Tubs and sheds

This photo of the shed shows what the siding on the house will look like - they moved to do inside work once it got bitterly cold (which it has been for a couple of weeks now)! The other is the tub in Timothy's new bathroom - not quite ready for use, but exciting that it has arrived anyway!

Opening up again

The kitchen and family room have changed a little in the last few weeks - the "hanging down" cupboards that drove me crazy between kitchen and dinette are gone (dishes are on temporary shelving in the dining room), there are new potlights in the kitchen, and the temporary poly barrier between dinette and family room is gone, so we are beginning to feel what the new space will be like. 

Plus, on Dec 23, the platform connecting the dinette to the addition was built, so we can now take the wheelchair in there. Not that there is anything in there yet... Well, there is a bathtub, but it isn't installed yet. Anyway, we were able to put a couple of couches back in the family room, and set up a little Christmas tree there, which was useful for the company we've had off and on over the last few days.

Argh! Once again, I've managed to put the photos up in reverse order of what I intended. Clearly, I am not posting often enough to remember from one time to the next!

Drywall

A lot has been happening - this place has been hopping with plumbers, electricians, the regular builders and DRYWALLERS! The rooms are really looking like rooms now!

The pictures have come out in the reverse order I wanted again - the bottom photo is November 22, the middle one is December 2, and the top one is December 6.

Besides all this, some cupboards have been removed from the kitchen to open it up, and the lighting has been redone, and now the ceiling has to be repaired and re-done. I won't have access to the kitchen this week- not ideal in prime baking season! But that's OK- these changes are so exciting!

Insulation

The exterior insulation is complete now everywhere except the east ((front!) of the house and a little on the north. Even more exciting though, is that there is insulation on the inside walls of the addition now! And this insulation, plumbing rough ins and electrical are all done and passed inspection in the addition. That means the dry wallers can come later this week, and then the rooms will really start to look like rooms. 

We have been taken by surprise, a bit, by the amount of time it takes to make decisions and get things ordered - especially for the bathroom! Vanity, cupboard, tiles, tub, faucets, toilet - it all takes time to find what you like, weigh some pro's and con's, look around at pricing and availability... We have pretty much always just lived with whatever was already in a house (unless it broke and needed to be replaced), so I have new respect for any owner who made a decision before us - whether I actually like what they chose or not!!!

November 11

November 3, a crew came to pour concrete in the new part of the basement - there are amazing echoes down there now! Meanwhile on the outside, more old siding is coming off and more insulation is going on... maybe we should leave the house pink. And yes, that is a bit of snow on the roof. It will be good if the outside work is finished very soon!

Coziness

It doesn't look cozy in these pictures, but these changes will make it so! 

Since the new part of the house needs some kind of exterior, and we want it to look more like the rest of the house than an after thought, we are redoing all of the exterior. Since the old house is 2 by 4 construction (and the addition is 2 by 6) we thought it would be a good opportunity to beef up the insulation in the old house after removing the old siding and before installing the new. So the first picture is part of the south wall after the old aluminum siding has been removed - the tar paper shack look (or "kind of ghetto" as one of my kids might say). A truck load of insulation arrived this morning, so it might be a lovely shade of pink by the end of the day.

The other photo is of the installation of hot water pipes for the IN FLOOR heating in the new part of the basement. The installation should be finished today; then (sometime soon, we hope, before it gets much chillier) the cement floor will be poured on top.

More windows

Most of our windows are now in, including the skylights (click on the photo and you may be able to see the clear bubbles of the skylights better). Also, most of the electrical is done. 

Another disappearing wall

The opening between current and new basements got sledge-hammered out the other day. You can look back to the July 21 post to see the saw cuts that were made in preparation for this. Since this photo was taken, sand has been spread over the new basement floor area and packed hard - ready for the plumber to come do stuff, and then the concrete pour.

Disappearing Wall

Since last week some of the windows have been installed - including the one in our bedroom, which is much appreciated as we've had some pretty frosty nights lately. Only some windows have been done, since they sent the rest with the wrong color trim on the outside. The window man is here today to take them back and get it changed though, so maybe there will be a picture after all the windows are installed soon.

Meanwhile, the wall between the family room and the addition has come down (a VERY noisy process - so glad that pocket door got fixed so we could escape just a little from the banging)! So here are 3 photos - before any destruction in the family room, with just the (former) deck door removed (the orange tarp providing a slight barrier to the cold), and last with the wall itself gone! It is much lighter with the wall gone - it may not be such a dungeon after all!

All the furniture from the family room has been put in various other rooms temporarily - the computer is hooked up in the living room for now (whew). The big hole in the floor between the family room and the addition is where the ramp will go from the main floor level down into the sunken family room. Click on the first picture and you can just make out the blue sign that have been on that door since the beginning of July - "BIG HOLE - NO EXIT!"

A roof over our heads!

The roofers have completed their job - now plumbers and electricians can do theirs, windows can be put in, and the more invasive part of the process will start soon: some time in the next couple of weeks, the wall between the existing family room and the addition will be knocked out!

