chimbley swept

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.

whole lotta bangin' goin' on

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

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.)