Leaded and unleaded

Things have been dragging a bit lately, with the mudding and taping still going on and on and on, but there are a few new highlights.
We have windows where there were none! The most dramatic of these is in the stairwell up to the 2nd floor, and it really brightens up the space. I don't really have a comparable 'before' picture, just one shortly after work was started:

Now, we have a window in that space:

Actually, this is not the final window that will go in this space. As noted in the post of 11/23, The wrong windows were delivered - but Chris wanted to take advantage of the relative warm spell to get the window space cut, and thus put the wrong window into the space until the right one is delivered this week. (Good thing too - the temperature is supposed to drop by about 30 degrees.) The correct window has a bronze/brown color on the outside, and will have wooden snap in grilles to keep the divided-light appearance.
Here is a picture of Chris working on it from the outside:

The tile guys have also finished up their work in the bathroom. The vanity is installed, with our granite top, and now we have our new glass tile backsplash to add a bit of color.

In the front, our new diamond-patterned leaded-glass windows are up and in place. Here's a view from the inside (on a very cloudy, rainy day) - you'll have to picture the window seat that will go underneath the windows:

And here is a view of the outside, showing the most striking transformation the house will see exteriorly:

Obviously, there still needs to be a fair amount of finishing work with the wood trim before it's completely done here, but compare it with the 11/23 post to see what the front looked like before!

Sneak Peek

While we were in Milwaukee over the Thanksgiving holiday, our hardwood floors were being put in our master bedroom. They are being immediately covered up to prevent damage from all the other work that has yet to be done, but I was able to get a photo of some of it half-done:

We have a new, larger hole in the wall where the window in the closet will be, but I wasn't able to get a picture of it worth posting.
We are still trying to find a perfect, not too costly, eco-friendly paint that has the colors we want. Nothing is simple...But we were able to purchase some furniture today for the master bedroom with a gift card we had - and a flat screen TV for the new family room!
We hope to see the windows in the master bedroom go in this week, and will post when that is done.

Exteriors

With nothing real exciting going on on the inside, I figured I'd post a couple of pictures of the views from the outside of the house. Here's the outside of the front of the house:

The front window is boarded up at the moment - it will be one of the future decorative windows with the leaded tape in the diamond pattern - 2 smaller square windows will flank this larger one, with the same pattern.
This a view of the back of the house, with the newly installed large window in the boys' room.

Below is a view of the north side of the house - you can see the skylights in the boys' room, then the one that is at the top of the stairs from the 1st floor.

I took a picture of the south side of the house, with the skylight in the bathroom, but it just doesn't show very well from that angle, so I'm leaving it out at this point.
We've had a bit of a set-back with the windows - the distributer sent our builder some windows with a white exterior instead of bronze. They are replacing them at no charge - but some of the windows with the white exterior were the ones we already had the leaded tape applied to, and we obviously can't send those back. I guess Chris hadn't opened them before dropping them off at the glass place, and so didn't notice. All is well, though. Apparently one can use special paint to be applied to the metal, so the ones in front will have that that treatment done. Another glitch to get through, as we didn't expect everything to go perfectly!
This week promises more mudding and taping of the drywall, and hopefully more windows to go in!

Grout It Out Loud

Things have picked up again on the remodeling front. Grout in the bathroom. Mudding in the bedrooms. Window in for the boys' room.

Above you can see the egress window in the boys room, and as a bonus, lying against the wall next to it is our finished leaded window for the front, with the diamond pattern - I was able to find someone to apply the leaded tape the way we wanted it, for a reasonable price. I think it'll look fantastic!

It's fun to go up every day and see the new progress. Check out the lovely "checkerboard" glass tiles in the shower, we're also going to be seeing them as a backsplash for the sink.



