design finch

This past Monday afternoon around lunch time I walked over to the house to check on the progress and this is what I found….

….snow and a gaping whole in the roof! The day that we were scheduled to demo the roof and exterior wall, winter decided to make its reappearance in the middle of May. Mother Nature has a warped sense of humor! That didn’t stop our diehard construction crew, though.

Shortly after the exterior demo was finished, the framing for the first level of the addition began to go up!

Here’s another view of the addition looking back towards the interior where the new living room will be. The big opening in the wall is for the sliding doors that will go from the living area out onto the patio.

This is the view of the living room from the kitchen. Being able to see the mountains through the clerestory windows while standing in the kitchen washing dishes will make the task so enjoyable.

Who am I kidding, I’ll still loathe washing dishes!

This is the view from the existing front door looking back towards the kitchen. It’s really fun to finally be able to get a sense of the space in person after looking at the plans on paper for the past six months!

This weekend Jason and I did a little yard work at the house….not sure that we should label it “progress” since we basically just dug up all of the shrubs. I also moved approximately 9,452 tons of rocks by myself and made a big pile by the curb that I’m hoping little elves will come and haul away for free in the middle of the night. Maybe they will completely re-landscape our yard while they are at it.

Despite a week full of cold and dreary weather (rain, snow, sleet, more rain!) construction on our home remodel continued.

Framing on the new garage roof is fully complete. The whole house will be getting a new roof once the addition is constructed. In the meantime, the roofing subcontractor is coming out to put down underlayment on the garage to (hopefully) keep the rain out.

We like the interior roof pitch so much that we decided not to put the drop ceiling back in. While we’ll lose the little bit of attic space that was up there before, we’ll gain more vertical storage space along the walls. Creative storage techniques will be key in this space because the garage is so tiny and our car barely fits as it is.

The electrician was also out this week to temporarily organize the chaos of wires that came out of the attic until a permanent solution is in place. Apparently we need a whole new electrical panel – just what I always wanted to spend my hard-earned money on!

Here’s a view of the garage roof from the backyard. The previous owner left us that lovely pile of garbage to deal with and, although we’ve made some progress back here, it’s still one of the junkiest views of the house!

The addition is coming along nicely. I can finally stand in my new living room! The floor joists are in, the subfloor is halfway done, and framing on the exterior walls is scheduled to begin this coming week.

This week we also picked out the new windows and exterior doors for the whole house. Well, everything except the front door. We want something very fun and contemporary for the front entry so the search continues. Decisions, decisions, decisions!

Three weeks down, only seventeen more to go! The weather almost didn’t cooperate this week. Believe it or not, it snowed off and on Monday–Wednesday! Yes, it’s May and it’s still snowing here. The end of the week brought gorgeous weather, though.

One of the biggest projects this week was lowering the pitch of the garage roof. The new rafters are about 50% complete. This was one of those “wish list” projects that we almost scrapped due to budget, but now we’re so happy that we decided to move forward.

The interior of the garage is currently a mess of electrical wires and shady-looking scaffolding. Oh, yeah…and there isn’t a roof. We like to keep things classy!

The other big project this week was construction of the foundation wall for the addition. The town’s building inspector came by to make sure everything passed inspection before the concrete was poured on Friday afternoon. We got the green light!

The mudroom is also looking especially classy right now. Roof…who needs a roof? I am kinda digging all of the natural sunlight anyway.

Now that the wall between the guest bath and old master bath is down, you can really get a sense of the size of the new guest bathroom. The white pipe in the middle of the room is where the old wall used to divide the two bathrooms.

This loft in the old master bedroom was kind of pointless. The previous tenants had a desk up there, but mostly it was a graveyard for spiders. We’re utilizing that space to raise the ceiling in the bathroom below.

Praying the snow is finally behind us and only sunny, bluebird days ahead. Happy spring!

We hired a contractor and construction is officially underway on our house! The crew started on April 14th and it’s amazing how much progress they made in the first week.

The weekend before the contractor began, Jason and I completely gutted the kitchen. We donated all of the appliances to Habitat for Humanity and sold the kitchen cabinets on Craigslist.

The contractor completed most of the demo within the first couple of days on the job. The existing front door will eventually be relocated and this space will become our new dining area. The coat closet in the old entry was the first thing to go!

Next came the ceilings. We decided to remove the drywall on the ceilings throughout the house to get rid of the popcorn texture. This will also allow the contractor to blow in foam insulation and re-wire the electricity to add more lighting.

The closet in the front guest room will be relocated to the opposite wall. The old bedroom closet will become the new coat closet, which will be accessible from the new front entry.

The old master bedroom will become the second guest bedroom. In addition to removing the ceilings, the interior doors and flooring have also been removed throughout the house.

The guest bath is one of the spaces that is undergoing the most dramatic transformation. We are combining two bathrooms into one larger guest bathroom by knocking down the wall that divided the old master bath from the guest bath. We will also be raising the ceiling height in this space to make it feel larger.

We call this the “money pit” because this is a very, very expensive hole. After the excavator did its work, they brought in a machine to pack down the dirt. This will become the crawl space for our new addition. The new living area will be on the ground floor and our master suite will be upstairs.

At the end of the week, the contractor began to build the formwork for the footers. We had planned to start pouring concrete next week, but unfortunately it’s been raining today. Hopefully it will all dry out soon so that we can continue to move forward. The contractor is estimating 20 weeks for construction, which means we should wrap up the last week of August. It’s going to be a busy summer!