Last week was a little more exciting than previous weeks for one simple reason: we now have walls in the new sections of the house. They’re not complete, of couse, and there are gaping holes in the old parts of the structure, but it’s new and novel to be able to walk around in what will become our laundry room and great room and get an actual sense of place and scale.

As you can see in this week’s gallery, the construction crew made substantial progress even between Wednesday afternoon, when Julie and Julia visited the site, and the weekend, when I accompanied them to check things out. After hearing their excited reports mid-week, I had three long days to anticipate seeing where things stood, and the revelation did not disappoint.

Because of Thanksgiving, this has been a short week, so it will be interesting to see how much has changed when we drop by over the weekend. It seems unlikely that there will be dramatic changes on the scale we saw last week, but it still feels exhilirating to see things moving ahead in such a tangible way.

Gallery: Week 9: Walls

Credits: Julia Neva Wong contributed many of these photos.

As you can see in this week’s gallery, there wasn’t as much obvious progress in week eight as in previous weeks. The most visible changes were the installation of additional subfloor in the new sections of the house and further demolition in the living room and in our master bedroom. Notably, the last section of the old garage wall, which had been left standing because it was where our main electrical panel was mounted, was finally removed and left lying face-down in the grass.

It looks as though they’re in the initial phases of starting work on the second floor. Last week, they took out the ceiling in the living room. This week, they cut through the ceiling joists—adding additional temporary supports in the process—and marked out areas on the floor where new beams are to be installed, as you can see in this photo.

They also removed the ceiling from the short hallway in our master bedroom, presumably to allow them to add support for Julia’s bedroom, which will sit over our master bath. We’re still a little down about losing the skylight in that room, a change made even more bittersweet by the extraordinary light we have in the bathroom in the rental house.

We made some long-delayed infrastructure decisions over the last week; unfortunately, they were largely the kind that results in us spending more money. We elected to go forward with a water softener in view of the staggering hardness of our water, and we decided to add on a recirculation line to keep hot water available on-demand at the taps throughout the house. I had long been frustrated by the length of time it took to get hot water in some sections of the house—minutes in the case of the front bathroom—and in my fuzzy, vague memories of childhood didn’t remember that being the case in our house growing up. That disconnect motivated me to press for the recirculation line, but I’ve since been informed that my memories on this front might be somewhat rose-tinted. C’est la vie.

We also elected to add spray foam insulation under the floors of both the old and new sections of the house, a particularly labor-intensive procedure that requires the installer to lie on his or her back and direct the insulation up, between the floor joists. The idea is that this will make the house envelope more airtight, reducing heating and cooling expenses in the long term. However, I expect the effectiveness of this approach will be partially compromised by the fact that we’re not adding new insulation to the existing walls. Neverthless, we felt that this was the sort of thing that’s easiest to do now, when the house is open to the environmet anyway, so we decided to bite the bullet and have it taken care of.

We plan to meet with the architect and contractor this week to resolve the shear wall question once and for all. To move it, we’ll have to go back to the city to have the changes to the structural plans approved, but Enzo tells us it won’t impact the project schedule: at this stage, there are plenty of other problems to tackle.

Gallery: Week 8: Floors and More

There was a fair bit of exciting progress in week 7 of our remodel, and the house is finally starting to look a little bit like something that could someday, maybe turn into a structure of some kind rather than an abandoned quarry.

The fun part is that the crew has begun to put in plumbing and gas lines for the new sections of the house and to install the subfloor over the floor joists where no further work is required. They’re not quite ready to finish that off yet, as we’re still hashing out whether we want a recirculation line to keep hot water available at the taps throughout the house, but it’s getting close to a point where we’ll be able to walk around the first floor of the new sections and get a feel for what things will be like when the walls go up.

They’ve also started patching up the areas of the old floor where there were gaps, such as beneath the old furnace closet, and they cut back further portions of the roof and existing walls to clear out areas where they’ll be doing work. The front kitchen window, which held out for so long, is finally gone, as are the attic stairs I’d been climbing to take overhead pictures.