This last picture was taken before the grouting, but you can see the skylight in the bathroom - the extra light it adds will be great.
We're also seeing why they call it "mudding." It's messy. I have to say, though, the contractors have really made an effort NOT to bring the dust and mess from upstairs down into our current living area.
From the early decision to build a stairway outside to the second floor to now, they've really minimized the amount of "tracking through" the house, and we appreciate it. Of course, some mess can't be avoided, but it really has been less than I expected.

Above you can see the front reading room area with the built in bookshelves now finished with drywall. The mudding has begun, but will take a long time, due to all the weird angles and such.
In other news we picked out a bunk bed (on sale!) for the boys, and we're awaiting the paint samples to finalize that choice. Bunk bed is below. Are we asking for trouble with 2 climbing boys??? Time will tell.


Izzy

I can see tiles for miles

To our surprise, we now have tile on the bathroom floor and the shower floor! We weren't aware this was going to happen so soon, but we think it looks good! It hasn't been grouted (is that a word?) yet, and we actually have to pick out the color of the grout. Very exciting choice, I can tell you. Our glass tile for the accent border and the backsplash of the vanity top is here too that is what I'm most excited to see when it's done. Other than that, the drywall continues to be put up and it is almost done. Meanwhile, we've chosen all of our lighting fixtures, so we're glad to have that out of the way.
We did end up having to take back the mirrors we bought, but found a solution in $50 mirrors at Home Depot that are oval shaped, and thus fit better with the angled ceiling - though we still are going to have to have one lighting fixture above both of them instead of 2 separate ones. I'm sure it'll look fine. I'm trying to learn to be flexible...
One of the more irritating things is that we rarely get to see the place in daylight, now that it is barely light when we leave for work and dark when I return - which in turn makes it difficult to take pictures. These were all taken early this AM.
First, looking up the stairway into the main hallway and the skylight at the top of the stairs:



This the bathroom floor, and the shower floor. If I would have thought about it, I would have taken a picture of the skylight in the bathroom too. Too bad. Now it is too dark up there!

Below is a shot looking down the hallway to the door to the boys' room - the door will have to be cut at an angle due to the roof angle. You can kind of see the 2 openings to the built-in linen closets on the right side as you look down the hall - hidden by a huge piece of drywall.

Here you can see the wall of the pocket door to our closet. The wall will remain open above, to allow the light to come through from the window.

Tomorrow I'm going to meet with some stained glass artists to see about having them apply a leaded glass tape to our front windows in a diamond pattern in the front 'sitting room' area of our master bedroom (see architect's sketch below, with the window seat).

We are running into a bit of a problem here too. We thought we would be able to get someone to attach lead adhesive tape directly to the window, thus giving it the appearance of a divided light leaded window. Turns out that so far, we can only find a place that uses the leaded tape on a clear glass insert to place into the window, which just complicates things and increases the cost. I will figure it all out tomorrow. I hope.

A Room With A View

We haven't posted in a while because I was hoping the next pictures we posted would be of the finished drywall, but although most of the rigid insulation board is in, I guess the drywall is taking a long time, due to the odd angles, peaks, and valleys and such. The skylights in the boys' room have been installed, and it definitely brightens up the place! We are told that the skylights in the hallway and the bathroom will be done next week.


Here's the mostly finished drywall in the front "reading" room (pink board covering the front window),

and in the larger part of the master bedroom,

and looking through the main master bedroom into what will be the closet, with a pocket door, the frame of which has yet to be installed.


A lot of the work that has gone on lately has to do with the HVAC. In the back of this picture is the heating/cooling unit that will take up most of the knee wall space on that side.

Geez, I would hate to have to crawl around in there to service that thing. All of the silver tubing and ducts really make me think of the movie "Brazil". As long as it works, I guess I don't care what it looks like behind the walls.


The other area of progress has been the bathroom. The shower is coming along, with the cement board (or whatever, forgive me I don't know all that goes into making a shower) in place and we think the tiling will start in a week or so.


