window trim

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

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

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.:

at the top of the stairs

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!

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

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

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

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

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: