Lots of Progress

There has been lots of progress since the last update. The Bathrooms are pretty close to being finished, all the rooms are painted, the hardwood floors are being refinshed, most of the light fixtures are hung......Here are some pictures.

The brick on the front is complete:

The stairs:

Master Bath:

Hall Bath:


Connor's Blue Room:

Guest Room:

Drywall

The First floor windows are installed and we have drywall! It is very exciting to see how the rooms are going to look. Here are a few pictures.

Master Bedroom:

Baby's Room:

Living Room:

Windows

The second story windows have been installed. We are very pleased with them.

Furnace

Next milestone - we have a Furnace! They finished installing it yesterday. Today they are finishing up the remaining rework on the existing furnace vents in the basement. They are hoping to call for HVAC inspection today or Monday. Supposedly the Electrician should be finished on Monday as well. He has been pretty sick so I don't know if that will happen or not. Hopefully he will finish sometime next week so they can get the Framing, Electrical and Plumbing inspections completed. Regardless things are progressing quite nicely.


Here is a shot of our new furnace up in the rafters:

Stairs and a Roof!

So the stairs were installed about a week ago. Colin is thrilled because it means I am not insisting on climbing up the ladder to see the progress (I only did that once....but he really did not like it). Anyway, it is great to be able to get up there and see everything. Here is a shot of the stairs.

The other main thing to report is the Roof. We have one! A crane had to assist in the placement of the trusses. It was quite a sight. After the trusses were placed the roof went on really quickly. It is great to have the roof for a few reasons....it is going to help keep the weather out and we are able to get a pretty good feel for the rooms now that there is a "ceiling". Here are some pictures and a link to a larger set of pics.

Here is a link to a collection of pictures of the framing process.

http://picasaweb.google.com/LucyGoose06/Framing?authkey=HN3eNlGsoYo#

Walls

So we have walls now. Here are a few pictures:

This is the Baby's room (the first two windows) the hall bath (the next window) and the master bath (the last window). The holes in the floor are for the furnace flue and the laundry chute located in the master bath.

This is the master bedroom on the right and the master bath on the left.

View of the master bedroom and bathroom from the backyard.

This is a view of the guest room from the corner of the front yard. The living room is bellow.

Demolition

The Demo started this week. It is exciting and disconcerting at the same time. It is kind of hard to see your house in such a state but it won't look like this for long. Here are some pictures:

Before: After:

North Side Before:

North Side After:

Office Before:

Office After:

Here is a link to all the demo pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/LucyGoose06/Demo?authkey=r4jckp6gFPI#

The Beginning

We talked about "Pop Topping" our house since we bought it. We went back and forth on whether or not we wanted to undertake such a big project and even looked at/made offers on homes for sale. We have always loved our house and it's location but we weren't sure if we could swing it and if we would want to deal with the entire construction process. Anyway this spring we decided we should do our due diligence and find out what the project would cost and what we could actually have built up there. Initially we had an engineer come out to casually look at the house to see if it would be doable without massive structural work. He said it looked good so we then chose an architect and paid to have Schematic drawings created. With those drawings we were able to get bids from a number of contractors. So 4 to 5 months later we have chosen a contractor and are getting this project underway (of course during the course of this we found out we are having a baby. So that makes this process even more interesting....) We spent the last month packing up the house so we could move out of it. We had to clear the entire first floor of all our belongings. We finished that project up last week and are now moved out. We took some before pictures which are posted here: http://picasaweb.google.com/LucyGoose06/HouseBefore?authkey=bxsfgicF8yM#

So far they installed a new electrical panel and much of this week was spent installing the "protection". This involved laying plywood over all our hardwood floors and putting some other kind of board over all our cabinets, counters and appliances. Yesterday the dumpster was delivered and we expect it to get put to use next week when then begin to tear off the roof. We are quite excited to see the roof come off. That will make it feel like things are really getting moving.