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.

House Renovation, Week One

Our home is listed as a 2 bedroom. For all their lives excepting the year in Hungary, the girls have shared a room with each other, and that's worked out well enough. But Stephanie has long tracked the aches and pains of our house, and had more reasons than room apportionment for pursuing a home renovation.

We're not good homeowners. I like happy neglect. But a couple disasters and opportunities finally lined up enough to initiate the full project--not just adding rooms above the kitchen's flat roof and not just renovating the kitchen and not just replacing the siding but all of it--new bedrooms, new kitchen, new siding. The piecemeal cost of staging different projects over time was ridiculous if we could do all of it at one go; and we could do it in one go with the guidance of a philosophy our contractor has taken to heart: Do it "good enough." I'm still most comfortable in a happy neglect, but this is hopefully enough to appease Hestia for the next bunch of years.


The permitting process took a month longer than we expected it to, giving us time to pack up the first couple floors and move them to the basement. Below are pictures of loose stuff now in our office, and of the bookcases and mattresses against the wall adjoining.

The first week of the project is now over, and after four days, there's no going back. Here are a series of pictures taken over the course of a these few days, starting in what was once our library (and half a century ago, a kitchen for the half century before than) and what will become a hallway abutting a larger dining room.

Below is the view from our living room through the dining room and into the kitchen. 

And here's how the kitchen ended up by the end of the week.

Upstairs, our bathroom will evolve from open chambers to a room divided by two dividing doors into a washroom, a water closet, and bathing room. The architect strongly recommended two bathrooms upstairs instead, but this plan will help the five of us share without multiplying costs.

Finally, here is the girls' room. We once had the tower of girls--a bunk bed for two and a trundle that squirted out for the third. Later we pulled off the bunk and built a bed for Sophie behind a curtain on the other side of the room. The window you see in each of these three pictures is the same.

And here is the view from our attic/sky stage right now.

Dad and Wendy have been tremendous. They anticipated this for a long time, renovating their basement to make it a comfortable space for the girls. It's no exaggeration to say we could not do this project without their help. And now we've taken over their house, and they've given us carte blanche to make ourselves at home there. Dad and Wendy still come in from Vashon for their work-week, but they're sleeping on Stephanie and my much smaller bed stuffed into their office. 

Maybe we'll dedicate a tile to their great help in the new kitchen.

Savary Island

                 An international crossing, two ferries, a water taxi, the back of a pickup, and a young guy named Jesse who unloaded our week’s worth of clothes and comestibles for ten brought us to a house on Savary Island, a sand spit on the Sun Coast across from Vancouver Island.

                Five miles long and almost none across, the only cars on the island had been barged in; the only electricity was gas-powered and much of the water pumped in similar ways. There was one store, a couple candy houses, one bar. And the store was like this: I only bought two grapefruits because I didn’t want to take half the supply; one pint of 2% depleted the shelf for a couple of days. I didn’t quite realize until a third of the way into our week how much I’d handed over when I gave my keys to Dave’s Parking back in Lund—the keys to the van, the house, the job. But for a whole week, there was no opening those doors.

                Our good friend Rachel had arranged this trip. The trip part was a bit of a pain in the ass, frankly, and I’m embarrassed about how much we spent on ferry crossings and the rustic semi-walled house where we were advised to bathe as little as possible and burn the toilet paper, but once we were there, we were so free. There was beach in every direction, and the tide would roll out for most of each day, leaving long stretches of soft sand and water warmed in the shallow rolling surf.

                Rachel and Isabelle’s six year old boy, Tommy, needed watching, and also their little dog (eagles were everywhere; and another of Rachel’s dog had a near miss in the past), but mostly kids carted themselves back and forth to the beach or played games in the house, or took the hike to the Sugar Shack down the Sunset Trail on the edge of the beach.

                On the last night, Rachel’s high school friend Amei invited us over to someone’s house for some folk music. Amelia, always up for something, brought her viola. Sophie knew there’d be fiddling and wanted no part of it. But when Sophie recognized the music, she got up on the deck with the guitars and other fiddles and stayed up there until we left. Besides the long walks and runs and climbing rocks with the kids, playing sand croquet, reading Dashiell Hammett out loud with Stephanie, every day discovering new strands of beach, swimming in the early evenings and waiting for the sun to set right before bed, the music gave us something new and rich to experience, and I’ll remember it.

                Before we went to play music, we had a poetry contest. Rachel’s a poet, and so she and Stephanie judged. Everyone who wrote a poem and didn’t judge won something—Sophie’s poem was Most Memorable, and in fact, I do remember that she quantified the experience in her poem a 6 out of 10; Amelia won best all-around; and Maisie’s won for best imagery.

                Here’s Maisie’s poem:

                Savary Island

                looks just

                like

                a mustache—

                A curvy shape

                one a face

                of water—

                Sea foam

                covering the face

                like a thick layer

                of shaving cream.

                “Oh no! Ouch!”

                The mustache

                was

                just

                shaved

                off

                the face.