The stairs were a darkish brown, with lots of layers of varnish and wear, even to the point of a slight depression in the treads. Rather than replace them, we opted to sand and refinish them. As it turns out, there's a variety of wood: the landing is, if I recall what the floor guy said, maple, while the treads are birch and the risers...something else? This view shows the stairs from the bottom landing in the back hall: sanding isn't complete yet, but it's nearly done:

Here's a view from above, at the top of the stairs on the second floor. You can see the floorboards of the landing quite clearly in this shot:

They expect to finish the work tomorrow. As noted in the previous post, what's been going on is fine detail work, which is all but invisible to the untrained (or non-obsessed homeowner's) eye: that's nearly finished. What's left? A legally mandated handrail in the stairway; a bit more detail finish work; cleanup; installation of bathroom hardware; and various issues elsewhere in the house, ranging from reinstallation of the shelves in our front hall closet (which, you may recall, was shortened to accommodate HVAC) to remediation of various issues that arose during construction (minor ceiling damage in the library, replacement of some wood paneling removed for access to plumbing, that sort of thing). And the last major item, utterly outside the realm of our contractor's work: the installation of our shower surround. That's scheduled for December 8 and 9.

But once the contractor's work is done, ours begins: we have lots of furniture to assemble, various other items to deal with (such as window treatments, etc.), and - a late addition to the project's scope, entirely our doing - moving the bookshelves from what is now the library (the "orange room") to what is now the bedroom (the "green room"), with the orange room becoming Rose's sewing/exercise/craft room, and the green room becoming the library/study. Finally, there's a bit of business involving moving the wireless router and cable up to the second floor, and trying to figure out the best way to get sound in the new library/study from my laptop. (Right now, it looks like simple external computer speakers are the likeliest bet...unless Apple's AirTunes - which I already use to port music from the computer to the stereo system - can switch between two sets of speakers. I need to do some research...)

So the contractor's work should be finished by the end of the first week in December, with punchlist and final cleanup, etc., happening early the next week...which is the same time the shower surround will be installed. Also around that time, our new ceiling fan (replacing the bad one we had to remove) and missing bathroom light (weirdly, misaligned post so it wasn't level) will come in as well (we're installing those). We'll have a couple of weeks after that for assembling new furniture, installing window treatments, and disassembling and moving stuff between the green room and the orange room...our hopes are that everything will be completely done and set up by Christmas. That's longer than we'd anticipated (as I think this blog has made clear), in fact longer even allowing for the 6-8 weeks of unanticipated delay...but right now, as we can see what things are going to look like, we're pretty damned happy.

Not least, cats will once again be able to roam the whole house, and their litter box will be restored to its old location, in the basement, well away from us, so we no longer have to clean up stray bits of clumping litter on the first floor... Whew!

adored

2008-11-14T22:24:00.005-06:00

Much of the work that's been done the last week has been very fine-tuned detail on the woodwork and trim...the sort of thing that's nearly impossible to notice at first, much less photograph.

But yesterday, our bedroom door arrived, and today, it was installed. Here's what it will generally look like, open (which, the upstairs being entirely the private portions of our us*, will be most of the time):

Here's the view of the door closed, with a better view of its detail, as seen from the hallway area at the top of the stairs:

And here's a similar view from inside the bedroom. (The little irregular dots are bits of cork, there to protect the glass, which will be removed.)

* What, you don't like my abstract poetry? That was supposed to have read something like "the private portions of our house" - entirely different from "the private parts of our house"...which would be, I dunno, the plumbing for a start. Or an end.

avoiding all bad puns related to "plumbing"

2008-11-08T23:38:00.005-06:00

Our plumbing fixtures are installed. Of course, I have photos...and since who doesn't love a photo of a toilet, that's what's first:

Originally, a failure of communication made it likely we wouldn't be able to get this toilet and would have to settle for your normal, everyday-looking toilet. Oh no: nothing but the finest for our posteriors...the plumbing crew came through and figured out how to make this one work. We thank them from the bottoms of our hearts.

Next, half of the pair of sinks:

The shower hardware, and the ceiling fan (which informs that "humidistatic" is too a word):

Finally, the bathtub and tub fillers:

What's not here yet is the glass shower enclosure, which will probably be the last thing to be installed of the entire project. We needed to wait for the tiling to be done for them to come out and field-measure the project, and then there's a couple of weeks' lead time until the actual glass is made and can be installed. (At least we hope it's the last item to be installed!)

fiat lux!

2008-11-06T10:12:00.010-06:00

The lighting is nearly complete! A few minor adjustments here and there, and once we're moved in and furnishings are in place, we'll reevaluate which bulbs go in the fixtures, but here it is. All the photos are without flash but brightened slightly and color-adjusted.

The tour: we begin with the lights above the stairway landing window (because I had loads of work to do, I took these photos quickly...which meant I stupidly nearly obscured one of the two lights in this shot: don't kill me):

At the top of the stairs, we have this fixture illuminating the hallway area between the stairs, bathroom, and bedroom (we have three of these lights; subsequent shots display the fixture itself more clearly. That red plastic thing is a wrap for the fire alarm which needs to remain in place so long as workers are spreading dust about):

Into the bathroom: here's a shot of the main lighting above the sinks. Only one of the sinks is in place, and the mirrors (two of them, placed between the sets of lights) are not up yet either:

Above Rose's bathtub (it's Rose's because she'll be using it way more than I will), there's an overhead light to facilitate reading:

On to the bedroom: here's a shot of the lights flanking the east window bay:

And here's another shot of the fixture that's also in the hallway and just inside the bedroom door (no photo of that particular one, for some reason):

The light and ceiling fan in the center of the bedroom is partially installed, but it's not shown here both because neither of the two shots I have of it are very good, and because its position has to be adjusted a bit. Instead, the last photo in this entry is of our closet light (whoo.):

the end is nigh!

2008-10-31T19:29:00.007-05:00

No recent updates not for lack of work being done, but because there's been almost too much of it: the moment I go up to take a photo, the next day finds the next stage finished. Plus, between lots of work, leaving before it's full daylight and getting home after dark, and some friends as houseguests for the last week, I haven't had time to update.

Anycow: tile work is nearly complete, with the stone tiles sealed and grouted, with only a few minor details to be touched up. Painting is also nearly done, again with only a few minor touchups left to be done. The plumbers have returned, and they've nearly finished the hookups in our basement and plan to set up the toilet and sinks early next week.

