Windows, walls, bathroom, and a pocket door

This week: windows. The existing ones in the kitchen were too low, so that the counter would have run right over them. They got swapped out for smaller windows - one step closer to getting to the building the kitchen!

Beyond windows... Below are photos of the wall between the living room and the kitchen. This is what you'll see when you walk into the living room and look towards the kitchen. There will be a glass cabinet hanging from the top and a couch against the bottom of this wall. 

 

Below is the same wall as viewed from the kitchen side of the wall. Eventually (soon, hopefully...) the saw will be replaced by a kitchen island. The window will have a stainless steel counter running below it and have shelves along the wall on the left of the window. The wall with the hole in it will have cabinets below and the glass cabinet hanging above it. Can you see it?

Final progress update for this blog is the bathroom and pocket door pictured below. The bathroom is framed in with a shower. The piece of wood leaning up against it is going to be on the opposite side of the room and will be a sliding pocket door that when opened will lead to the basement. 

We have a floor!

Well, at least a sub-floor. We can finally enter the house and not fall through to the basement. We also now have a framed bathroom, part of a frame for the kitchen wall, and new beams that will hold up the second floor a bit more sturdily.

All of the joists needed to be supported and leveled. There's a two-inch height difference between the outer wall and the inner wall where the middle of the house has sunk. 

After a couple of weeks redoing the joists, a subfloor finally went down. It may seem like nothing, but can I just say, let the dancing begin - you can jump around and not fall into the basement!

 That said Henry did not need a floor to do a dance... See below:

In addition to a new floor under our feet, we now have two new support beams to hold up the ceiling and keep our second floor from bouncing like a trampoline.

Will on a ladder (again - I will have a whole album of shots of Will on a ladder) having just installed another support beam.

Above is a panorama shot of the new beam across the back of the kitchen. It doesn't actually bow out in the middle, that is distortion from the panorama. But the gap on the left and the lack of gap on the right is real. There's a two and a half inch opening on the right and on the left, where our house sinks in the middle, there's no gap. The beam itself is LEVEL.

A non-panorama shot of the beam. Again, the beam is level, it's the rest of the house that is askew.

Above: the gap at the left and lack of gap at the right.

Following are broad shots of all the new support beams. I feel so supported!

Framing

Ned was showing us the framing of the new wall. He and Will were putting boards up at the ceiling. Ned explained that he hoped that this would make the ceiling more solid.

"Hoped?" I asked.

"It should make it more solid," Ned replied.

"Ned, you're the contractor," chimed in Brad. "You're not supposed to hope or have shoulds, you're supposed to know."

"Or at least sound like you know," I added. "I tell my students that in their writing not to say 'I think this because,' since it makes them sound wimpy. Just be direct and sound assured."

Ned scratched his head and then responded, "This is going to make the ceiling stiff like a honeymoon prick."

Now that's confidence instilling!

In addition to framing, there are new cement footings poured in the basement to hold up the first floor floor. Exiting to be moving beyond demolition and into building!

No More Wall!

Hey look - there's no more wall! The beautiful new support beam went in and now the kitchen and living room are one big beautiful open space! Mind you there's no floor, but that's just a minor detail. One huge step forward - now the space is open and my second floor bedroom no longer sags in the middle. Just like a facelift!

Also got a harvest of fall tomatoes and melon cukes and an actual cumber cuke. 

Hmmm...

They are working on the first floor and now the doors on the third floor no longer shut. Hmmm...

But the holes in the floor are getting bigger?

We are waiting for progress, and I suppose it is, but the holes in the floor are getting bigger, not smaller... But hopefully when the first floor is strengthened and the first floor ceiling / floor of the second floor has new support beams, it will all feel more solid, less creaky, and then will support a new and shiny floor. New and shiny floor. New and shiny floor. Just a daily affirmation to remember that sometimes it is NOT the journey but the destination that matters.

Slow and Steady... Labor Day to Oct. 6

I stopped writing on the blog since there wasn't much to say other than demolition, demolition, demolition. Labor Day it was the chimney that left us. Photo on the left is from the second floor looking down where the chimney used to be all the way down to a guy working halfway between the first floor and the basement. To add to our dead animal collection in the house, two birds came dropping out of the chimney as it was destroyed. Picture on the right, the house with no more chimney sticking out of the roof.

 

Following the removal of the chimney, Ned built new stairs to the basement. I did a little dance - excited that there was actually some new construction and not simply destruction, destruction, destruction.

The back stairs to the basement were removed and new ones built:

September left us with a search for a construction permit. We had taken out the horse-hair plaster and stripped everything to bare bones, but in order to build everything back up we needed to get the engineering report and then submit everything to Cambridge to get official permits. This involved paper work paper work paper work. We had to do things such as sign an affidavit stating that we are in fact the owners of the house, even though Cambridge (the city that will issue the permit) has our deed on record that shows we are indeed the owners of the house. We needed plans, approval from the fire department that we would be putting in sufficient smoke detectors, an engineering report, an estimated cost for the project (cost quotes from plumber, electrician, contractor), and although it seems straightforward, it took a month or more. But here it is - the finest C I ever received:

Plans...

We are now into October. Ned, a high school history teacher at Cambridge Ringe and Latin, works the school day and then heads here to work from about 3-9. This means when we're home, we get to hear the cacophony of hammers, saws, nail guns, and the like as our symphony for dinner. It's all music to my ears, however, I know that all the noise is leading to then end of the dust and the future of a whole new house.

Our dinner music...the power saw.

One of the discussions I overheard all day yesterday was between Ned and Will, the two guys doing the building, as they tried to figure out how to level the floors. Problem with having a 100+ year old house is that nothing is square. The floors on the first floor are two inches higher at the edges than they are in the center. They are trying to figure out how to re-work the beams and sub-flooring so that when the new wood floors go on, it will at least appear level if not actually level. 

This is what it currently looks like (10/5) on the first floor with removal of sub-flooring and addition of supports to try to level out the floors.

This reminds me of the painting in our current living room. We straightened it every day, but as our house bounces around during the day due to people walking on not-so-stable floors, trains going by, and a dryer that shakes everything, the painting inevitably ends up crooked again. The question is, when I straighten it, do I make it appear parallel to the top of the couch or to the ceiling because with our floors, the couch and the ceiling are not actually parallel...

Speaking of COUCH, that is something new. Although our new living room is still a couple of months away, the couch decided it was ready to come now. It BARELY fit up the stairs...

We (the very strong movers with me standing below and watching) had the couch wedged between the stairs and the ceiling. It was almost stuck and we about gave up, but one last twist and we managed to get it into the upstairs living room (eventual master bedroom). 

So now we no longer have to use the blow-up mattress as a couch and enjoy lying about on our new couches, napping through the nail guns and power saws.