We've run into another stumbling block because of the steep pitch of the roof in the bathroom on the right side of the vanity - we may not have enough room for the 2 mirrors we've already ordered that go over each sink in the vanity. And we definitely won't have enough room for a separate light over each of those mirrors, as we had intended - we may have to go with one larger one over the top of both of them. The vanity and mirrors will come in on Monday, then Chris will do a mock up of where everything would go, and we'll see if we have to go a different route - maybe one larger mirror, or 2 slightly smaller oval mirrors. Lighting will depend on that situation too. I'm frustrated by this situation, as it seems like there should have been some foresight about the lack of wall space/height on someone's part (I'm not excusing myself from fault here), but it's just this kind of thing that makes the process exciting, yes?

No New Tales to Tell

Or rather, no new pictures to post. So, today they finished the spray foam insulation and loaded all the drywall in through the front window via some scary looking scaffolding. I'm glad I wasn't here to see it and chew my fingernails off. The rigid board foam insulation was also loaded up there to be installed, and 1/2 of the tile we selected was picked up too. Last week Chris picked up the hard wood flooring, which sits in our garage. I'm told the area was measured for carpet on the stairs, hallway, and boys' room too. So I guess there is a lot going on, just no visuals to go with it.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how we are walk-under-ladders lucky that we got our Home Equity Line of Credit when we did - we had to take 95% loan-to-value - but that is at the value of our home as it stood before the remodel. (With adding on 2 BR and a bath, we certainly increase the value of our home.) I don't think we would have been able to get that high of LTV now in this credit-frozen market. If we had gone a different way with a construction loan, and tried to use cash from the future potential value of our house, we may have ended up in an even worse situation, given the decline of values on homes (though our neighborhood has remained relatively stable). All in all, I am so glad we pulled the trigger when we did. And not just because we're tripping over toy-clutter in the living room...

Let it Snow!

(oh please not literally!)The insulation installation started today, and it just looks like upside down snow up there! We weren't here at the same time as the installers, but we had to crawl through a plastic lining to get up the stairs and check it out. They still have to come back on Monday to finish. These views give an idea of what the cut outs will be for the 3 windows in the master bedroom, 2 smaller ones on either side of the big one, though the sizes here are only approximate..

Here's a view from the top of the stairs, looking from the hallway into the master bedroom:

We'll also have some rigid board insulation over this, giving us an insulation of nearly R40. Sweet.
Also, the frame around the skylights are in, here at the top of the stairs

and in the boys' room, obviously both before the sticky snow was put in. The skylights will have a little shelf below them, though I guess it's difficult to see at this angle:


In other news, yesterday was a very productive day - picked out tile in the morning, carpet at noon (ultimately decided to go with different carpet in the hallway than the boys' room) and looked at plumbing fixtures in the afternoon. I was starting to get very frustrated with our builder's "allowance" for these things - he supposedly gave us the "top of the line" pricing, but we're finding that we really have to do more sleuthing and bargain hunting to find what we want and stay within our range. Overall, though, I think we're doing a good job of finding good quality things that are interesting, but still affordable. Part of it has to do with the 'showroom' concept - where the public can go and look for what they want, but only the professional can purchase the item. For the plumbing fixtures, at least, the prices they charge at the showroom seem to be considerably higher - with not all that much more selection - than one can find at Home Depot, for instance. Supposedly the quality of the merchandise is the same, so I'm not sure how it all works....but it looks like we may be skipping the plumber's paradise showroom and finding our fixtures elsewhere.

Inspections: passed!

We have passed all mechanical and framing inspections -woo-hoo! A lot of other stuff has happened today, but I'll to have to report more on all that stuff later, because I watched the debate and the aftermath, and now it is time to go to bed!