Basically, what's left is the final plumbing and electrical work (including installation of lighting), final work on woodwork trim (including the installation of the handrail on the stairway), and refinishing and adding trim to the stairs themselves (that's nearly the last thing that'll be done. All that remains after that are a few minor details related to ways the job has impinged upon the rest of the house (there was a mishap involving our first-floor bathroom ceiling fan, which needed to be rerouted...and the hardware in our front-hall closet, removed due to using some of that space for HVAC runs installed in the back of the closet, to be reinstalled on the new back wall). There's also the bedroom door - that's a story in itself, which I'll relate once it's arrived and is in place - and the shower enclosure, which will in all likelihood be the very last item to be installed, even after we're otherwise moved in to the space.

So, photos:

The hardware in our new walk-in closet has been installed:

Shower hardware is in place:

And our accent paint is in place on the alcove at the front of the bedroom:

As you can probably see, there's still some detail and trimwork left to be done here (as I note above), but increasingly the room looks like it will when it's finished. Finished, but unfurnished: after all the contractor work is done, we have loads of new furniture to assemble and move into place...

railing against...

2008-10-23T23:35:00.010-05:00

The stairway railings are almost complete. They still need to install a handrail (it's code), but you can see the last few days' work on the railings below. The top pieces, which will eventually rest against the wooden banister pieces, are not yet in place - for that matter, neither are the bottom ones.

Here's the area at the top of the stairs to your left as you reach the second floor, at two stages of progress and a couple angles on the first stage:

Next, some views of the area just beyond the stairs that overlook the stairway proper:

lack of clever reference to railings and tiles

2008-10-17T23:29:00.004-05:00

The tile work is nearly finished - or rather, the tiles themselves are nearly all installed: next, the tile needs to be sealed and the grout applied. But here's a look at the last bit of tile, which is a little ledge behind where the sinks will be (the wood below is just a temporary support):

And here's the pattern at the edges of the floors, along the walls:

The stairway railings have begun to be installed. Here's a first look:

floors and doors

2008-10-11T23:53:00.003-05:00

Work on the trim continues. Doors have been installed as well for the bathroom and closet.

Here are two shots: one looking into the bathroom and showing the door surround, the other from roughly the same position showing the pocket door half-closed:

Here's a shot from inside the closet, where flooring was finally installed, showing the flooring and also the double pocket doors:

it continues...

2008-10-09T22:27:00.002-05:00

More trim has been installed, including the door frames (or most of the door frames) for the bathroom and closet doors, as well as the doors themselves (no hardware yet, though). The last bit of flooring (in the closet) has been installed.

No photographs, because between the position of heavy equipment standing in place because it's still being used and my inept photographic technique (or my lack of mountain-goat grace in clambering to odd positions precariously placed atop table saws or whatever), I have no usable photos.

more trim, more tile

2008-10-07T19:57:00.002-05:00

Truth in labeling!

Here's the woodwork on our little alcove - we'd originally intended this space to house a gas fireplace, but when our budget crunch hit, that was one of the obvious things to go...both because it's a luxury item and because it's pretty simple to do later, should we decide to do so.

And here's the side of the bathtub enclosure. Most of the tile work is done - there are just a few spots yet to be done: some infill, some edging, the little ledge that will be beneath the mirrors and behind the vanities, etc.

window trim

2008-10-07T17:00:00.003-05:00

Window trim:

Bathroom:

Above the landing:

At the top of the stairs, looking north:

In the bedroom:

More to come.

Laconic today.

out on the tiles

2008-10-05T16:48:00.005-05:00

More tiles installed. The floor of the bathroom is nearly complete:

The shower surround, likewise, is nearly finished:

You can see the logic of the layout here, I think: borders tend to be formed of a row four tiles wide of the smaller tiles with a "pencil" edging. This carries to nearly all the outlines of the various defined spaces, the main exception being the shower surround itself, which omits the smaller tiles.

For grouting, we're using a dark-gray color rather similar to that of the raw base (you can still see it on the ceiling of the shower area), which has two advantages: first, it makes the colors in the tiles "pop," and (more important, in the long run) it's easier to clean than a lighter colored grout.

exterior all but finished

2008-10-03T17:27:00.006-05:00

With a few minor details, the exterior work is now complete. Here are several views of the house, beginning with a shot similar to earlier ones of the eyebrow dormer, now refinished and repainted, and then moving around the house to view the east side (old dormer and the new stairway dormer), the north side (back of the house), a shot of the west side of the house from the alley behind our house, another shot of the west side from the street in front of the house, and finally a shot of the front of the house.

If we were to do this over and with less limited funds, I think we'd make two changes: one, try to find a way to make the west side a little less blocky. That would be difficult: the blank wall that makes it bulky is a closet, and so a window would be a bad idea to articulate the surface, since it would let in light and UV which would fade our clothes. That "more funds" issue might have made it possible to make the dormer on the east side of the house continuous, which might have allowed us to tuck the closet in on that side, between the stairs and the bedroom...but I'm not sure that would have worked. (That plan still doesn't figure what to do with that dead wall on the west dormer, since that wall is either a closet wall as it is now or a bathroom wall...and we couldn't have windows on three walls of the bathroom and the doorway on the fourth: no place to put the sinks and mirrors.)

The other change might have been to have gone with a lighter, contrasting tan on the walls of the dormers (the soffits and window trim would remain the chocolate brown they are). Rose disagrees, but I think that might have lightened up the massing a bit (do remember: she's the architect, so I'm probably wrong...).

We will be painting the rest of the back exterior wall (on the north) with the same paint color: look closely and you can see that the new material surrounding the window is a slightly different shade from the rest.

Overall, though, we're happy with the exterior. But realistically, it's the interior we care about much more anyway. And as the last photo (from the front of the house) shows, from most angles the new construction is all but invisible anyway.

(Here's a sneak preview of the baseboard moulding, or some of it anyway:)

flooring and trim

2008-10-01T21:49:00.004-05:00

Except for the closet, all the flooring is in place - and I think they did a fine job aligning the flooring with the stair nosing I featured yesterday, in particular the herringbone pattern solving the corner problem. It would have looked awkward to have a series of short slats of wood along the ledge, running the same direction as the wood on the floor - but this solution strikes me as elegant, and it will look even better once the railings are in place, since the corner of the railing there will delineate the space a bit more clearly:

Here's a clearer shot of the base where the railings will be installed:

And here's a shot of the materials to be used for the baseboards, etc.:

at the top of the stairs

2008-10-01T07:31:00.003-05:00

The stair nosing is installed.