In a move that caught us a little off guard, they also removed the ceiling in the living room. Because the outlines of that room aren’t changing for this project, I wouldn’t have guessed that anything that drastic was going to be necessary, but we’re assuming they didn’t do it for fun. When we visited last Sunday, the room was filled with garbage bags stuffed with the loose insulation from the attic, all of which has to be cleared out before they can begin working in earnest on the second floor.

When we started the project, we asked Enzo if it would be problematic to be in the middle of construction during the rainy season, and he assured us that it wouldn’t pose a problem. Even with those assurances in mind, it was still a bit disconcerting knowing that the house—including the hardwood floor in the living room and the carpet in the master bedroom—was open to the elements when the first rain of the season arrived last week. As you can see in the photos, things were good and damp when we visited, and our poor dryer, which we’d hoped to save, was standing forlornly in the back yard.

We’re still hashing out questions regarding our fireplace and the location of the shear wall required to support the second story in the event of an earthquake, but I think we’re approaching a resolution quickly. As I hinted earlier, we’re also starting to nail down decisions such as the style, size, and location of our water heater and whether we’ll want a water softener. We’ve never had a water softener before: the house didn’t have one when we moved in, and I prefer the taste of hard water anyway. But our supply, which comes from groundwater, is very hard. Hard enough, in fact, that it could meaningfully reduce the lifespan of equipment like the expensive water heater we’re going to install. With that in mind, although a water softener isn’t an expense we’d planned for, it seems like it would probably be a good investment, even if it means hauling big bags of salt around for the rest of our lives.

Gallery: Week 7: Outdoor Plumbing

Week 6 of the remodel was a big one: Enzo and his team started laying the actual foundation for the new sections of the house. Hence, the title for this post and the accompanying photo gallery, which I’ve been itching to use for weeks.

As you look through the pictures in this set, you can see the progress the team made from Tuesday through Saturday. On Tuesday, the rough concrete foundation was in place, but it remained encased in the wooden molds into which it had been poured. By Saturday, the molds had been removed, the concrete had been topped with a sill plate to which the frame will be anchored, and floor joists were in place for most of the new great room. The sole unfinished area was the back corner of the old garage, where the old garage wall was still standing: they’re still using our original electrical box, despite the fact that the temporary power pole has been in place for a several weeks now.

Unfortunately, as hinted at last week, this stage of construction led to the loss of the rose bush near the kitchen window, as well as the Nile Iris that had been a fixture in our yard since the day we moved in. I’m trying very hard not to think about the amount of landscaping work we’re going to have to do to fix things up when construction is complete.

As of this writing, we’re still trying to work out a solution to the problem with our fireplace I mentioned last week. The architect had hoped that perhaps there was enough shear wall support in our existing master bedroom walls to make further work unnecessary; she even asked us to dig up the plans from that remodel, which the previous owners had graciously left us. Unfortunately, that avenue did not pan out, which leaves us to decide whether we want to relocate the sheer wall, which involves additional construction (and perhaps some paperwork and back-and-forth with the building department), or have the fire box inside the living room. We’ll probably have to make a call in the coming week.

Gallery: Week 6: Foundations

A bit behind schedule, we have another set of pictures to share, this one covering week five of our remodel.

This week, having previously cleared away the old garage and patio and dug out space for the new foundation and additional footings required to support the second floor of the house, the team set up wood frames—I’m sure there’s a better word for these—to shape and form the foundation itself. Looking at these pictures, we’re finally starting to get a sense for how the first floor of the house will come together. We can see where the dining area and kitchen will be. And, seeing the size of the garage, we’re beginning to reassess our original plan to put the charger for my car inside the structure.

Luckily, we managed to get good photo of the rose bush which sat outside our kitchen. We bought it as a Mother’s Day gift for Julie a while back, and it struggled for a long time. The last two years, however, it really took off, producing a steady stream of blooms all summer long and well into the fall. I took a picture because I was happy to see it had survived the construction work thus far, and I had a flash of hope that it might make it to the end of the project. You can probably guess how this story ends; it‘s a good thing I got the picture when I did.

Gallery: Week 5: Groundwork