We have relatively few photos this week, but that’s probably a reflection of the fact that the rate of visible progress has slowed somewhat. There’s not much left of the house to tear down at this point, and we’re not far enough along that any substantial construction has started.

What is happening is work on laying the foundation (literally!) for the new sections of the house. The team has been digging out the space where the foundation will sit and putting down rebar to strengthen the foundation and footings. They also dug out the areas in the old portions of the house where new footings will be required to support the mass of the second floor. This apparently required cutting through the carpet in our master bedroom—previously, it had merely been folded back—so I suppose this means we’ll be getting new carpet next year. I’m rooting for a shade of green that’s not dissimilar to what we have now, but Julie is looking for something different.

The crew also removed the hardwood flooring that had been revealed when Julia’s carpet was pulled up, much to my delight at the time. I thought that they might try to save that floor, since it’s in the general area where the dining room and mud room will lie, and we’re obviously going to need some kind of flooring there, but apparently not.

We ran into a few hiccups this week, as well, though nothing insurmountable. First, PG&E threw up some procedural roadblocks that got in the way of setting up the temporary power pole that will be needed for the team to continue working after the wall with our existing electrical box comes down. Given that we’re dealing with the power company, it should come as no surprise that the solution involved a transfer of funds from us to PG&E.

There was also a bit of a mixup regarding the plans: the structural engineer had assumed that our chimney was going to be removed completely, and surmised that he could use the north wall of the living room as a shear wall. Unfortunately, this would leave no space for the firebox of the converted fireplace, unless we want to have it project into the room. We don’t want that. Luckily, the contractor caught this discrepancy early in the project, and has been working with the architect and structural engineer to come up with a solution, which may involve converting one of the walls of our master bedroom into a shear wall in place of the living room wall.

We’ve also made some progress on other fronts. Enzo put us in touch with a window salesperson he likes to work with, and he’s working on putting together a bid based on the specifications in the plans. And Julie has been working with Lesley, our designer, to hash out some of the decisions we need to make early on with respect to the interior of the house. They’ve already picked out toilets, tubs, and tile for the upstairs bathrooms—the toilets are actually sitting in our storage unit as I write this—and have settled on a color for the kitchen cabinets: white.

It’s good to feel like we’re taking positive steps forward.

Gallery: Week 4: Digging

Going into the third week of the the remodel, it seemed like the most dramatic aspects of demolition were complete: Julia’s room was gone except for the floor; the kitchen had been removed except for one short piece of wall that is theoretically staying after all is said and done; and the garage felt like a distant memory, as all the walls had been knocked down except for the tiny corner where the electrical panel hung.

It hadn’t really occurred to me that there was a lot left to do with the garage (and also the patio): in order to support the new living areas that would be constructed above them—including a couple second-floor bedrooms—significant new sections of foundation would have to be laid. That meant the garage floor would have to go; that’s where much of the work was focused in week three. The floor and patio were broken up by Tuesday and removed by Thursday. When we went by at the end of the week, the concrete base of the garage walls had been cleared away, as well.

That wasn’t all that happened, of course. The ongoing task of attic cleanup continued, producing piles of insulation, flooring, and various pieces of boxes that we’d left behind. And work started on the fireplace, including removal of most of the chimney: we’re planning to make use of the bricks to piece together trim for new sections of exterior wall, in the hope of saving a little bit of money and ensuring a good match with the existing brickwork.

If you look carefully, you can see the last scraps of kitchen wallpaper and floor, still tenaciously hanging on in the face of all this destruction. Time will tell how long they’ll hold out.

Gallery: Week 3: Goodbye, Garage

Credits: Julia Neva Wong contributed many of these photos.

After the interior work done in week 1 of our remodel, Enzo and his team got serious in week 2, as you can see in our latest set of photos. Chekhov’s excavator, which sat menacingly in our driveway at the end of the previous week, was put to extensive use in week 2.

Julie and Julia visited the site during the week as work was progressing, and by the time the whole family made the trip on Sunday, little was left standing of the portions of the house that are scheduled to be removed: a bit of the front kitchen window, which will become part of the garage wall; the back corner of the garage, which was only spared to preserve access to power, as that’s where our electrical panel is situated; and the roof, pretty much all of which has to go eventually.