This wood is the same wood that will be used for window trim and the baseboard; it will be stained to match as closely as possible the red oak flooring.

The rest of the day the crew installed nearly the remainder of the subflooring (you can see it in this photo) and the flooring in most of the rest of the area, but since it was then covered with protective cardboard to allow the crew to work without damaging the floor, no photo of it.

Two minor problems: there was a defect in a few boxes of the flooring which meant a higher-than-usual rate of unusable planks; the seller agreed to take back the defective flooring for credit on replacement. Fortunately, this won't really cause much delay despite two weeks' lead time, since the only areas left to floor will be the closet and maybe a bit of the narrow ledge next to the landing.

And we miscalculated the amount of tile needed (in a kind of forehead-slapping way...), so last night we picked up the remainder of what we needed (it was a small enough quantity that it was easier and cheaper for us to pick it up rather than have Erik or crew do so). Tile guys are scheduled in today.

merry tiler, more!

2008-09-29T06:57:00.005-05:00

Most of the bathroom tile is in place. We ran into a minor detail of miscalculation (embarrassingly obvious) and so had to order more (which explains why the amount we paid initially was so much lower than our estimated budget...), but fortunately, there's no real delay, since it's arriving Tuesday evening.

So here's a shot of the area behind the bathtub:

Here's what's been done so far in the shower:

And here's the bathroom floor, so far:

On another note, my sister and brother-in-law have just started their own remodeling (theirs motivated by needing room for their two boys), and she's doing a blog of her own, called This Year's (re)Model (opting for the Elvis Costello rather than Roxy Music reference).

floors and tiles and paint and things

2008-09-25T21:02:00.008-05:00

Lots of work getting done the last couple of days. On the exterior: the back window's rough frame-out is nearly done:

Inside: the first coat of paint is on the walls and ceiling:

The tile installer has put down the gypsum-board underlayment. In this shot you can also see a swatch of the accent color that will fill this wall below the ledge at the very top of this image, as well as the alcove in the bedroom. The actual color has more red to it - it's hard to get accurate color given the reliance in this photo on late-afternoon natural light or flash, which tends to wash out darker colors). You can also barely make out the tile we'll be using in the bathroom (more visible at the larger size):

And the flooring has begun to be put in place:

concretely

2008-09-23T22:16:00.005-05:00

The tile installer has begun his work. He's put in the concrete-like sheets that serve as base for the substrate and grout into which he'll place the tiles. Here's a shot of the shower area:

Here's the shower base which, as you can see, looks a lot like poured concrete. It isn't, quite, but it's similar:

And here's Rose's tub (she's the bath-taker here), with its surround in place:

inside and out

2008-09-20T00:06:00.004-05:00

Inside: most of the subflooring has been installed. Here's a picture:

Outside: most of the exterior trim on the old dormer (with the new window) has been installed:

The only exterior that hasn't been initially finished is the rear of the house, which I imagine will get done sometime next week. Tomorrow (oops - later today) the drywallers return to sand and finish the drywall.

panefully

2008-09-16T23:35:00.003-05:00

I'd mentioned before that the large window space in our bedroom, in the previously existing dormer, had been left as a big hole covered with plastic sheeting, in order to allow large objects like drywall and the plywood subflooring to be lofted up through that window. Well, the last of those large objects is up (that subflooring), and as the drywallers continue their mudding (slowed down some by the weather: damp but cool, so no A/C but no heat either - our contractor brought over an electric heater to speed the drying process), the last window was finally put in place. Here's what it looks like, before its framing is put in place, from inside and out:

walls

2008-09-14T22:55:00.004-05:00

The drywallers have partially completed mudding the walls. They'll do more mudding, and then sanding to fine-tune the texture of the walls. Here's a shot of the top of the stairs, showing the initial blend of the new walls into the existing walls:

Here's one angle along the ceiling in the bedroom to give an idea of the way that will look:

Probably the most detail-intensive aspect of their work is here, framing the eyebrow dormer window:

Finally, here's that corner alcove next to the tub (for future guests' reference: taken from nearly the exact position one would occupy while sitting on the yet-to-be-installed throne...):

summer's almost gone

2008-09-07T22:52:00.003-05:00

One side effect of this remodeling project: this has been the summer that never was, in some ways. Several factors combine to have made this the case, including some that have nothing to do with the project. Obviously, the energy and attention we've had to pay to the project have preoccupied us; and for the early part of the project, one of our main summer activities - hanging out in the back patio, cooking out or just sitting around - was impossible due to construction materials taking up the space. (And it occurs to me that in most summers, we have a couple of regular traveling visitors, neither of whom made their annual trip here for reasons mostly unrelated to the remodeling. Our friends Janet and Andy and their children were in town for a couple of days just as the project was beginning, and I saw them on my Grand Rapids trip as well; while our friends Bob and Susan skipped their usual Milwaukee visit in lieu of foreign travel this year - they're visiting in late October instead.)

So it's kind of weird that it's September already, feeling as if many typical summer activities never quite happened. (As a teacher, my seasonal calendar is in arrested development: the school year still delineates the end of summer at one end and summer's beginning at the other...although now that I think of it, something similar is probably true for parents of school-age kids, too.) But ultimately, it will be worth it: Rose and I are both in the habit of just wandering upstairs and sort of looking around, for no other reason than to imagine and enjoy the space. We were both up there this afternoon, talking about a couple of details and clarifying window treatments and the like, and it was just a wonderful moment: this is a project we'd been pipedreaming since we bought the house, eleven years ago (in some ways, before that: the idea of buying a house and remodeling it was in her mind at least well before we could buy a house in the first place). And to see it in real life is gratifying...despite its costs (including the monetary ones), minor setbacks, and its tendency to take priority over most aspects of our lives. All that's temporary. The fabulous new space we'll have - and the more it becomes real, the more I really love Rose's design - is permanent.

ein, zwei, drywall

2008-09-04T22:40:00.007-05:00

The rest of the drywall has been roughed into place. Here's a shot from the landing on the stairway, looking up toward the door into the bathroom, and to the left there's the door to the closet, just beyond the door to the bedroom:

Here's a view from the back of the hallway looking toward the doorway to the bedroom:

From inside the bedroom, a view looking out the "eyebrow dormer" window at the front of the house:

A shot looking into the corner of this part of the "T" that forms the bedroom, where the east-facing window will be (most of the morning sun will be blocked or diffused by our neighbor's house):

And this is pretty much the reverse angle of the second shot, above, now looking from just in front of the eyebrow window out the doorway, into the hall, and out the back window:

but no Stanard Ridgway

2008-09-03T22:50:00.006-05:00

About half the drywall is roughed-in now. It's a bit hard to show photographically, both because I haven't figured out how to stick the camera back through the wall to get a longer field of view (don't own a wide-angle lens) and there's still lots of yet-to-be-put-up drywall blocking both views and places to stand and shoot photos. So here's a selection.

