Long time no Blog...

We have had a busy winter here at ye olde house o' straw, but that doesn't mean that the house isn't getting worked on, oh no...in fact it looks like a house again.

Check it out, my new backdoor. A door with a weather seal so tight that you have to put a little grunt into it while pushing it open. And our siding. We picked the siding color long ago, when the house was still a house, before its brief stint as a hole in the ground. It seems like for weeks we were debating about different colors of beige...because that's the color that siding comes in. Sure you can get blue tinted beige, or green tinted beige...or as we picked grey-brown tinted beige...but really. You're fooling yourself if you think it's anything but beige.

This is an old picture...months old in fact. I have been meaning to update for at least that long. The house is almost entirely sided now. We ran out, so there is a tiny corner of the northside, and one gable end left to be covered in lovely grey-brown beige...okay I'll stop with the b-word, sorry.

A rather drunken picture of our porch. I gave the camera to Isis when we visited the jobsite last week, since it's a little hard for me to manage both the baby and the camera. Isis has artistic vision, and as a result it's often hard to tell which way is up in her pictures. Maybe it's the fact that she's closer to the ground, but everything in her shots has a monumental quality to it.
We have plumbing! We have an electrical service box. This weeks project was finishing the framing on the stairs, and as soon as that is done we will have the "mechanical" guys in to run the ducts...then wiring, finish plumbing, insulation, drywall, trim, paint...move in. Gosh it all fits in one sentence. How cool is that?

The week of pink houses.

If anyone besides me has been reading the comments (and I love comments by the way...) you'll know that our friend Ramsey has been putting up fan fold insulation on his house. By the way, three cheers for Ramsey who took time out from his busy schedule of remodeling and being a professional (ie one that gets paid) musician to come and work on our project. He didn't just come for the fun stuff either, here's the only picture I can find of him...bagging old nasty blown in fiberglass insulation.

This was one of the only jobs that I got to do (carefully respirated of course) before I became too pregnant to help out, so I know from first hand experience how much it sucks! But you have never had a better shower than the one you take after a day of dealing with that stuff.

But we are not dwelling on things that have passed! We are looking towards the future, and the future is rosy indeed...or at least pink.

Because pink is the color that fan fold stuff comes in. Yes yes, we are also getting ready for siding.

First though we must have windows, which will start to be installed tomorrow.

Plug it in baby...

Electricity, it's what makes the jobsite go round.

And while you are admiring our new electric meter, you can check out the lovely window wells. This is the side of the house where the new foundation wall went in, so as you can see everything is buried back in.

And the new mast, waiting to be hooked into the grid. (In response to Layne's comment about the number of masts on a ship, our one master is a sloop).

And this week is all about plumbing.

It's a bird, it's a plane...

It's a house!!
Or at least it's starting to look like one.

I was sort of into the idea of an open air second floor, sleeping under the stars, cool breezes...but it was pointed out to me that we live in Michigan, which tends towards drizzle in the summer and slush in the winter. So a roof we have, as well as a porch, and as of yesterday afternoon, a new electrical service!!

I was going to go and take pictures of our spanky new fuse box, but I spent this morning at home waiting for the washing machine repair man...apparently our old clunker wasn't up to three loads a day. It's back and better than ever though, and the repair man didn't even have to unload the wet diapers in order to fix it. What a pro.

Petoh is acting more and more like a person every day, so it might be possible for me to make it up to the wireless coffee shop more often...it's a goal anyway.

Downside up and Inside out....

There are always surprises when you are remodeling, nay rebuilding a house. Usually they aren't pleasant surprises. As you've no doubt noticed there isn't much of the "old" house that we feel worth saving, but one of the things that we were hoping to reuse was the foundation.

Surprise!! The north foundation wall just wasn't fixable, and even though we are well in to the second story, we had to go back to the bottom and replace it.

This is the wall that had the chimney on it. This is what the first story wall looked like behind the chimney:

You can see where the wood is rotted away? Well that water went right down in to the foundation as well. Plus this wall is only a few feet away from the neighbors house, and neither house has an adequate gutter system, so all that water just soaked into the ground. I didn't get to the site in time to take a before picture, but here's the trench and the big gaping hole waiting for the masons to come and wall it back up.

And here it is the next day after it's walled back up again:

Check out those swank glass block windows! In addition to the wall they squared up and enclosed the strange ledges around the outside walls.

If you have a good imagination you'll be able to see that the basement is actually going to be a very nice space, which is exciting since it used to be a scary dungeon full of mold and funk.

And another exciting development:

A truly historic moment, the last dumpster being hauled away!

We keep expecting a phone call to say that our trusses are here, but so far no word. We ordered them a couple of weeks ago, so they are overdue.

Untimely post...

All of these pictures were taken over a week ago, so these are rather out of date. My excuse?

Okay, that's a little unfair, actually he's a very sweet natured little guy. I've noticed that there are some silly questions that new parents get asked everytime someone new meets the baby..."is he sleeping through the night?" No of course he's not, he's only a month old. "Is he a good baby?" Is there such a thing as a "bad" baby? He is like all babies, he is a perfect angel as long as you are doing exactly what he wants to be doing. This is usually eating.

The house is plugging along though, thanks to our crew of carpenters.

Here's the downstairs bedroom, the door is on an angle which will theoretically provide us with a little more space in the livingroom/diningroom area. All of the downstairs framing is in, even the staircase.

It's really starting to look like a house, at least on the first floor. As the space is taking shape we are having to do some serious thinking about our layout. The staircases are taking up a lot more space than they did on paper. There is a strange shelf, or ledge running around the outside walls in the basement, possibly because the basement started as a crawl space and was excavated to make space for a furnace and waterheater, and why dig more than you have to? The problem is that basement stairway has to run 12" in from the outside wall, so that's a lot of floorspace lost in order to make the headroom we need to pass code. So our "livingroom" has become more of a living "nook." We're thinking "cozy," and keeping our fingers crossed.

The upstairs is shaping up as well. I haven't been on sight for awhile, so I understand that the interior framing is well underway. The other complication with our stairway is that it's taking up more of our upstairs bathroom than we had planned on, so we're trying to figure out if we can still fit a bathtub, or if we are going to have to go with a shower.

The trusses are ordered for the roof, and we were thinking that they would be in this week, but they haven't arrived yet. Eli is using the extra time to work on the flat roof over the addition. There are some pretty rotten spots, after tearing off the asphalt it's surprising that it didn't leak more than it did.

And it leaked, boy did it leak. Flat roofs tend to do that after awhile, but Eli is a retired roofer so at least we know that it will be done right this time.

I'm going to try to be onsite (if Petoh cooperates, always a gamble) when they set the trusses, so look forward to that next week.

Movin' on up...

This is just a teaser post to show the progress that's been made since the last post. Look! A second story.

Now that we are actually getting some walls up (the first floor is basically framed in) we are having to make some decisions about our layout. It's amazing how different 3 feet looks on paper vs. real life.