Julia’s room is completely gone except for the hardwood floor, and there’s a crack in the wall of our master bedroom where it appears that the machinery was a bit too voracious. Likewise, the planter of boxwoods under the kitchen windows has been removed, as have the garage and the painted brick corral where we stored the garbage cans out of sight from the street. They’ve even started tearing up the patio to clear the way to put down the foundation for the new sections of the house. I suspect the large rose bush in front of the house, which we bought for Julie for Mother’s Day a number of years ago, but only really came into its own last year, is not long for this world.

Having lived in this house for nearly two decades, it’s a pretty remarkable sight.

There are glimmers of hope, however. On the floor near where Julia’s closet and the hall closet once stood, the crew has marked off where the mud room walls will eventually sit. It’s not much, but it’s one of the few signs we have thus far that the project will change to a more constructive mode sometime soon.

To lighten the mood a bit, we’ve included a cat picture or two and some photos of the kids playing in the pool. Toward the end, there are a few pictures of Joe and Julie bravely taking a late-night swim. The pool light casts a beautiful glow in and around the water, but I suspect it was a bit chilly.

Gallery: Week 2: Demolition!

Credits: Julia Neva Wong took many of these photos.

We’ve been in our rental home for nearly a month at this point, so I thought we might share a gallery of pictures showing what it looks like filled with all of our stuff.

In fairness, most of these pictures were taken a week ago, and we’re slightly more unpacked now than we were then. A few things remain unchanged, however: Julia and Joe’s rooms are still furthest along; the garage is stuffed to the gills; and the office continues look as though a bomb went off. If it weren’t for virtual backgrounds in Zoom, I’d be too embarrassed to attend work meetings.

We’re hoping we have another couple weeks before the rainy season starts to make room in the garage for the kids’ bikes and scooters, which are currently stashed in the side yard.

Gallery: Settling In

You might think, knowing that we’ve been planning this remodel in one form or another for about three years, that we would be fully prepared for the emotional impact of starting construction, but it turns out that it’s easy to talk about knocking down walls and replacing rooms in the abstract as you fantasize about the amazing new edifice you’re going to construct. It’s much harder to see the nursery you carefully painted and decorated for your unborn daughter—who is now just a couple years from heading off to college—gutted. Of course, this is exactly what we signed up for, and Julie has been very good about reminding me that things will feel better once the crew is doing something constructive rather than things that are purely destructive, but it’s still something of a gut punch.

Here are some pictures from the first couple days of interior demolition work, and an additional set covering the entire first week of the project.

The construction crew made amazing progress in the first couple days of work, largely stripping the garage, kitchen, and Julia’s bedroom. By the time we came back at the end of the week, the interior of the house was largely unrecognizable, as most of the distinguishing features of those spaces—including the boundaries separating rooms and hallways—had been removed.

And, at the end of the week, a small excavator was parked in our front yard, a harbinger of things to come.

The demolition process revealed some interesting facets that we’d never really examined in our time in the house, like the older wallpaper hidden behind the cabinets in the kitchen and the surprisingly well-preserved hardwood floors under the carpet in Julia’s room; maybe we should have refinished that surface at the same time we removed the carpeting in the hallway. There was a surprising amount of symmetry and intentionality in the layout of the hallways and doors that was more apparent when everything was stripped bare than it had been when the house was filled with the artifacts of everyday living. I hope we can bring some of that thoughtfulness and care to the new configuration.

It also dredged up emotions and memories, reminding me of simple, physical things like the chair rail we put up in Julia’s room in the last few weeks before she was born; it remains one of my favorite things that we’ve done to the house. Other memories bubbled up to the surface of my consciousness as well: lying in bed, listening to the sound of the kids’ feet as they crept (or stampeded) down the narrow hallway to our room; chasing them around the winding, looping path through the kitchen, dining room, and front hallway, confident that they’d never catch on to the fact that I could double back and catch them unawares going the other direction; and countless meals in the kitchen, from Julia’s first, thin spoonfuls of oat cereal mixed with breast milk to family dinners with all five of us crowded around the kitchen table, with thousands of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches packed into lunchboxes along the way.

Sometimes these thoughts keep me up at night, as I reflect on the fact that not only will I never hear the sound of Julia’s door creaking open, followed by hushed whispers as little feet tiptoe down the hall, but no one else will have that experience, either. That door and that hall are gone. Julie rightly and kindly reminds me that this is Not My Problem: we get to keep our memories and our joy, and the next family to come along—after we are beyond caring—will make their own memories and invest their emotions in the house as they know it, not in what it once was.

Also: people move (we moved when I was William’s age, and I solemnly swore to buy back our old house when I was grown); homes are lost to fires, floods, and financial ruin. This was our choice. Our situation is far from tragic and anything but unique.