The first shot looks out over the stairway. I'm standing roughly in front of where our closet door will be.

The second shot shows the bathroom wall where our sinks will be.

This shot (which I had to take by sticking my camera into the bathroom past a pile of drywall) shows the little alcove that'll be behind the bathtub, created by the setback of the new dormer and the old roofline.

Finally, this is a sense of what the hallway space will look like. I'm standing in front of the window at the top of the stairs, looking toward the front of the house: the doorway you see will be the entry to the bedroom.

The crew has just begun to put up the drywall in the bedroom itself. Tomorrow I imagine they'll finish nailing the drywall in place, and then they'll fill and finish the surface over the next day or so following.

in the pink

2008-08-28T19:38:00.007-05:00

The rigid insulation was installed today. Basically it goes only on the sloped ceilings: the horizontal ceiling surfaces are all actually interior, and so there's no concern with the "ghosting" phenomenon described in my last post. Because there's a whole lot of insulation above the new stair dormer, we felt it sufficient merely to install insulation directly to the existing rafters:

In the rest of the space, we mounted the rigid insulation between ledgers attached to the rafters, so the cold spots of the wood are reduced only to very small squares where the two planks of wood meet:

This shot gives some idea of the eventual shape of the space, approximately from where our bed will be (although higher off the ground). My friend Rog would probably slap up a flatscreen TV that folds out from the ceiling here...

Here's a shot of the front part of the house, where bookshelves will surround what was originally going to be a gas fireplace (it may eventually become that) and now will become a decorative niche:

our long national nightmare is over

2008-08-27T19:50:00.003-05:00

Tuesday, the insulation crew returned (again), and this time, they used an alternate product (still soy-based, but open- rather than closed-cell: the difference has to do with its ability to trap air and thereby its insulating efficiency). They cored out the failed insulation where it had pulled away from rafters, studs, and from itself, and filled the space very thoroughly (which, with this product, means right up to the edge of the rafters or studs). Finally, we can move forward.

In much of the area we'll still be putting in some rigid insulation, separated from the rafters by spacers to prevent "ghosting" from the reduced insulating properties of the wood versus the insulation. This stuff should be going up within a day or so, and then the drywall (which has been sitting around for quite a while, as you can see in these photos) can be put up, the subflooring be put in, and the various finishing work be done (including putting in the final window, which has been kept open and protected by plastic, so it could be used to load up the drywall and, eventually, the plywood subflooring).

Plus, we get our own cool freaky H.R. Giger braincave space...

a date with Ikea

2008-08-23T23:09:00.002-05:00

Today was a shopping day. We rented a van and drove to the Ikea in Bolingbrook, Illinois to buy furniture, primarily for the new bedroom but including a few other pieces as well. We'd done pretty extensive preparation beforehand, in terms of visiting the store earlier to select the items, making sure they'd look good in our space, and so on. We assembled a list so we wouldn't forget anything.

Only thing we forgot to do was make sure we'd be able to get it all home. First, a note: Ikea does deliver, but their rates are very high: it's essentially a per-item cost (as if each item has its own truck...), and so picking up the stuff yourself is considerably less expensive (assuming you live within reasonable driving distance). The risk, though, is that you can't have them hold stuff beforehand: if it's in stock, and on the floor, great...but if it's not...you're SOL. (And we had a very unpleasant experience a year or so back: one of the items we needed was in the store...but on a high shelf where it supposedly could be reached only with a forklift...and they refused to get it down until the end of the day since doing so would be a safety hazard to other customers. Why couldn't they just shut down that aisle like Home Depot does, I asked? No good answer. I was very, very close to monkeying up onto the shelves and trying to muscle one of the boxes down, when fortunately we were informed that the Schaumburg store had one of what we needed.)

Back to our shopping list: Rose had a conference in Chicago a couple of months back, so she stopped by Ikea on the way back and picked up two bathroom cabinets, two sinks, a bathroom shelving unit, and a few miscellaneous items. Good thing she did - because if she hadn't, there's no way everything would have fit in our rented van. Here's a photo of the rented van and all the stuff piled next to it: packed in the van, there was maybe three inches of room above the stuff, and no room anywhere else in the vehicle (except where we sat):

And here's a view of the stuff from the other side:

What foiled us is that Ikea's vaunted "flat-pack" thing does not apply to some of its seating materials. As we were purchasing a love-seat and a sofa bed, this was a problem: both were simply huge boxes (the large unit on the left, and the enormous box on the right, flanking the pile of other stuff). We ended up packing and re-packing the van several times, with the assistance of one of the store's loading guys. We finally got it right, though, and home with no problems.

(An inventory: four short bookshelves, about 30 inches wide; four short bookshelves, about 15 inches wide; two doors for those shelves; a bed in three parts; a set of headboard shelves for that bed in two parts; a mattress; a bed frame; a metal bed brace; two small storage units designed for the foot of the bed (although that's not where they're going); one love-seat; one sofa bed; two bathroom mirrors.)

first thing you learn is you always got to wait...

2008-08-15T16:03:00.003-05:00

Unfortunately, the second application of insulation also failed in the same way the first batch did. Everyone is mystified - and, alas for my need to vent righteous indignation, acting with utter professionalism and integrity to try to figure out what's going on. Our contractor's worked with the stuff before; the installer's worked with it before, and of course the manufacturer has as well...yet even though everyone's followed all recommended procedures (as far as they know anyway), still things are going weird.

I have a theory (no, it's not bunnies).