It was very noisy while the roofers were here, and anticipating the interior chaos to come got me a little down toward the end of last week. So it made me laugh when I was reading a bit of Scripture and came across Haggai 2:9 - in case you don't have a Bible handy, you can go to http://www.biblegateway.com and plug in the reference!

Meanwhile, two pictures: one showing our tidy new roof, and the other taken just after dusk - that small glowing dome on the roof is light coming out of the solar tube when lights are on in the house! The little bumps on the ground are the tops of the concrete piles which will support the new deck.

The roof men cometh - finally

We've had stunning warm fall weather, but no roofers. Today, they are here! So once the roof is on and the windows are in the addition, all kinds of serious interior stuff will begin in a rush!

Meanwhile, a little job we've been trying to get done filled in time nicely for a patiently waiting worker. 

There is a wonderful pocket door between the kitchen and dining area. The dining area is next to the living room and piano. This pocket door cuts back the sound of the piano in the kitchen and family room substantially. When it is shut, you can talk on the phone in the family room. When it is open, you can't so well. Pocket doors, kind of like computers, are wonderful when they work. And frustrating when they don't work. Our pocket door has been jammed open for about 6 years. 

It seemed to be too small and too fiddly a job to entice anyone to come and fix it. But now, thanks to Timothy and the big reno job, it is done!

This photo shows it just before the casing was put back on around the door.

Ready and waiting...

In these pictures you can see piles of shingles on the roof. The skylight curbs are finished and insulated; the window wells are completed now, and the roofers are a little behind because of some heavy rain earlier this week. Maybe they'll come tomorrow? Maybe next week? You may also be able to make out that the small roof overhang over the doors to the (not) deck has been rebuilt and slightly extended. 

As soon as the roof shingles and windows are in place, things will probably move quickly inside! (Windows will be nice. As it gets cooler, we are noticing the R-value of poly sheets in our room isn't quite as good as our window was!) The major event after that (in terms of disruption to family particularly) will be taking out the family room wall next to the addition. This will mean emptying the family room, which will mean moving the computer desk, which may mean I may not easily be able to post updates for a while after that. We'll see how the logistics work out.

The other picture shows another "while-we're-at-it". We haven't had a good piano light, and the lowered soffit over the piano nook seemed to lend itself to the idea of pot lights, so we had a pair installed there! They are (literally) brilliant.

Windows - up and down!

A lot of the work in the past two weeks has been positioning and building curbs for skylights, and finishing the window wells - so no roof shingles yet!

These window wells are built to last with heavy duty braces attached to the concrete walls!

The temptation with renovations is to add things "While we're at it...". I have tried to resist many of these, but truthfully, some of them just make sense! One of these while-we're-at-its was to add a variation on skylights called solar tubes or light tubes in a couple of dark corridors and one bathroom that has no windows. The bathroom in the accompanying picture has no windows, and the lights are off - that's solar tube light you see coming in through that circle in the ceiling!

Roof boards

The work this week consisted mainly of getting the fascia (boards at the bottom of the trusses) and roof sheeting in place. You can also see the dark clouds that have dumped occasional cold rain downpours on the work and workers!

Suddenly it is VERY dark in the family room, which has become an interior room. We will add a window on the north side of the family room (the side of the house on the left in these pictures), and next week, they will cut the openings for skylights in the new roof - so hopefully that will help.

Here is an interior photo also - to the left is the doorway into Timothy's new room, a closet opening in the middle, and the doorway into the new bathroom on the right. Not exactly inhabitable yet, but I really love the look of a building's rooms at this stage - don't know why!

Raising the Roof

It has been a productive week - first the interior walls were framed up, and we began to truly feel what the rooms will be like, Then the roof trusses got put in place. You can see how there will be a nice roof overhang  where some of the deck will eventually be. Maybe by the end of next week, the roof will be shingled (along with a new roof on the house and shed).

Walls!

Suddenly we have walls, and the addition once again looks big. Like several elephants in the backyard, actually. We look out the window and think "What are we doing?!?" But it will be Ok...won't it?

The process of putting up the walls is quite neat - 2 guys and 2 special jacks, and up goes a 30 foot wall section, and that's heavy, with 2 by 6 studs and 1/2 inch plywood!

Here is a short video of the process, and a picture as it is now with 2.5 of the walls up!

Subfloor

The subfloor was on last week, making the new basement look very dark! Then the big window from our master bedroom, door to the balcony and the balcony itself were removed, and the new (smaller) window roughed in. Maybe if you click on this view of the house, you might be able to make out the red line marking the new roof line - the reason the other window, door and balcony had to go.

The subfloor looked like an inviting dance floor, maybe under the full moon a couple of days ago...but the gap with the 9+ foot drop into the basement next to the house put us off! Today they are framing the walls - if they get them up before the predicted rains start, there may be more photos in the nest day or so.

Backfill!

Today the landscape of our yard changed dramatically. These photos show one last shot of the weeping tiles and basement window well areas, then the skid-steer and tampers at work removing the mountains of clay and packing the dirt in beside the foundation walls, and then the view with much of the yard leveled again!