I know all of that. And still, it’s hard.

Galleries: Days 1 & 2, Week 1

Credits: Julia Neva Wong took many of these photos.

As part of the process of renovating our house, we had to find a new place to live—the changes we are making are much too dramatic to allow us to stay at home during construction. We initially explored a few different options, including buying an RV to live in for the duration of the project and selling it when we were ready to move back into the house. I have some friends who made that work and lived to tell the tale, but it’s worth noting that they have just two children, both of whom were under the age of twelve at the time. It’s not at all clear how many of us would survive a year in an RV with two teenagers and a first grader.

So, we elected to pursue a more conventional strategy and began looking at apartments, townhomes, and houses to rent. We started out with a couple fairly strict requirements: enough space for Julia to have her own room and a Felix-friendly neighborhood not too close to very busy streets. The fact that we’re still, as I write, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic added some additional wrinkles: we needed enough space for each of the kids to do distance learning, and I needed a space in which I could work from home and participate in meetings without completely disrupting the kids’ classes.

Despite the pandemic, the rental market in the Bay Area remains somewhat absurd. It became clear very quickly that it was going to be difficult for us to stay within the housing budget we’d set up. And we learned from a few experiences early on that we couldn’t afford to hesitate when we saw a unit we liked: almost everything was snapped up within a day or two of appearing on the market.

One place we could afford was a cute little house just a block away from home, on Ellen Avenue. It was a cute little home of about the same vintage as our own, and seems likely to have been built by the same builder: it shared some of the design flourishes that we’ve grown accustomed to over the years, especially in the kitchen. It was a bit on the small side—getting all of our stuff in likely would have been a challenge—but the price was right. The problem was that the owner was looking to begin a remodel herself and was only looking for a tenant to stay six to eight months, or long enough for her to get her building permit. Our project is scheduled to take eight to ten months, assuming nothing goes wrong, so ultimately there wasn’t a way to make it work, as nice as it wouldd have been to be a five-minute walk away from home.

After that option fell through, we—well, mostly Julie—kept looking, checking the online listings daily and making appointments to see anything that looked promising. Finally, she came across a very nice looking house a near downtown Campbell that seemed to check all the boxes: bedrooms for Julia and Joe; a separate office; and a large, two-car garage to help store all the stuff we’d be pulling out of our garage, workbench area, and attic. As an added bonus, it came with a feature that I had never really considered: a swimming pool. Julie and Joe went to see it after school one afternoon and quickly came to the conclusion that it was likely our best option, despite the fact that it was at the upper end of our price range. There were a few other places still on the table, but none of them had the same appeal. With that in mind, despite the fact that I’d never actually seen the house in person, we put in an application, fearful of losing our chance if we waited.

Even moving as quickly as we did, there were other applications in play, but we were lucky enough to to be selected. The house is owned by a very nice family with two older kids—one just out of college, and one in high school; they were moving to a larger home in Almaden Valley because the wife’s parents were moving in with them. We started the lease a couple weeks before our planned moving date of September 8, which in turn was a couple weeks before the tentative start of construction on September 21. The hope was that this would give us plenty of time to empty out our house before the construction crews started knocking down walls, and the plan mostly came together, a few late nights notwithstanding.

The rental itself has been wonderful. Julia and Joe have plenty of space to deal with school comfortably, and we’ve more or less dedicated the living room to William’s schoolwork and toys. The office is more than adequate for my needs—in truth, it’s probably nicer than the office will be in our house when it’s finished—and after school, when William wants to play Minecraft with his friends, I move over to Joe’s room, as he usually doesn’t have too much in the way of homework. The boys have been making good use of the pool, jumping in a few afternoons each week, and there’s a lovely park about half a block down the street with a playground for William and plenty of open space where Joe and I can play catch.

The only minor downside is that the house doesn’t have air conditioning. We thought we might have timed things such that we would miss the hottest part of the year by moving when we did, but the weather has not cooperated: temperatures have reached the middle or high 90s as often as not the last couple weeks. It’s been a little uncomfortable during the day when I’m cooped up in the office in meetings and my computer is continuously generating heat, but on the other hand, the hot days have given us more opportunities to use the pool before the rainy season starts.

To convey a sense of what the house looked like before we filled it with all of our stuff, we’ve posted a few pictures taken in the days immediately after our lease started. It’s a bit messier now, but we’re settled in and as comfortable as we can reasonably expect to be as we face what looks to be an interesting year ahead.

Gallery: Rental