There’s not too much to report this week: the construction crew had the week off, so no further progress was made relative to where things stood last weekend. Even though we don’t have any pictures of new work to share, we had received some requests for photos that show what the project looks like from the street, so this seemed like as good a week as any to take some. We took a few snapshots when we visited the site—yes, we made a special trip to go see the house even though we knew nothing had changed—and are posting them as this week’s update. We’re hoping for more substantial progress in a week’s time.

Gallery: Week 15: Street Views

The developments in week 14 of our remodel were less dramatic than in week 13. Not only was it a short week due to Christmas, but it’s tough to compete with being able to walk around upstairs for the first time.

Nevertheless, there were some real changes this week. Most notably, the team began installing a roof and actual walls on the north side of the second floor, including Julia’s bedroom, her bathroom, and the playroom. Even though there’s still a long way to go, the addition of these components provides in a much stronger sense of what it will be like to inhabit the space.

One additional thing we noticed is that they’d put in soffit vents along with the roof. This was a bit of surprise, because we’re planning to have an unventilated attic in which spray foam insulation will be applied directly to the underside of the roofing panels. The benefit of this approach is greater energy efficiency, albeit at a somewhat higher cost, since the installation of the spray foam is more technically complex than putting in ordinary fiberglass insulation. It’s somewhat uncommon in our area, so our first instinct was that the contractor had simply forgotten about it. When we asked, however, he assured us that he was merely preserving the option of taking a more standard approach when the time comes, and that the vents can be covered if we stick to the plans.

As part of this week’s work, the crew also removed our old porch light, which had remained untouched through the first three months of the project. I’m not altogether sure whether its removal was an integral part of the work they did on the roof or just something that happened incidentally, but although it was bound to happen sooner or later, it was still a tiny bit sad.

Gallery: Week 14: Walls Closing In

As you can see in the pictures, week 13 of the remodel marked a pretty momentous occasion: for the first time, all of us were able to make our way up to the second floor and walk around. Admittedly, we had to climb up an extension ladder to get there—a process some of us were not especially excited about—but it was a real treat to be able to explore the space upstairs and get a tangible sense of what it will be like when the project is complete.

One thing we noticed as we looked around is that the rooms felt smaller than we imagined they would. Counterintuitively, we think this feeling will probably dissipate somewhat as the walls are built up and the rooms are enclosed: it’s hard to get an accurate feeling for the scale of a space when it’s open to the horizon on all sides.

The kids had a great time wandering around, seeing how the rooms fit together; the absence of solid walls provided a unique perspective that won’t be available to us once the project is complete. We kicked around a variety of fanciful ideas, like building a secret door to connect Joe and William’s rooms via their closets, that obviously won’t come to pass, but were fun to contemplate anyway.

Gallery: Week 13: Upstairs

Credits: Julia Neva Wong contributed some of these photos.

We’re still catching up, so here’s another brief update, this one with photos from the twelfth week of our remodel.

As I mentioned in the week 11 post, work on the second floor of the house left the first floor largely open to the elements. Seeing as it’s December in California, the predictable happened in week 12: it rained. This left the house in bit of a state. The living room was a muddy mess, and the hall carpet in our master bedroom was completely sodden: we left squishy footprints in our path when we walked through the hall to see what had changed in the bathroom. By the time we returned the next week, that section of carpet had been removed entirely. It’s becoming very clear that we’re going to be replacing big chunks of flooring materials even in rooms we weren’t expecting to be significantly impacted by construction.

Mess aside, the most exciting change in week 12 was the addition of a bit of subfloor upstairs, so you could climb up a ladder and walk around a bit if you were feeling daring. Julie was the only one brave enough to do so this week, but that would change in the weeks that followed.

Somewhat surprisingly, the crew added what appear to be placeholders for the washer and dryer connections in the laundry room. They’re not actually connected to anything at this point, but we didn’t expect to see anything that looked that finished at this stage of the project.

Gallery: Week 12: Rain

We’re a couple weeks behind at the moment, so we’ll keep our comments on week 11 of our remodel brief. This week seems to have been less focused on new construction and more focused on clearing the way for the next phase of the project.

In particular, the crew spent much of the week removing portions of the existing roof where the second floor will sit. This effort actually went further than we naively thought it would: by the end of the week, the entire living room was open to the sky. This was necessary becuase we’re converting that section of roof from a hip roof to a gable roof. The conversion seems to involve a pretty substantial amount of work; our contractor even jokingly (I think) asked if we were sure about making this change when we met with him mid-week to talk about our options with respect to the fireplace.

We’ll cover the ins and outs of the fireplace decision in the next post, as it took us nearly week to figure out what we wanted to do. But the good news is that it’s finally behind us.

Gallery: Week 11: Open Air

Credits: Julia Neva Wong contributed some of these photos.

The remodel has been proceeding apace as winter approaches: we’ve been lucky in that there haven’t been too many rainy days this far, so there have been few interruptions. In week ten, which was shortened a bit by the Thanksgiving holiday, the biggest change was the installation of beams and other structural supports for the second floor. For example, a massive beam was placed across the center of the living room ceiling where the ceiling joists had been cut; it looks as though this will be the support for the front wall of the upstairs playroom.

One of the more interesting aspects of the new construction (to me, at least) is the means through which two beams which meet at a 90º angle are fastened to one another, as shown in this photo. The solution to this challenge is a metal bracket, called a beam hanger, and a boatload of nails. As is likely evident if you’ve been reading these posts, I don’t know anything about building a house, but I can appreciate the simplicity of a brute-force solution.

Gallery: Week 10: Support

Credits: Julia Neva Wong contributed some of these photos.

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