You may recall that the morning the insulation was initially installed, a poor little squirrel had entered in through the eyebrow dormer window in search of rancid cookies and, presumably frightened by the men in moonsuits making noise and carrying scary hoses, skittered off into the soffits to hide. Once the insulation was installed, poor Soffity the Squirrel was trapped! He was scared to death - pooping all over the place, desperately scratching and looking for a way out, like Buffy when she woke up in her tomb after Willow's spell... Fortunately, we eventually figured out what was going on, and opened a hole for the squirrel to get out.

But it was too late.

As soon as Soffity recovered, he and his squirrel brethren and sistren pronounced a Squirrel Curse upon the evil insulation that had trapped him.

My theory is the insulation will work only if we propitiate the squirrel gods. I think scattering a bunch of nuts in the front yard ought to do it. A prayer or invocation or suchlike will probably help, too: "O Great Squirrel God, we are heartily sorry for injuring and traumatizing Soffity, your faithful hoppity, fluffity-tailed worshipper!"

(I think the Great Squirrel God's name is "Buddy")

more windows

2008-08-09T17:41:00.007-05:00

The trim on the exterior of the stairway dormer is nearly done (except for painting), as you can see here:

And the eyebrow dormer window in the front of the house is being restored. Rather than rebuilding the decaying framing (visible in the first image below), they merely applied epoxy to fill in and strengthen that framing, which will then be painted to match.

In other news, the insulation has been reapplied, and while some small areas persist in beginning to tear away, they're small and few enough that we will merely fill them in with spray-on insulation foam and count on the rigid insulation we'll be attaching on the ceilings to eliminate any weak spots. All in all, the insulation problems have set us back about four weeks (going back to my July 12 entry detailing its initial installation and the misadventures of Soffity the Squirrel).

Unfortunately, in any project of this scope some sort of unanticipated setback is nearly inevitable. Fortunately, we had no particular timetable or deadline we needed to meet.

and an update

2008-08-06T19:57:00.003-05:00

Siding on the bathroom/closet dormer is nearly complete; siding has begun to be attached to the stairway dormer.

The second paint coat should bring the color closer to the brown of the gable in the back of the house, although the difference now is pretty minor and in keeping with new construction compared to existing, somewhat weathered construction.

Tomorrow the insulation folks are scheduled to core out the insulation in the places where it failed to adhere properly to the wood (a prep issue, it seems - not a problem with the insulation itself). After that (which they supposedly can take care of in a day or so), the new insulation will be applied. We're also going back to our original plan of furring out the ceiling by a half-inch or so and also putting in rigid insulation, just as insurance against any possible unseen contraction in the foam insulation that might occur after it's drywalled over. It's not supposed to do that, and all indications are that the only reason it did so were related to the adhering issue - but more insulation will save money in the long run, and the ceiling height change is minimal enough not to affect anything.

a little sumthin' on the side...

2008-07-30T23:32:00.003-05:00

Siding is starting to get put up on the new dormers:

Elsewhere...delays due to situations I'm reluctant to be specific about until we have more info... We don't think it's anything insurmountable - eminently solvable - but a bit of a headache...

becalmed...

2008-07-21T23:25:00.002-05:00

This is the stage of construction when things slow down a bit, as various subcontractors need to be scheduled, supplies be delivered, etc. - as opposed to the earlier stages, where a particular crew was handling nearly all of the work. So, in other words, nothing new to report...just a few minor bugs being worked out (the sorts of things that any complex project is bound to exhibit, with multiple channels of communication inevitably experiencing a few trivial breaks).

nothing to do with Bill Gates

2008-07-17T23:22:00.009-05:00

We have windows! Most of our windows have been installed (not the largest one - they're still using that space to loft large items into the space). Here are some photos.

Inside the bathroom, looking west:

Top of the hallway, overlooking our back yard (I didn't get a good shot of the other window overlooking the back yard, which is behind the bathtub):

The windows at the top of the stairs:

And the same windows from outside - in this distant shot, you can also see one of the windows overlooking the back yard (the same one, in fact, whose inside view is above):

And finally, the "eyebrow" window at the front of the house:

They've also cut down the top portion of the stairway wall, which eventually will be replaced with metal railings:

On the left of this image you see the drywall that will be installed shortly.

yo soy insulados

2008-07-12T22:42:00.005-05:00

After a day and a half of watching men in strange white suits emerge covered with flecks and daubs of strange whitish goo, we wandered up to the new space to discover...insulation! Okay, we knew that's what was going on...but it did look kind of science-fiction-y. Still does, actually:

This "foam in place" insulation provides better R-value (the measure of insulation) and is soy-based (thus my atrocious pseudo-Spanish pun as title). Unlike its distant cousin, such as the polyurethane used in the hideous Wisconsin Dells "Xanadu, House of the Future" - which we saw just before it was destroyed in the mid-'90s, this stuff won't give off a terrible funk...which at Xanadu wasn't just because of the Prince-style decor, which included a round bed and pink-purple shag carpeting. I think everything was sealed up so tight there was no airflow. Although you want insulation to insulate, you still need to allow air to circulate...

Of course, our freaky future-cave walls aren't the real walls, only the insulation - the drywaller's scheduled within a week or so, after the windows are installed.

We also had an adventure with a rogue squirrel. Seems he managed to get in, probably yesterday, via an opening in the plastic covering one of the windows, and then managed to sequester himself within the soffit space. They tend to be scared of noises and people, and we had plenty of those. Unfortunately for Soffity the Squirrel, the noises and people were the aforementioned men in white suits with hoses full of plastic goo (okay, "soy-based goo"...), who were not Devo but were insulators - and after their work, Soffity was trapped. We heard him scratchiting about last night, trying to find a way out. So this morning, we went up on a ladder and freed an opening in the soffits. The Humane Society's website said squirrels do not like noises and suggested playing loud, percussive music or talk radio (squirrels hate right-wing politics), so we set up two boomboxes at either end of the attic and deployed each one with an Einstürzende Neubauten CD on shuffle mode. Fortunately, Soffity is not a fan of the German avant-noise scene, and as far as we can tell (no scritching tonight) he left through the exit we provided for him. We do hope he didn't drop dead of a heart attack - I guess we'll find out in a day or so.

