House Renovation, Week Twenty

I've been sitting on an amazing picture of our house, one where two thirds of its walls had come down and it was exposed to the world like a fallen apple core. This was only a few weeks into the renovation, and the exhilaration of standing on the second floor, or even the attic, now just a platform before the sweeping summer world, was exquisite. Before us, the hills of the city and full mountain ranges to west and east, the blue sky of August expansive and broad; our view to life was open and full.

At the time I was afraid to publish the picture because I knew it would expose the house to Seattle burglars who pore over my blog -- the out of state ones too -- and they would rush the house and steal the suitcases of clothes detailed in images from our last blog and now lying vulnerable to the neighborhood. So I waited.

It turns out I had plenty of time to wait. Though we had originally spoken of a Thanksgiving completion date, we are now talking about Valentine's Day.  The house is safely closed up once again, and I submit these pictures as a moment of glorious expansiveness and possibility.

Despite the delay (and will it be completed by Valentine's Day?), Dad and Wendy continue to share their house next door with us. Stephanie and I still sleep in their bedroom while they come in from Vashon one to three nights a week and sleep in the mattresses we've piled in what used to be their office and now is just a landing zone. Stephanie has rearranged their furniture twice; we've brought the first Christmas tree to a home that hasn't seen one for almost a decade; we cover all surfaces with girls' coats and violin sheet music; but Dad and Wendy have been gracious every moment.

In the renovated house, there will be four bedrooms on the top floor. Stephanie and I have new windows in our room, but otherwise, our bedroom has been largely untouched. Maisie's room is where the girls' old room used to be, though it's larger now -- she has the biggest room by any measure. And why does the youngest get the largest room? Did she steal the birthright from a blind old man? When people ask -- because they always notice right away as soon as they see -- our reply is that Maisie will be in her room the longest. She is also our crafty child, cutting paper and cardboard and gluing pieces together, and the accretion of materials is better contained in this nice space, I hope.

Here is Maisie's room, in its various stages:

Here is the girls' room before it was taken down. The old eaves are apparent through the frame of their closet. This is the southerly view from their old window; we used to squeeze around this window and watch the fireworks in July. Maisie lost this view to a Sophie's adjoining wall.

Old and new are bound together here, as Stephanie is demonstrating to Amelia and Maisie, and to her sister Karen, at left.

The pictures below show Maisie's view to the west, with new windows, a dormer replacing the eaves, and a fuzzy blanket of insulation.

The final two pictures, directed at the northwest corner of the room, also have the benefit of capturing the two stages of dry-walling. And yes, Maisie gets the biggest closets too, by a factor of five or six, but one of the two seen here will serve as a house closet for towels and linens.

Sophie and Amelia's room's are the big addition. Built over what had been the a one story leaky tar of a flat roofed kitchen and bedroom below, the house now rises straight up, Both girls will have generous south facing views of the city.

Pictures of Sophie's room also give a sense of the new sharply slanted roof built high above the old one.

Though her room is the smallest, no one is as excited as Amelia. She likes a cozy spot to read, and she'll have her own built-in nook by a window (not pictured); best of all, she likes a tidy room, and sharing space with slobs has been a frustration she will no longer have to bear. And she loves the view. See Mount Rainier in the first picture, and you have a sense of it. See Amelia dancing in the second picture, and you have a share of her joy.

While the prefabricated roof trusses were lifted by hand, an idea that sounded so traditional and even Amish that I'm sorry I wasn't around to help, a crane was deployed to bring the second story drywall into the house (here's a video of the process). I present the pictures below slightly out of order to demonstrate the dramatic change of the hallway leading past the bathroom on the left and Maisie's room on the right to Sophie and Amelia's rooms, without drywall and with.

Originally, we intended to keep the walls of the 1970s addition (the kitchen and first floor bedroom), but our contractor, Joe, soon saw that these walls were not even built directly over the foundation but were cantilevered to the side. These walls came down in an extra day's work.The new kitchen will not be larger than the old one; in fact, because the former bedroom and now library is going to open more freely to the kitchen, less cabinet space (but more light and space) will be available.

 

 

Meanwhile, what had been our library will become a hall -- one with built-in bookcases, but a hall nevertheless. This allows us to expand the dining room several feet. The green floor beneath the old library are the green asbestos tiles seen in the first picture, accounting for a second unexpected expense. I am especially fond of the hallway pictures that follow: by dint of the narrow accessible viewpoints, I ended up taking the same shot at various stages, so the changes are both dramatic and easy to track.

 

 

Here is the dining room. The third picture shows the first window in the house to be completely trimmed. Every window, except those in the front of the house and those in the basement, will be likewise replaced.

Finally, here are the beginnings of our new library. It will be smaller than the old one, but more accessible and, hopefully, cozier. Stephanie contemplates on the right.

The next time I blog about the house, perhaps we will actually be living there. In the meantime, I write from Dad and Wendy's fat red couch next door, my feet up on our transplanted coffee table that leaves half a foot of space passage on one side, two and a half feet on the other. Maisie finishes a puzzle on a card table to my right, stockings and holly hanging from my father's treadmill beside her.

The pictures below represent over a month's worth of stripping and siding, now complete.