floors and doors

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...

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

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

Window trim:

Bathroom:



Above the landing:



At the top of the stairs, looking north:



In the bedroom:



More to come.

Laconic today.

exterior all but finished

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

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.: