House Project - Day 53 - Sheathing

One week later, and the addition is almost fully framed and sheathed. The window plan is now fully evident from the exterior, at least for the new-built portion of the remodel. And there is now a more fully-developed sense of space on the interior.

One of the critical areas that we've been wanting to take a look at has been the area in the kitchen-to-family transition space around the peninsula. There are a lot of things happening there: the wall jogs in, the countertop peninsula wraps around the jog, the ceiling height transitions, and a window is placed in the area. The location of the ceiling beam that defines the height transition was moved about 1 foot towards the rear of the house, so that the bathroom cabinets on the second floor would not have to be cut to "ride" the beam.

This means that the ceiling height transition happens right at the left edge of the window. It also means, though, that the height transition does not happen right above the heads of whomever happens to be sitting at the peninsula. Plus, it gives us more flexibility to use drawers in our bathroom vanity cabinets.

My favorite feature of the new addition, so far, is the walk into the master bedroom. It's still a bit misleading at this point since the ceiling isn't in yet, and it appears as though the bedroom will have cathedral ceilings. Part of me wishes that we had specified cathedral ceilings in the bedroom, but I'll just have to see how the tray ceiling looks.

A note to those clicking on the links to the pictures: in these blog entries, I've only linked to a subset of what's available on Flickr, the hosting site for the photos. There are more pictures in the "House" set of photos, which you can browse through using the navigation on the right side of each picture's page.

House Project - Supplemental: New Furnace

Back when they were laying the foundation, they also installed a new furnace. Our old furnace was an ancient model that looked like it was at least 50 years old. In addition to being inadequate to heat the expanded structure, it was also probably horribly inefficient.

This new Weil-McLain unit comes universally recommended by many plumbers and heating experts, although if you squint at the yellow Energy Guide label you can see that it falls within the lower range, efficiency-wise, of other comparable units. Hmm.

You can also see from the picture that we're going to be set for 3 zones of heat: the original portion of the house (except for Miranda's room) will be on one zone. The master bedroom and bathroom, and Miranda's bedroom will be the second zone, and the new family room and kitchen will be in the 3rd zone.

House Project - Day 45: Framing

After a lull of about 2-3 weeks during which weather and delayed town inspections resulted in a slow-down of work, things have finally picked back up. Since the last blog entry on April 9, the foundation floors have been poured, and the foundation backfilled. The excess dirt that was excavated was then used to grade-off the backyard.

The delay by the town in the inspection of the foundation work resulted in the framing crew being reassigned to another job. When they finally finished with that job, the weather then conspired to delay them even more. However, they were finally able to start framing this past Monday. We've been told that this portion of the project goes relatively fast, and by Wednesday they had finished framing the first floor. And as of today, a portion of the second floor has also been framed.

From what they've done so far, we're able to get a sense of the rear exterior elevation for the first time. We can also start to get a sense of the interior of the new space: views from the kitchen sink, as well as across the new family room. One interesting view that I've always wanted to see was from the family room back towards the kitchen area, because of the fact that we designed the family room to have 9 foot ceilings, with a drop back down to 8 feet for the kitchen area.

That design choice also means that there will be a couple of steps up to the new master bedroom on the second floor, which in turn should afford some nice views of the wetlands/Ash Creek behind our property, as well as Long Island Sound beyond.

And at long last, we've reached a point where we can finally start to get a sense of the proportion of the addition as it relates to the old house, especially when seen from the road. We had been mildly concerned that the addition would loom gigantic, but thankfully that appears not to be the case. From the north west vista, the addition actually appears quite small, given that it is set in from the west side of the old house. From the north east side, the addition does appear larger, but the road is more even with the level of the house instead of being below the house as from the northwest, so the effect is diminished.

House Project - Day 17: Foundation Walls Finished

The masonry crew has essentially completed the buildup of the foundation walls. The exterior of the walls has been smoothed over by a layer of cement, and is awaiting the application of some sort of tar-based waterproofing agent before the backfill goes back in.

That waterproofing agent can't be applied until the cement layer is completely dry, which won't be for another couple of days. Also, they have to punch through from the new foundation area back into the old basement, and this will happen in the area of the old rear bump-out. After that, the floor slab will be poured, and then the foundation will essentially be complete.

There was a basement window placement issue that popped up, which Wendy's eagle eye caught today from the dining room window. She saw that the two northern basement windows were not lined up correctly. I teased her by saying she was in a horrible position -- being essentially perpendicular to the alignment plane -- to determine whether that was truly the case. Still she ignored me, grabbed the plans, and went out to discuss with the foundation subs.

Turns out she was right.

The foundation sub had built the bulkhead slightly off spec because:
a) the spec was for a prebuilt bulkhead, and they were building a full bulkhead
b) the foundation subs thought there should have been more space between the old foundation and the bulkhead wall for drainage purposes

The architect had originally specified a prebuilt bulkhead, which is more space-saving than a fully built one, as well as a fourth basement window for symmetry. And he squeezed both of them in the area to the left of the family room exit door landing and stairs.

With the moves the foundation subs made, the fourth window was now intruding into where the exit landing and stairs would be. The sub didn't know this because he was only working from the foundation plans and didn't have the elevations to see how the basement windows fit in with the structures above.

After a short consultation, we decided that the moves were made for good reasons and that sacrificing a fourth basement window was a small price to pay, so we asked to sub to fill in the fourth window.

Meanwhile, you can see the overall shape of the addition now from the 2nd floor hallway window. And eyeballing down the west wall back to the existing house, you can start to see how it'll lay out on that side of the house. The dining room and bedroom windows will be shifted left, and the family room exit will have a landing and stairs parallel to the driveway.

It's still a little bit hard to get a sense of scale just yet, although the addition certainly doesn't seems as massive as we feared it might have been when the foundation pit was first dug. "It's the perfect size addition for this house," John the Builder said when we asked him for his opinion, and we think he's right.

House Project - Day 14: Foundation Footings Poured, Basement Walls Started

Work on the house stalled over the weekend and into Monday as we waited for the town to inspect and approve the forms that were laid late last week for the foundation footings. Apparently, someone at the town thought the rains over the weekend would have turned our foundation pit into a muddy mess since our house is located among other properties that are within a flood plain, even though ours is not. They thought they would not be able to climb down into the pit to do the inspection. But we apparently have very good draining dirt so there was no reason to delay.

So John the contractor put a call in Tuesday morning to the town hall asking for an inspector to come out immediately so that the concrete truck, which was due to arrive later Tuesday morning, would not have to be turned away. The inspector came, gave his approval, and they poured the concrete for the foundation footings Tuesday afternoon.

From the very beginnings of this project, we knew that our driveway, being very narrow and hemmed in on both sides by retaining walls, would pose a clearance issue to any large-sized vehicle that needed to get up the driveway to the back yard. And the concrete truck was foremost in all the contractors' minds when we discussed the projects with them during the bidding phase.

As we saw last week, the backhoe barely fit in the driveway, and the same was true for the concrete truck. Wendy's great decision to spend the $2800 to replace and push back the left side retaining wall once again proved prescient, as the truck barely made it past the house, and probably would not have fit between the 2 original retaining walls at the bottom of the driveway.

Today, the masons are scheduled to come and build up the foundation walls with concrete block. I hope to have an update on that this evening.

UPDATE (10:00pm): They've removed the forms from the footings, and have started building up the basement walls with concrete masonry blocks. The blocks arrived Wednesday morning, and got forklifted up the driveway and deposited in front of the garage.

The masons didn't arrive until the afternoon, and started building up the southwest and southeast corners of the basement walls, as well as the east wall which contains the fireplace bumpout.

One thing that will be interesting to see is how they join the new block foundation to the old fieldstone foundation. It won't look quite as jarring on the dining room side of the house, since the new foundation starts in on the old foundation, but on the kitchen side the old rear bumpout was demolished, which means the new foundation will have to continue flush from the old foundation. They'll stucco the exterior, but it'll still be a jarring juxtaposition, I think.