Hot Roofing Action!

So I promised you guys some HOT! ROOFING! ACTION! last week, and we did make pretty good progress with it this week. The roof started the week looking something like this:





It kinda reminds me of a child's set of tinker toys.

As the week progressed, the roof got filled in a bit more:





You'll note that they are not removing the old roof until the new one is completed and covers the house. We're grateful for that.

The roof ended the week being blanketed with roof felt. I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds artsy and craftsy:



While the roof was going up, the addition itself was being filled in with more walls:



That's our new living room folks! There will be a fireplace there someday between those two windows. Here is our dining area:



Isn't it bright and cheerful? And here's our kitchen:



Some day my AGA stove will sit between those two windows.

Also, this week was the official Week of the Crap Pile:





Help! The Crap Pile is eating my porch!!!


nom! nom! nom!


The hubby and I voted this lovely pic of the ductwork crap pile our Gross Pic of the Week:



We vehemently deny that the ductwork crap pile bribed us for our votes!


move along, nothing to see here

I know what you're thinking- you're thinking that roofing and crap piles are nice- but what about the slantyness of the Slanty Shanty? Oh don't worry gentle reader, we are still dealing with a lot of that. Mercifully, we don't have to add any more (expensive) helical piers, but we did pour a lot of concrete in holes under the house. I'm assuming they plan to stick some boards or something in them to support the floors.




Oh yeahhh baby, stick it in me!

That's about all that happened this week, except oh yeah, our blue room wall mysteriously disappeared:


Uhm, wall...hello?!? Wall?!?

The hubby and I were both like, "WTF?!" when we first saw a BIG GAPING HOLE where we once had a wall. After hyperventilating a few minutes with our heads between our legs, we figured out that they probably took down the whole wall because that room will eventually have a spiffy new set of pocket doors. At least we hope that's the reason.

I'll leave you this week with a cool pic that the hubby took looking down the hall from our front door into the addition:



Some day you will look down that hall and see a beautiful stained glass transom beckoning you to the new part of the house...sigh...

Tune in next week when we better call the Doctor, cause we've got shingles!

Walls Go Up, Walls Go Down

When we last left off with the construction talk, we had a floor for the addition, but little else. Well as you saw from our time lapse video, the workers were busy as bees and the walls are definitely coming up:







All those (temporary) diagonal beams make me nervous- how can they work in there and not trip all over them? By the end of the week, they were adding plywood to what will become our honest to goodness exterior walls in the addition:





They even began work on what will one day become my screened in porch:





While walls were going up on the outside of the house, they were coming down on the inside. Our house sits a little too close to the neighbors on one side (they built 'em close back in 1911). So to protect our neighbors, the city requires us to make our walls all along the length of that side of the house fireproof. That means we have to take down all the interior walls on that side. Hooray for extra work and added expense! I must say it does look pretty cool to see all the lath though:





The walls in our current bedroom/bathroom/closet area are completely gone now. Here's an artistic shot the hubby took looking down our hallway and into our bedroom from what was once our bathroom:



And here's another view taken while standing in the bedroom. As you can see there is no evidence that our bathroom or closet ever existed:



Kind of sad really.

This week we also continued to fight the good fight against the slantyness of the Slanty Shanty. As you can see from these pics, a lot of the support under the existing house is in dire need of reinforcement:





So they dug a hole to add some support and water bubbled up.



We have to get the engineer back out to look at this, and we may have to purchase and install another dreaded helical pier (yay! overage!). It's no fun having a house built on top of an underground spring.

We did find something neat this week. We found the original ceiling in the current kitchen/dining room/bathroom area. The beadboard is another strong indication that this area was most likely a porch that was walled in at some time.



I find that deep teal color to be rather shocking because the lighter Haint Blue would have been much more common on a porch of that era. I guess the folks that originally owned this house marched to the beat of their own drummer.

And finally I'll leave you guys with the Gross Pic Of The Week. This week it's a shot of the squirrel's nest we found in our eaves:



Bleh! Tune in next week for some HOT ROOFING ACTION!!! and maybe even another time lapse video.

A Brief Design Break

I thought today we might take a break from all the construction photos and discuss design just a little bit. As things are moving along, the first hard design decisions we have to make (other than the layout of the whole house) are tiles and counter tops. As some of you may remember, we were considering going with purple tile in the bathroom. But we changed our minds and decided to go for a more classic, timeless white subway tile look. To go with it, we chose little marble hexagonal tiles for the floor (another timeless look), and white carrera marble for the counter tops and tub surround.


Our cat picks out his favorite trim.

