Incremental progress was the name of the game in week 26 of the remodel. Work continued on the drywall, with the downstairs areas that hadn’t been tackled last week mostly taken care of, and the application of drywall tape and paste to fill in and smooth out the seams. There are still a few areas that need work—mostly sections of old drywall that were damaged or removed during construction—but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for this phase of the project.

One thing we noticed when we visited is that there’s a fair amount of noise transmission between Julia’s room upstairs and our bathroom downstairs. In fairness, the bathroom ceiling was wide open, as that’s one of the sections that hasn’t been patched up yet, but it’s something we’ll want to keep an eye on: providing Julia with a quiet retreat where she can focus is one of the main goals of the project. Hopefully finishing up the drywall and installing carpet upstairs will help quiet things down.

Gallery: Week 26: More Drywall

As shown in the bonus photos and bonus-video we posted earlier this week, week 25 of the project brought a significant change: the installation of drywall throughout the second floor and in major sections of the first floor. The drywall radically changes the feel of the house, as individual rooms are now closed off from one another, whereas before you could see from one end of the house to the other by looking through the wall joists.

The installation of the drywall also served to highlight the look of the recessed lighting in all of the new construction. I like the clean, modern feeling the new lights provide, but Julie isn’t a fan. We’ll continue to have lamps in some of the public spaces to add visual interest and atmosphere, but it will be nice to be able to turn the built-in lights up when the situation calls for a bright, evenly lit space.

While the drywall work was underway, we spent some time working with our designer, Lesley, to pick out paint colors for the public areas of the house. For the living room, stairwell, hallway, and great room, we’re going with a relatively neutral color called—and I am not making this up—Mawmaw’s Pearls. By choosing a single color for these areas, we’re hoping to provide a sense of continuity as you move throughout the house, and to let the brighter accent colors we’ve selected stand out.

For the kitchen cabinets, we’ve chosen two different colors. The upper and lower cabinets along the wall will be Swiss Coffee, and the island will be Sea Pine, which will complement the tile we’ve selected for the backsplash. We contemplated doing all the lower cabinets in Sea Pine, but ultimately thought that might be too much.

The laundry room will be yellow, calling back to our old living room color, with gray cabinets, and the upstairs bathrooms will reuse the Mawmaw’s Pearls color from the hallway, with brightly colored tile in the tub and shower areas to liven things up.

The kids are choosing the colors for their own rooms. Julia is going with a green named Goddess of Dawn, and William has asked for a “Star Wars room”, so he’ll be getting a shade of blue that will go well with Star-Wars-themed decor. Joe hasn’t decided what he wants to do yet: one possibility is for us try to recreate the bright colors he had in his old room, but we’d like to give him the opportunity to shake things up or shift them around if he’d like.

We also still have to figure out what we’re going to do in the master bedroom. Now that our old green carpet is gone, Julie is agitating to move in a different direction, but we need to sit down to hash that out. That should be an interesting conversation.

Gallery: Week 25: Drywall

In addition to the photos in our last update, the professional photographer hired by our architect also shot video of the interior of the house. The footage is pretty rough in the form in which it’s presented here: it’s a set of raw takes that I imagine Lakshmi will stitch together into a coherent whole for her web site. But it’s a very different perspective on the project, and we thought it might provide a better sense for the spatial relationships among the rooms than the discrete photographs we’ve been taking.

Gallery: Week 25 Bonus #2: Drone Video

We haven’t yet found time to post our photos from week 25—the vagaries of real life got in the way of our plans this week—but here is an interesting set of pictures taken by a professional photographer hired by our architect for use in her online portfolio. Although many of the shots he took aren’t dissimilar to the ones we’ve been posting each week, some of the angles he selected would be challenging for us to replicate, to say the least.

This set also marks the first appearance of new drywall in the house, which makes the interior feel dramatically different. We’ll have more on that front in the full update for last week’s work.

Gallery: Week 25 Bonus: Professional Photos

It was a busy week at home, as Enzo’s team has been working quickly to wrap up the current phase of the project and move on to the next. You can see their progress in this week’s gallery.

The most obvious change, by far, since last weekend is the installation of insulation throughout the house. We’re installing spray foam insulation in the attic and exterior walls in order to provide a solid envelope around the house and improve the efficiency of the heating and air conditioning systems, and we’re putting in fiberglass batts under the floors and between the interior rooms to provide a bit of much-needed soundproofing.

There’s still a long way to go on this front, but the great room, office, and laundry room seem to be more or less finished. The living room is about half-done, and it’s probably just as well: we are still holding out hope that Enzo will be able to move our old mail slot from its current location inside the new garage to the living room wall, and the spray foam would make that more or less an impossibility were it already completed.

The electrical work and low-voltage wiring is more or less finished for now; the electrician will need to come back during the trim phase of the project to install switches and outlets. Between now and then, my project is to figure out where we’ll want to install “smart” switches that we can control with timers and our phones. As you might imagine, I’m vastly more excited about this aspect of the project than I really should be, and certainly more so than anyone else in the family.