(Fun fact: two Neubauten tracks playing simultaneously is nearly indistinguishable from a single Neubauten track!)

plumbing in loco

2008-07-10T23:42:00.007-05:00

Most of the mechanical rough-ins are nearly finished. Here's a shot, looking straight up from the eventual location of the toilet, showing various vents and stacks as they route their way above the eventual ceiling:

And here's a shot of the "guts" beneath the bathtub:

One minor detail: the old vent stack from the first-floor toilet originally vented out part of the roof which no longer exists. In some earlier photos of this area (I'm too lazy to find them), you might have noticed the decapitated stack. It's now been rerouted to a new vent stack. It would have been more trouble than it's worth to try to cut the old stack down to floor level, so instead it's now boxed in our closet. As it turns out, this will eventually make a pretty functional shoe-putting-on seat!

It's not quite as crazily tangled-looking as I'd hoped - but the plumbers haven't quite finished hooking up the various lines to their sources. This shot of the ceiling of our laundry room doesn't quite convey the chaos... (in the background you can see our new direct-vent water heater: it's the gray box):

Aspects of Rose's bathtub continue to shape up; one we hadn't planned on from the beginning was what to do when the bathroom ceiling fan and light fixture was nixed (due to code). In consultation with the electrician, we settled on a can light fixture above the back of the tub area, so that when Rose is taking a bath and reading (a favorite habit of hers), she'll have adequate light. You can see the box for that light at the top of the next image. The framing you see crossing the image will eventually be a wall, so the windows in the background, above the stairway, will not be visible from this part of the bathroom. However, from nearly any point in the remodeled area, at least one window from another room will be visible. It should be quite light and airy feeling, with a wonderful flow from room to room.

PS: I've been asked why I've never posted a picture of any of the folks doing the work. Well, mostly that's because I never go up there while they're working (I suspect I've been banned - by Rose, probably). However, I did manage to sneak a shot of two of the guys working on our plumbing and HVAC systems.

They were strangely more interested in having me fill out various forms than in doing work, though...

bathing beauty

2008-07-08T22:08:00.005-05:00

Some plumbing work done today. They brought up and located Rose's bathtub (I say "Rose's" because she'll be its primary user by a good margin!), and in what will be the shower area some of the control and drain mechanisms are in place:

The beginnings of the reframing of our eyebrow dormer have begun as well:

a brief lull

2008-07-07T22:59:00.003-05:00

The holiday, the weekend, the rain, and the stage our remodeling is in mean that there's little tangible news to report - thus, this metareport:

One of the more interesting aspects of this project has been the insights I've gleaned on how houses work. Seeing the various systems and their interactions as they're assembled is fascinating - I've always been intrigued by that sort of systemic interaction (too bad I didn't try to make some sort of career out of that fascination...) and experiencing it in action, step by step, is quite instructive. Every particular step is relatively simple and straightforward - if not to execute, to understand (tools and knowhow are key) - but in total, the whole thing is quite complex. Still, it's relatively easy to break down the entire system of the house to a series of discrete steps - at least when you're working in this way, doing a remodeling to a structurally sound existing house. I imagine both building anew and trying to work with a more compromised structure present their own, more complex challenges.

it continues...

2008-07-04T17:46:00.005-05:00

Most of yesterday's work involved installation of the soffiting, best visible in this picture:

The landing area return I referred to in the last post was installed:

And, following up on my comment last time, I found a good view of the new shingles:

Today's holiday means a three-day weekend free of construction work. A nice break: although the noise really hasn't been bad, it is nice to be able to sleep in a bit later.

a door is a jar until it is stuck

2008-07-02T22:27:00.011-05:00

A lot of detail work over the past few days involving electrical, HVAC, etc....not all that photographically interesting. But that won't stop me from posting a few!

In the comments on Flickr on a photo of two HVAC ducts in our front hall closet, someone made a reference to Brazil...this shot, of flexible ducts, should reinforce that impression. (Fortunately, the space is not overwhelmed with ducts...nor has Robert DeNiro shown up in an enormously long-billed cap.)

The biggest excitement was a bit of a headache over the placement of the doorframe to our bedroom. As it happens, between the ceiling height, roof slope, and placement of the central chase to accommodate HVAC, there's only exactly enough room for a door of the legally required height and width. As this photo demonstrates, it just barely fits. Some of the trim will need to be cut off (a fairly common thing; in fact, most of the doors on the first floor of our house exhibit this trait), but so long as the outer layer of trim is replaced along the edge of the doorframe (including along any angled cut), it'll look fine.

Initially, the duct in this photo curved the other way, stealing space from our hallway and forcing the doorway toward the sloping roof...it wouldn't have worked like that.

Now, we've got it going the opposite way, so it steals space where we don't care about it: the closet (which feels large enough to park my Mini Cooper in, should we need an extra parking space, should we build a ramp to allow access. But that would mean more floor reinforcements! Damn...). In addition to her cleverness in figuring out how to locate the door exactly in about the only place it could be located (while preserving the overall spatial flow of the area), Rose was exceedingly clever here: originally, the air return was going to be in front of the door in the photo above, to the right. But that (again) would have pushed the doorframe a few inches toward the roof - nope, can't do it. What to do? Why, run the return duct between the floorboards and have it come up on the opposite wall, of course. (The duct guys haven't been back yet, I don't think...Erik, our contractor, thinks there'll be no problem with this idea.)

The other main work of the past few days is electrical. All the funky little boxes that contain the various wiring are in place (although we found out that code prohibited our bathroom ceiling fan: not enough room to keep it far enough away from the bathtub...), and much of the wiring is in place. Plumbing work, too: here you can get a good idea of where our two sinks, nearby electrical outlets, vanity lights, and two mirrors (between each set of lights) will go:

The framing for the bathroom pocket door is in place, also:

The roofing is nearly complete, with an entirely new layer of shingles and new venting...but I haven't been able to get a good photo. It would help if I were thirty feet tall.

plans and floors and roofs and things

2008-06-28T16:35:00.014-05:00

Rather a whirlwind of activity over the past few days. By Wednesday, the eventual profile of the roof of our dormers was becoming clear:

Yesterday we had two teams of workers, our usual carpenters inside and roofers outside, the latter tearing up the accumulated three layers of shingles and making quite the impressive racket and equally impressive mess all over the ground. Or rather, all over a large tarp they'd spread on the ground. And then, about half an hour before they were probably due to finish for the day, a sudden downpour forced them to scramble to make sure everything was watertight. They decided to put in some extra work today (a Saturday), and they finished about a third of the roof with new shingles (and cleaned up that mess as well).