Interestingly, our builder told us at one point that when the hole was dug, it would look huge. When the basement walls went up, it would look not so big, when the joists and subfloor are on it will seem huge again. I didn't believe him - but so far he has been absolutely right! The psychology of visual perception!

Correction...

That orange beam referred to in the previous post is NOT the beam supporting the bathroom, but it is a load bearing beam! The beam supporting the ramp which will connect the addition to our sunken family room was put in yesterday and the bathroom supporting beam will probably be put up with the rest of the floor joists today. 

Sunken family rooms were so very common in houses built around the time of ours (late 70's) and for a good long time after. We love our family room, and it truly IS the room in which we live, gather, listen to the stereo, post blog posts(!), etc. But it has been one of  the most challenging things to work around in making this house accessible and designing the addition. 

The joists!

It's been awhile since there has been something to "see". weeping tile was laid, and the foundation walls got sprayed with black (and very smelly) damp proofing - we wished we had closed the windows before they started! Then they were covered with pink styrofoam insulation. But it still all looked substantially like a hole with foundation walls in it - just some colour changes. Now things are happening rapidly again - yesterday, they put in an important structural beam (orange top) which will support the special accessible bathroom fixtures, and today they got the floor joists across where the two bedrooms will go. The subfloor may be on by the end of the week, and possibly early next week, the mountains of fill will be pushed back into the gap around the foundation walls! 

Most readers probably know this, but I didn't until one of my kids told me - if you click on a photo, you get a very good high resolution enlargement of it!

Basement walls - ta-dah!

The cribs were removed yesterday, and the walls look good! Next week, the weeping tile and damp proofing will happen, so there may not be much in the way of dramatic visual changes for a few days.

Concrete pouring

Here is the video of yesterday's doings! I love the motto on the boom of the concrete pump - "If we can't reach it nobody can". The fellow in the blue coveralls has the remote that controls the unfolding of the pump boom, directs it into the forms, and controls the speed of the concrete flow. A small crowd of neighbourhood kids (and adults!) gathered to watch. It took three cement trucks to come to fill the wall forms (should have taken 2 but the first truck didn't have a full load). The noise is partly the concrete pump and partly the vibrating rod that the workers are pushing down into the concrete as it pours - this makes sure it settles evenly, with no big bubbles that would create weak areas in the walls.

Wall forms

The weather has cooperated and it has been a busy week! Tuesday a cribber crew came and built the forms for the basement walls - inserting the rough bucks for the basement windows so those holes will be in place. Yesterday the concrete came - I will edit some video in the next few days and post that, too. It was pretty amazing to watch! This morning, they are taking the forms away and the walls (we hope) will stand intact!

Hole-in-the-wall

It was too wet for much to get done last week, but the weekend was dry and sunny, so today the concrete cutters came to cut the hole in to the existing basement from the excavation. I was having trouble envisioning this - what would keep the bugs and the rain out? They cut strategic slits, and then these slits were caulked. Once the basement walls are up and joists and roof and all, it will be "easy" to take a sledge hammer and knock out the bit of wall they outlined with their cuts. It was interesting to watch - but painfully noisy and dusty. Once they set everything up, the saw was operated by the guy in the boots with a remote control! The other picture is of the basement storage room, with the lights out to show the cracks of light coming in through the slits (before the caulking was done!)

Swimming pool

My daughter and I did joke about "While we're at it, how about an in ground pool?" But we didn't really mean it!

In these photos, you can see the chalk lines on the existing house foundation where the connection between old and new basements will be cut. But it's too wet for the concrete cutter to come. :-( The wetness you can see in the other picture - today we had several long heavy thunder storms which dumped a lot of water in the hole - hence the swimming pool! It's been too wet for the cribber to come build the forms for the walls too. We were very fortunate that the footings got poured just before all the rain began last Wednesday. Hopefully when we do get the walls poured, I may be around to get some video footage.

Those three concrete squares are the footings for the posts to support a ramp and the wheelchair accessible shower.

Forming shape

The forms for the foundation footings are now in place, so you can see the (unusual) shape of the addition. On the main floor, the area closest to the right of the picture will be the wheelchair friendly bathroom. The upper left corner area will be Timothy's new main floor bedroom, and the lower left jutting out corner area will be a main floor guest bedroom.

The first rain in two weeks is supposed to happen this evening - could be quite the mud pit some time tonight!

Excavation!

The hole is now the required 9 feet deep! We looked out the window yesterday and breakfast, and decided that the castle (see top photo, June 12 post) built by our summer boarder Mark Prince (you may now groan at the pun in the June 12 post...), has become a Scottish castle. You can see the foothills of some Munros to the left of the castle, and in front - that's not a moat, that's Loch Ness in a severe drought!

Speaking of drought, it has been hot and dry here for 10 days or so, and should continue for another 4 at least. Very good for digging, and could be good for pouring the foundation footings, but challenging to water the garden, which is on the other side of the Munros and the trees behind them.