Duct, duct, grey duct

(Or duct, duct, goose, if you grew up where I did)
We had 2 evenings of chaos at our house last week. The HVAC guys had to fit us in between other jobs, and so had to come from about 4-8pm or so. They were placing the ducts for our new central air/furnace for the upstairs AND punching through to the rooms downstairs, so that we can use that system to cool the whole house in the summer. This is one of the added bonuses of doing the remodel - no more lugging 2 giant window AC units up from the basement every spring and down every fall. Plus it'll be a 1000x more efficient way to cool the house- ok slight exaggeration, but much, much more efficient. Given the 3 rooms upstairs, they had to figure out a way to get the very large ducts from the knee-wall space where the unit will be to each of the rooms above and below. One of them will be encased in a low shelf in our closet:

This then splits and the duct on the left goes to the living room downstairs, and the one on the right goes across the front of the house, which will be under our window seat - this unfortunately limits the storage space we thought we would have under that seat, but the floor joists change direction in that part of the house, making it difficult for them to go under the floor.


The vents going downstairs are fairly unobtrusive, small and circular things on the ceiling. The larger return air vent in the dining room isn't that bad either.

We also had a bit of a scare on Friday - our builder had an eye injury involving a nail...but it turned out to be just a corneal scratch and he should be good to go by Monday. Next up, the electrical and plumbing inspections, then we move on to insulation.

Perfect Landing

Our new and improved stairway is now roughed in. We had to have a longer landing to allow the stairway to end further into the hallway. This eliminates the head-height issue of people knocking their head on the way up the stairs. (At 5'0" I never seemed to have a problem...) Eventually the new landing will be nicer wood, stained to match the existing stairs, and Chris will try to use the old stair treads for the remaining stairs if possible - they were still in good shape. Here is the new landing. If you look back at the post from 9/27 you can see what the stairs used to look like.

Of course, extending the landing upstairs resulted in one of the few intrusions into the downstairs of the house - we had to steal space from above the hallway off of the kitchen and above our broom closet. In the picture above, I believe the white material currently to the side of the new landing is what used to be in our hallway downstairs. Below is what that hallway looks like now. This will get soffited (is that a word?) off and will look like it has always been that way.

Interesting story about the stairs.....we've been told by some neighbors that the women that lived here for the first 65 years after the house was built used to keep her jewelry in a secret compartment under the attic stairs. We've poked around a bit, but so far, no hidden trap doors or treasures found!

Best Bargain Ever

Ok, we did our weekly house shopping trip and ended up at Home Depot, so Scott could look at the granite vanity top choices we have available (we're going to go with the grey 'Napoli' one). We looked around at other things too, such as faucets, tile, and toilets, and lo and behold on a clearance rack we found a stainless double robe/towel hook that was similar to, though not the same as, the type of faucet we are getting from Delta on sale for........... 1 cent each! yeah, $0.01! I splurged and went back and got the 3rd and last one of the shelf, thinking we could use it for a hand towel or something. It is close enough to the style we chose for the faucets, etc. that I think it was worth, um, 3 cents at least.
We also got some more ideas for tile for the shower. We went back to the same store where we got the vanity and found a really cool (but very expensive) glass mosaic that we like for a border in the shower - we'll see if we can find something similar at the Tile showroom used by the "tile guy". See the one on the right:
We haven't found anything we like other than a classic white subway tile for the main part of the shower, but I think that will give it a classic look. And we are looking a shower doors in a catalog too - again, who knew there were so many choices. I favor the plain clear glass frameless, but Scott would like a little more privacy with a 'steam mist' glass....a decision we still have to battle out.
Speaking of the shower, here is the framing for the shower, with the bench:


Here's the area of the vanity, with the area of the custom medicine cabinet to the right, and the plumbing and electricity ready to go:


Here's a little triangular shelf alcove at the top of the stairs on the landing (this was my sister Rose's idea - thanks Rose!):


The HVAC people will be continuing their work tomorrow evening for our new central air/furnace that is going upstairs.