Interestingly, although the crew put in smurf tube to facilitate future wiring changes, they didn’t actually run the network wiring through the tube: instead, the network cables are run alongside the smurf tube or on the next wall joist over. We’re not sure why they took this approach and will ask about it the next time we meet with the electrician, but you can clearly see it in some of the close-up photographs of the wiring.

As it happens, despite the fact that we put in more than fifteen network connections, we missed a spot where one might have been useful for a security camera: right outside the patio door. As the spray foam is already complete in that area, it’s probably too late to add one now. If we want a camera there, we’ll have to look at wireless, battery-operated options.

Another question we’re wrestling with is what to do with some of the large, blank walls we’ll have when the project is complete. In particular, there’s a very long surface in the great room where the second floor projects into the space, and there’s a tall area over the stairwell landing that borders the garage and Joe’s room. We’re casting about for design ideas—including just leaving them open—but haven’t hit upon anything compelling yet. We are wide open to suggestions.

One problem we actually seem to have solved is our need to acquire a new dryer. You may recall that we left our old dryer in the living room, thinking, incorrectly, that not much work would be required there, and that it would be safe for the duration of the project. Unfortunately, work did need to be done in the living room, and at some point during demolition, the dryer was moved to back yard, where it sits to this day, having endured five months of sun, wind, rain, and cold. We’re fairly certain that it’s dead.

Luckily, Julie has been a very active participant (and moderator) of our local Buy Nothing group. Last week, someone offered up a relatively new dryer to the group, as they were replacing their broken washer with a different model and wanted their dryer to match. A number of people expressed interest, but Julie was selected as the lucky winner by the owner, so we zipped over Friday evening to pick it up. It has a bit of a high bar to live up to, considering that our old unit lasted eighteen years for us and wasn’t new when we bought the house, but I’m happy to be able to cross “Buy Dryer” off of our to-do list.

According to Enzo, there’s a chance that they might have the sheetrock up throughout the house by the end of next week. That would be a dramatic change: things will undoubtedly feel very different with the interior walls closed up. And it would signify progression to a new phase of the project, triggering payment for the current stage, so Enzo is certainly motivated to get it done.

That said, it’s by no means a sure thing that we’ll actually hit that milestone; it’s hard to predict precisely where things will land in a project of this scope. But, just in case, Julie wanted to take this opportunity to leave some messages inside the walls in the hope that some future resident might find them decades from now during their own remodel. To that end, we loaded the kids into the car Sunday afternoon and took them over to the house with a box of Sharpies to leave our mark on the structure.

Gallery: Week 24: Insulation

We have just a brief photo update regarding the remodel this week—there are only so many pictures you can take of wires, after all—but nevertheless, there are still a few highlights.

Just to get it out of the way up front, work continued on wiring in week 23 of the project. At this point, most of the actual electrical wiring seems to be done, and the team has mostly moved on to low voltage work. The speaker wire is in place in the living room, and they’ve begun installing the boxes and smurf tube for the network wiring. The smurf tube—so named because it used to be blue, like a Smurf—is a flexible, non-conductive conduit that will theoretically allow us to replace the wiring should it become damaged or outdated. The wiring we’re having installed is Cat 6a, so it shouldn’t be obsolete for a while, but it will be nice to have the option to upgrade it sometime down the road.

Believe it or not, a few things happened that aren’t related to wiring. Two of the big ones are framing for the pocket doors going into the laundry room and the installation (finally) of the picture window in the upstairs hallway.

The window feels even bigger now that it’s been installed than it did when it was just a hole in the wall. It faces west towards the street, so it will bring in a lot of sun (and heat) in the afternoons, and after dark, it will provide a beautiful view into the hallway, including the boys’ bathroom. As such, we’re definitely going to be in the market for some remote-controlled shades to provide a modicum of privacy for our not-especially-bashful-about nudity sons. The good news is that the window is out of reach from the stairwell, giving it a bit of protection from grubby fingers, so with luck, we won’t have to wash it too often.

With the installation of this window, all the windows are installed except for the one over the kitchen sink. We’re not entirely sure why that one is missing in action, but we’re hoping to find out soon.

In other news, we’re continuing to work through the cabinet designs, and we have a reasonably solid idea of what we’re looking for everywhere except in Julia’s bathroom. None of the cabinets have actually been built yet, so we don’t have any photos, but I thought I’d share some of the designs here.

In the kitchen, we’re going with custom cabinets, hoping to make the best use of the available area, as counter and storage space are always at a premium.

We expect the laundry room to do a lot of work in the new house, taking over three different functions from the old garage:

• Space for the washer/dryer, along with storage for laundry and cleaning supplies.
• A launch pad with cubbies and hooks for shoes, coats, and school supplies.
• Pantry storage, though it’s unlikely it will fully replace the comically deep pantry shelves we had before.

We’ve come up with a layout that we think will serve these needs reasonably well using stock cabinets, as long as we can find room in the garage for additional pantry storage (our spotty history with mouse infestations notwithstanding).

Finally, the layout is the boys’ bathroom is aggressively simple in its approach. We gave some thought to having cabinet towers on one or both sides of the counter, but ultimately decided against that approach in order to preserve as much flexibility as possible with respect to how we can use the space: we’re still trying to nail down where we’re going to put towel racks, for example.

Gallery: Week 23: Windows and Doors (And Also Wiring)