Inside, we had the plumber running the drainage system for the bath and shower and two bathroom sinks (and if someone can tell me why Blogger insists on rotating that second photo, I'd like to know: it's correctly oriented in every other display of it I can come up with) -

- while the next day, the carpenters built the frame support for the tub surround and put in the subflooring in the bathroom:

Meanwhile, they also installed the frame for the double pocket doors for our closet -

- and the rough framework for an alcove space, which was originally going to be a gas fireplace (until budgetary reality hit home: we're still running up a gas line behind this space, so that if we decide to put in the fireplace in the future, it'll be easy to do so):

Meanwhile, we were busy too: we finally decided on the plumbing fixtures, and purchased bathroom accessories (towel bars and the like) and all the lighting fixtures for all four spaces (bedroom, hall, bathroom, and closet).

Our contractor (and friend) Erik also kept himself busy: now he's a farmer...and a budding video star... (This is a video put up by Outpost Coop, our community coop store, at their YouTube site.)

why a no chicken?

2008-06-25T11:01:00.012-05:00

Duct work has begun. The main ducts up to the addition are routed from the furnace (of course, across the basement, and up through our front hall closet (there'll be a wall covering this up), and finally emerging in the crawlspace behind what will eventually be a set of bookshelves:

The rest of the chimney (down to the basement) was removed, and it turns out we won't have to tear down part of that chase in the kitchen to access it. Here's a shot of there being no chimney stack in our basement -

- and here's a shot up the chase (note the terminus of the new kitchen vent):

On the one hand, this loses us a few square feet of space we thought we were going to get; on the other, it saves us some money, plus lots of disruption, and in fact the location of the vent is more efficient than it was in our original plans anyway:

The fridge will still be moved over to the right of where you can see it, and the current heating vent - which is tucked in the corner of the kitchen, behind the fridge, so that it's trying to heat the whole kitchen boxed in on three sides, plus it's also the sole source of heat for the library, behind the wall, as well as going upstairs - will be shut off except to the library.

chimbley swept

2008-06-20T14:29:00.008-05:00

The stairway dormer is framed out now - here's what it looks like from inside:

And from the outside:

We decided to get a new, direct-vent water heater (our existing water heater was purchased very quickly under emergency situations for not much money: I'm surprised it's lasted as long as it did), which meant that venting the water heating via the chimney was no longer necessary. And as convenience turns out, the chimney chase proved to be the perfect place to run some new heating/AC ducts - or rather, nearly perfect, since it's too small. In combination these facts mean that the existing chimney's being torn down. From its top above the roof down to the top of the second floor, it's gone:

Knowing that it was going, its location is actually the middle of the new hallway. What's left of it, down to the basement, will be going out Monday. Meanwhile, it's created a hellmouth - fortunately, one easily blocked by a piece of plywood:

The other nice aspect of this work is that, since it's made it necessary to rip out a bit of wall in our kitchen to access the new HVAC chase, we decided to take advantage of this fact to restructure that area of our kitchen, which will allow the refrigerator to be in a more logical location and the heating vent not to be tucked, pointlessly, behind the refrigerator. So: minor kitchen remodel along the way.

waiter, there's a hole in my roof

2008-06-17T00:05:00.002-05:00

They've punched out the second dormer (over the stairway):

The bathroom dormer's been finished out a bit more:

Some of the noisiest work involved removing the existing flooring and reinforcing the joists by sistering 2x4s to the existing ones. This is being done to provide added support for the tub and tilework in the bathroom:

When the roofer arrives, we'll be getting rid of quite a number of years' accumulation of shingle layers, as evidenced by this cutaway detail, made visible by punching out the space for the stairway dormer:

whole lotta bangin' goin' on

2008-06-16T22:46:00.008-05:00

So as I mentioned, I was on vacation from about the time construction (or rather, demolition, at first) started Monday afternoon. I returned Thursday afternoon - and as our contractor had mentioned, this is the relatively easy, quick part. So, here are before (some weeks ago) and after views of the front -

- and of the back of the house -

This dormer is for the new bathroom (and closet). Inside, more work had been done, framing out the space where the knee walls (accommodating the pitch of the roof; center height will be 8') are going to go:

A very necessary feature, given all the rain we've had, is this plastic waterproofing sheet, here lending a spooky blue glow to the stack from the bathroom downstairs (the stack will be relocated a bit):

appetite for destruction

2008-06-11T08:55:00.008-05:00

We hope our project is done before Guns 'n' Roses releases Chinese Democracy...

Here are some before and after photos, after Day 1 of the remodeling project:

As it happens, I'm out of town, so Rose shot these photos with her cellphone - if I'd taken them, I would have tried to match the shots a bit better, but she didn't have access to the "before" pictures...since they're on my computer, which is in front of me...

(And yes, that is a Mac Performa box, from like 1995...which we'd forgotten was sitting in the attic for years, long after the machine itself went to the great beyond. Then again, we actually had a Mac Plus up there, along with an era-appropriate dot-matrix printer - those went to recycling land via Rose's work just last week, I think.)

let the wild rumpus begin!

2008-06-09T00:11:00.003-05:00

With a banging, a hammering, a sawing, a drilling, etc. We've worked out all the nitty-gritty, and tomorrow morning Erik's delivering the final contract to be signed. We make our initial payment (whoo-hoo! we're deeper in debt!), and work will start that afternoon.

Amusingly, a previously scheduled vacation (Rose had to cancel, figuring that one of us needed to be home to deal with the remodeling, and the friends I'm visiting are closer to me than to her) means that I'll be gone the first few days of the teardown and framing out. So I'll return Thursday afternoon to a slightly different structure.

On a side note: kitties are now confined to the first floor. We have an elaborate setup for their litterboxes, temporarily in the library, involving foamcore and a tarp so as not to ruin walls and flooring with kitty inaccuracy and litter-tracking. We had to move their feeding area, too - it's next to the fridge now. The door from the kitchen to the back stairs will remain shut (except when one of us sneaks out it to the basement) until the job is done. The worst days for them will be when the rerouting of an air duct necessitates shutting them in the library for two days (during the day - we can let them out at night). Poor kittehs!

illuminated!