Vanity Fair

It is done. The vanity has been purchased and ordered. We started out thinking that we needed a 6 foot vanity (double bowl) and that we'd get 2 medicine cabinets with mirrors. It was hard to find a large selection at 6 feet, but we had it whittled down to a few choices, both over our budget. Then we realized that with the way the wall over the stairs butts out into the room (see below) it would actually work better to have a 5 foot vanity, and make this wall into a little shelf - and Chris (our builder) offered to make a custom medicine cabinet above it.

Thus, we were able to shave off a bunch of money by not only downsizing to a 5 foot vanity, but also by opting for mirrors instead of medicine cabinets over the vanity, and having a custom built medicine cabinet (stained to match) and extra shelf on the R side. Here is a picture of the type of bath vanity we got - the vanity top will be different and the lay out isn't exactly like what we'll have, but the color of the wood and style is what we've got (but I doubt we'll keep green apples in the bathroom.)

Freedom of Choice

When we decided to go with a remodeler/contractor rather design-build firm, we knew we would be doing a lot more leg-work in figuring out design and picking out various options. It is surprising how much time it takes to pick everything out - and how distracting it can be if you try to do it with kids underfoot. So we're thinking of just having a weekly babysitter to try to go remodel shopping once/week. Even without kids, the choices can be overwhelming, and it is hard to know where to start. It is true, though, that once you make one decision (for us it was the hardwood flooring) the rest of the choices become a little easier. For us, some of the harder decisions have to do with the bigger picture, like what color should we paint? The only one that has a strong feeling of what colors to use is Reid - who wants his room to be his (current) favorite color, red. A red room? Scary visions of Twin Peaks dream sequences went through my head...My plan is to accommodate him to an extent - and have one "accent wall" (you can tell I'm addicted to HGTV, can you not?) in a brick red. But for our bedroom, we just have no clue.
Last night (with the help of said babysitter) we were able to get closer to a decision for the carpet portion of the upstairs (who knew there were so many choices for carpet!), finalize our choice of bathroom vanity and mirrors, and pick out some shower and sink faucets. 3 hours well spent. Next up, floor tile and shower tile - woo-hoo!
On another note, recently my older brother linked to this website from his own remodeling website (they are much further along in a very similar project of their second floor). I will return the favor by linking to his Remake and Remodel page. Note the obscure Roxy Music reference - of course we opted for Elvis Costello for our title instead.
Stay tuned for more pictures later today....I'm home with our younger son, who is now sick.

We've been framed!

Some of the framing has been done, and today it was a whirlwind of activity, with the plumber and electrician here too (unfortunately, Scott and Reid were home because Reid has strep, so it wasn't quite as restful as it normally would be.) I've just been informed that Scott is going to contribute a first hand account of his experience today in a separate post. So I guess I'll leave it at that.
Here's some of the framing - first the hallway at the top of the stairs:


Here is the framing for the bathroom - somewhat hard to see because of the angle:


Here is the north side of the house. The slope of the east side is actually slightly different than the west side - something that wasn't picked up on originally. This results in a slightly higher wall on the east side than the west - but that will actually work to our advantage, giving us more storage above the clothes railing on that side.


And finally, we have a new addition to the soil stack in the basement (along with lots of other piping running this way and that, that I didn't find very interesting to photograph) and a new pipe in our current bedroom closet (Devin thinks when the camera is clicking, he must be in the picture).



Meanwhile, we have picked 1/2 of our flooring (found a good deal on some solid oak wood flooring at Lumber Liquidators), and we will be picking the rest tomorrow. The master bedroom will be the wood flooring, and the hallway and boys' room will be carpeted. We will be meeting with a small local store tomorrow to learn the ins and outs about carpet - which I'm finding I know nothing about.
We are also very close to ordering our bathroom vanity, and vanity top. Originally, I thought that there was no way we could afford a granite vanity top, but to my surprise, Home Depot actually has some mass-produced granite that is cheaper than the Corian that we were considering. So Granite it is - we just have to pick the color.