a house is not a motel, or...

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.

cats roam free!

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.)

yesterday upon the stairs...

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!

more windows

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.

let the wild rumpus begin!

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!