Half-Strapped

Well, we have gotten pitifully little done since the last post, mostly because we've been doing fun things. We've had family in town, and gone to see family, and will have family in town again this weekend. Which is very, very nice, actually. But it does push back timelines for getting stuff done on the ol' rat hole.

We did manage to get the beam halfway strapped down, though. We need to do surgical demolition to strap down the other side, as we're not ready to take out the ceiling in the den yet. It's one of the few rooms we actually live in.

Anyway, in these photos you can see us putting the support for the north end of the beam in. About where my husband's rear end appears is where the fireplace will be, as well as a bump-out (which will be obscured by the fireplace) for the fridge so that it doesn't stick out so far into the kitchen.

In this picture you can see where we're going to move the opening from the dining room into the den. Next we'll have to open up the wall to the north end of the beam, and we'll be almost finished with the framing of the room. We have to move the kitchen door, put in the ceiling joists and scissor truss, and then we can start running electrical wiring. Hooray!

It's Beam Fun

As promised, here are photos of the beginning of the second beam installation. Hopefully we'll get some time to attach it this weekend, but we're not holding our breaths, as hanging out with family not often seen definitely takes precedence. But we'll do our best.

Now that you've seen the new floor plans, these next photos will hopefully be as exciting to you as they are to us, since they're the first steps in making our sweet little rat hole a fun, usable house with good space.

In this picture, you can see that we're putting up the braces to support our roof while we do work on the beam. This is the third time we've had to support our roof while working on the house, for those of you counting. I doubt it will be the last.

In this picture, we've removed the roof supports, the old beam, and some of the old framing on the left (we left the paneling in the other room intact, seeing as how that's one of the few rooms we actually live in).

And now here we are with the new framing taking place. You can see the new wood that marks the edge of the closet and where the new south wall of the den/living room will be. We actually got down to the subfloor in the excavation of the old framing in that section, and it looks like the original 1935 wood floor. It's sorta neat. It'll be interesting to see what it actually looks like when we tear up everything above it.

And finally, we have the beam.

It's not attached to anything yet, as I've mentioned before, but it's up there, ready to be installed. It was MUCH easier than the previous beam! Anyway, you can see where the two ends of the beam are. One end rests on the new closet space, and the other is where we'll put the other post (and eventually the fireplace). The wall that's visible underneath the beam will all be taken away and provide a nice, wide pass-through between the den and the dining room.

I think this weekend, between family events, we might go look at antique front doors, which really, really excites me. Funny, I've ALWAYS hated shopping, but I sure do love shopping for stuff to use in or on my house. Go figure.

Plans Have Changed

So, ever since we moved in and realized that the side door was now the front door, we've been trying to figure out where the heck to put the washer and dryer. We don't want it in the entry portion of the house, but where else to put it? We've had a few ideas, but none of them really felt right.

Well, the 4th of July was our Independence Day from packed front hallway nonsense. We took the day and redid our floor plans.

The original plans were posted on May 17, 2006 (over a whole year ago).

Here's the new phase 1 plan (no additions necessary):

What we've done is turned the hallway into closet space. This necessitates us pushing into our den space a bit, but we have plenty of room to do so with the installation of our new beam. We realized that once we did that, we could move the beam far enough to the north (right, as you look at the drawing) that the fireplace would be visible from both rooms, which would add a nice atmosphere and make the two rooms feel more connected. Plus then we'd have dedicated coat closet space in the entryway, which would become just an entryway and not a part-time laundry room. Hooray! Turning the hallway into utility/closet space also increases our storage, which is something severely lacking in the house. We also took string line and measure out how far we'd want to bump out the bathrooms into the guest bedroom. We think it'll still leave plenty of room in the guest room if we do so, and it'd be really, really nice to expand that hall bath (not to mention put a bathtub in the master bathroom). We also made a bump-out for the fridge so that its door doesn't stick out in front of the cabinets and gives us a bit more room to walk through, and we switched the oven to be away from the wall, which should also work out.

Then, of course, you have phase two of the building plans.

This is what our actual goal is. This floor plan allows us to have good closet space in all the rooms, have a nice great room that's living/dining/den area, and a good-sized spare office/guest room. We think that this plan works best, and we're really excited about the whole thing. Now we just have to find the money to do those additions...

In the meantime, we worked on putting in the second beam this weekend, which I'll post pictures of later this week. We want to get the beam in, and we're going to replace the eastern window in the nook so we can re-side that side of the house before winter. We've been researching insulation, electrical stuff, etc., but all that pales in comparison to the true prize: shopping for a front door. Mwa ha- I'm really looking forward to finding the perfect front door for the little rat hole, and since we have to redo the entry way this fall anyway because of the rot, there's no time like the present.

Birds = Blocked

We had beautiful weather again this weekend, which made it a bit tough to work on the house instead of play. We compromised by doing a little bit more work on our new hedge strip. Since that strip of land gets more sun than anywhere else on our entire lot, it's the ideal place to grow vegetables and other edibles, and so we went out to the nursery and got a whole bunch of stuff. We just put different types of groundcover at the beginning of the driveway (I can't tell you exactly what because I'm not very knowledgeable about plants), such as corsican mint, cottoneaster, rosemary, something with purple flowers, and some sort of cute moss. Throughout the driveway we put more rosemary, corsican mint, orange mint, chocolate mint, a few different kinds of basil, a few different kinds of oregano, and strawberries (some of which have tiny baby strawberries on them right now). At the end of the driveway nearest the house, we planted chives, bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, and roma tomatoes. We're very excited for them to grow.

Then it was on to the real purpose of our weekend: bird blocking. Ever since we put up the walls and the windows, the wall's still been open at the top, allowing insects to enter. Bee-creatures of all varieties especially liked to visit. Plus the bird blocking was the last thing we needed to do before we put in the 2x4s that will span our ceiling between that wall and our new beam. Every single roof rafter pair had a different spacing, though, which meant we had to make each piece of bird blocking separately and to custom measurement. It was a pain in the butt, as was nailing so close to the roof, but it's done now and we're quite happy.

You can see that we also finally put the flashing up around the windows. We'll put up the Tyvek house wrap later, as we need to replace the eastern-facing window in our nook as well so we can put siding on that side of the house before winter. We think the bird blocking turned out pretty well.

We get the 4th of July off, so we hope to clean up our living/dining area and begin work on putting the other beam in. Once that's in, up the ceiling joists will go, wiring will be done, and we'll be getting ever-closer to having a complete room in our house.