2008-06-03T23:28:00.002-05:00

Yeesh - two days after we finally get our financing straightened out, the first dip into our contingency fund. Despite having run over the code before designing the addition, Rose is used to commercial architecture rather than residential, and thus it was that she missed an obscure requirement relating the amount of window space (including "borrowed light," or light that comes via doorways and the like from adjacent spaces) to the amount of floor space. Because our second floor has low ceilings and limited places for fenestration (a word you'll rarely find, that - but useful), when we discovered we needed a measly three square feet of additional window space, we were actually a bit flummoxed. Aesthetically, enlarging the existing windows would have been either a disaster or bad in other ways; a skylight wasn't really an option either.

Fortunately (remember that "borrowed light" concept?) Rose brilliantly realized that, hey, we've got a door to the room...and in the hall space at the top of the stairs, there are windows, and light. So...replace the standard door with a door with glass, and we're okay, right? Indeed, we are (this per the city's plan review person). So it is that the door to the bedroom will now be a "French" door, with frosted glass and leaded panes, the latter to match the windows. It looks cool enough that I almost regret the fact that 99% of the time, the door will be open (it's just the two of us and the cats, so no particular privacy issues here).

And, we found out that the permit costs rather less than we thought - nearly a wash with the increased price of the door (obviously, doors with leaded glass panes are a bit more expensive than plain old wooden ones).

assembling at the starting gate...

2008-05-28T15:35:00.004-05:00

We've been a whirlwind of price-cutting action the last week - we haven't been able to get the budget down quite to where we'd hoped, but we do have some very likely options (hi, Dad!) and all things going as presumed, actual action - permitting, contract-signing, and work actually beginning - should be underway in a week or so.

We've decided on almost every detail: sink cabinetry, hardware, lighting fixtures, details concerning trim...about the only thing remaining is to decide on a compatible couple of paint colors (we're pretty sure on the main color - an ivory just slightly heading toward a warmish brown tone...amusingly, fairly close to a lighter version of the background for this very text you're reading - and have three possibilities for accent color, all of which are compatible both with our flooring and the bathroom tile).

cancel that order for Argentine wheelbarrows...

2008-05-21T22:10:00.002-05:00

Did I forget to knock on a wood product when I mentioned my hopes that the budget would be fine? Because - eek! - Erik (our contractor) e-mailed Rose yesterday saying his preliminary numbers suggested the budget would be...uh, about twice what our actual, real-life budget is.

After several moments of panic (mine more than Rose's - she does this sort of budget-sledgehammering as part of her real job), we realized, well, we have options...but we can't really decide what they are till we get actual numbers so we know where to cut.

So this afternoon Rose met with Erik (I chickened out of being there - I wasn't needed, and I figured I'd probably eat my entire hand chewing on my fingernails from sheer nerves), and...well, first Erik said he'd overestimated the cumulative total number by a pretty significant degree (which means that rather than being twice our budget, his initial numbers were only 1.5 times the budget). However, after meeting, we realized there are a number of things we can do to whittle the budget down to affordability (and reasonability: that double-budget number was not only unaffordable, it was more than it made sense to put into this house, even if we could have afforded it), mostly involving changes in the roofing and insulation systems, which save pretty big chunks of change both in materials and (even more important) in labor.

So we're back to good: we're pretty sure we can shave the numbers down to a dull roar, maybe suh-light-uh-ly above where we wanted to be - but still doable.

Whew.

I had a moment of panic there - thinking ah hell, I'm just gonna delete this blog as reporting on the non-existence of a non-project would make dull reading. But we - like thunderbirds - are go.

Yea! (Wild moodswings to follow if data does not conform with expectations - I'll ask for the chemical mood-levelers if so...)

it continues...

2008-05-12T22:22:00.003-05:00

Stuff's still out to bid - we met with our contractor (also a good friend) the other night for dinner with him and his wife at Alem Ethiopian Village (fabulously yummy!). The flooring we'd ordered arrived over the weekend, so we rented a UHaul (I don't think thirteen 7'x2' boxes would fit in either a Mini Cooper or a Mazda Protege...) and picked it up, as well as dropped off some junk at St. Vinnie's. We went down to BBC Lighting Liquidators to check out some light fixtures Rose had spotted - we're all but decided on wall sconces and ceiling lights for the bedroom and landing, along with being pretty sure about the components of the ceiling fan for the bedroom. The bathroom's still a bit of a mystery - tiling, lighting, and cabinetry are still a bit up in the air. Not in terms of design, but in terms of actual materials. We've got a reasonably good notion of color, but it's sort of like a jigsaw puzzle: when all the pieces are in play, it's very difficult, but once you get a few in place, everything else can follow more readily.

Erik (our contractor) said he's likely to hear from everyone within a week, and we've met with several folks to check things out, from the electrician to the plumber to the drywall guy.

We also had some discussion - probably decided to get rid of one of the ceiling lights as unnecessary, and figured out a few details on the bookshelves we'll be putting up (not built-ins, so it's our work, after all the contractors have done their bit).

Rose is worried about the budget; I'm thinking we've heard nothing to indicate that we're over it (and both the flooring we've purchased and the lighting we've tentatively chosen are below our budget), so I'm not worried. Yet. Once Erik gets back to us, we'll know whether we have to downshift a bit... Fortunately, we have budgetary contingencies: we'll just ditch the solid platinum three-times-scale nude statue of me I was planning for the bathroom and replace it with a simple, life-size, solid gold one instead.

floored genius

2008-04-26T16:32:00.002-05:00

We made our first major purchase today: some flooring. A little bit jumping the gun...but a local lumber liquidator had some very impressive sale prices on some very good merchandise, we went down to check it out, and we decided this was probably the best deal we were likely to get. So it'll be oak flooring, prefinished, in 3/8" thickness on backing - it comes in varying lengths (approximately 6' long) to give the impression of the variability of traditional wood flooring. The existing floor (which will be the subfloor for this) is some ratty old pine, which is unlikely to sand well, so we decided this option would give us a good quality look without having to rip out the pine and put in entirely new flooring. Had I been thinking, I would have brought the camera along and taken a shot of the sample...but all things in time: once it's installed, which won't be until near the end of the process of course, then I'll photograph it.

[clears throat]

2008-04-23T20:07:00.001-05:00

Nothing here yet. If you found this because you're looking for info on Roxy Music (from whose song title I stole the name of this blog), sorry: I love the band too, but that's not what I'm writing about here. This entry is a placeholder until things get underway, in other words.