We also need to make decisions about the kitchen, and for the longest time I had my heart set on granite counter tops. But after watching many hours of Rehab Addict, I came to the conclusion that I wanted a look in the kitchen that would be more in keeping with the time period of the house. So we came up with this design for the kitchen:



Let me explain the photo. Tile 1 and Tile 2 are tiles that we are considering for the backsplash. Hubby loves Tile 1, I'm partial to the more rustic look of Tile 2. I think we're gonna go with Tile 1, but I'll keep you posted. For the regular counter tops we've decided to go with a nice thick butcherblock. This would have been a material available when the house was built. It's very durable, and I just love the warm look of wood. To fancy things up a bit, we're going with marble counter tops on the island. The marble island will give the kitchen it's "wow" factor and will be sealed so it doesn't stain. The cabinets are going to have classic shaker lines and a warm, creamy, slightly distressed color. The floors are- get this- going to be a stained checkerboard pattern (that's why we have a light and dark floor sample in the photo). How spiffy will that look?! And finally, the cup in the center is inspiration for the color of the body of the island...a nice dreamy blue. I think that color will go well with my AGA stove:



So there you have it folks, the design for the house is finally starting to come together. I'll try to have a construction update in the next couple of days. Lots of exciting stuff is happening!

Time Lapse Photography, or Weeeee! We've Got Walls!

Just a quick post today to show you this neato bandito time lapse video my husband made of this week's construction on the addition.



Special thanks go out to our next door neighbors the D's (names changed to protect the innocent) for coming up with the idea to do this and allowing us to attach the camera to their back deck.

Stay tuned tomorrow for an exciting construction AND design update!

More Construction Tales From The Slanty Shanty

Welcome to another edition of Construction Tales From The Slanty Shanty *cue old time radio mystery music* This week we got everything straightened out with the city and are BFFs again. So, we picked up where we left off with the addition. Here you can see all the rebar that they laid down to give the basement floor some structure:



Sadly, we weren't around when they had the super cool concrete truck out pouring the cement, but we did get this awesome action shot of guys smoothing it out:



And this is what the finished product looks like..all slick and shiny...



That picture makes me want to go ice skating for some reason... Anyhoo, after the basement was finally finished the crew was ready to frame the actual addition! But! Since this is the Slanty Shanty, they have to even out the floors in the old house so that they will be level with the new addition. This required a scary amount of reinforcement of old support beams:




Looking at how rotted things got under our house, the hubby and I sometimes think it's a miracle we didn't just walk through the living room one day and fall through to the crawl space.





After they finally got things all nice and level, the crew was able to come out and start working on the framing of the addition:





We wrapped up this week by checking on our house this rainy Sunday. We were startled to find our back door marked this way:



What dangerous thing could be behind it? A tiger? A lady? A pack of rabid wiener dogs? Nope, just a really wet floor to our addition:





Sigh...only a few days old and already our basement is flooded:



Well I don't want to leave this post on a down note, so I thought I'd give you a little update on our friend S.Jack. Remember him?



It turns out that S. Jack was a boy who lived next door to our house when the previous owners put in the hardwood floors. He snuck in and outlined himself on our subfloor. I actually think it's kind of cool that we have his portrait immortalized under our floor. Maybe some day, years from now, future owners will uncover our friend S. Jack and wonder about him too.

Rip Snortin' and Tearin'

Because of complications between us and the city, we've had to temporarily defer work on the addition. Not one to sit around and rest on his laurels, our contractor decided to start working on the inside of the house where they are just rip, snortin', and tearin' stuff up! Let's start at the back of the house. This is our master bathroom/closet area. It used to look something like this:

And this is how it looked earlier this week:

Quite a change, huh? The floors were rotted around the tub from water damage, which we kinda expected. Still it's pretty gross when you see it up close:

So they wound up having to rip up the flooring and replace it.

No one's gonna miss that uggo vinyl flooring. They also ripped out the ceiling, which we will be replacing with the more historically accurate beadboard.

So our bathroom ended the week looking like this:

No outside or inside walls, no ceiling, but at least it's got a new floor!

Let's move on to our kitchen area. It once looked something like this:

And now it looks like this:

Not that much worse really. They had to rip out the floor that was underneath our fridge. I guess it was rotted. Now you can see directly down into the crawl space.

The entry from the living room to the kitchen/dining area is now a lovely crap pile full of old cabinetry, countertops and my old stove.

And speaking of our living room- remember it? It used to look like this:

Now it looks like this:

I'm glad to see the living room got it's own crap pile. I'd hate for it to be jealous of the kitchen. As you can see in that second photo, they had to replace some of the floor in the living room. It always used to swoop down right there by the couch...now we know why. I gotta say it feels good to fix all the floors in the ole Slanty Shanty.

Let's check in on our home office. It used to look like this:

And now it looks like this:

So far they've removed the flooring and the moldings, and they've cut a door between it and the bedroom (remember, it will be our master bathroom some day).

That's all the major changes inside the house this week, but I promised you an update on the outside of the house and I'm not one to lie. So, look! We've got insulation!!! And walls!!! Sorta...

Hey, it's not much but it's a start. As an extra special treat for you guys this week, I share this pic:

The hubby and I about peed ourselves when they found this "artifact" under the floor in the kitchen. We were all like, "Oh wow! It's the guy who built the house! He outlined a picture of himself! His name was S. Jack!". And then we realized that the outline was done in magic marker. We figure it must have been the builder who bought this house and flipped it sometime in the 80's. Well played S. Jack, well played.

That's all for this week- tune in next week for more Tales From The Slanty Shanty!