Why not work late?

Well, it's 6:00, but I'm not doing anything else, so I may as well keep going. I'm getting a little bit anxious that the summer is slipping away without enough getting done, so maybe I'll sleep better tonight if I'm totally exhausted.



I use leftover stuff from the demo all the time in the new construction, waste not want not and all that, but today I used a special piece, the old Andrew Jensen phone number scrap, for some
blocking. It got me wondering what other stuff I might hide in the walls. I have some old license plates, and I may as well put those creepy legos back in...

I'll need to move the wire that's on the left of the stud over to the other side of the stud to accomodate the window that will be stuffed into this spot. See where it kind of wiggles into the stud bay at the top? Unnacceptable. The client demands as much glazing space as possible: "I need to see the sky, Stephen. It reminds me that I'm free." If I move it over, I gain 1 1/2" and then all of the windows in the room will be the same size. The wire is kind of a long run, around 40 ', but it is all within the room, so it's just redoing a stretch from one junction box to another. And yes, I'll check and make sure the power is off before I start.











The light colored furring strips here show the dimensions of the new window going into the south bedroom. Pretty giant. Tomorrow or this weekend I'll get started on the header. Robert's coming over to let me know if I need to do any temporary shoring up of the wall while constructing. Residential Construction was disappointingly lackluster in dealing with cutting windows out of existing bearing walls.

Closing some walls

First of all, why am I bothering with home remodeling when I could be building this? That is the most awesome thing I have seen in a long time.

On the home front, though, I put up some soundboard between the laundry closet and the south bedrooms. It will help muffle the noise of the laundry machinery.

There's also a psychological advantage in that things are actually starting to look like rooms up there. Today I'll finish with the soundboard, maybe even insulate it and sound proof the other side, and then get started on the south wall window framing.

The windows for the bedroom will be arriving on Monday! That's exciting. So Tuesday, the bedroom should look really, really different.

Super Furry

Today, the stairwell and south bedroom windows were ordered (screw triangle windows, too much trigonometry. We're sticking with rectangles), I fixed the front door lock so it will actually open with a key now, and furred out the entirety of the wall in the stairwell.

Some serious Spiderman wall crawling was recquired to get the nailers in place at the top.

Except, of course, Spidey isn't carrying a framing nailer when he's scaling walls. Spiderman probably doesn't do a lot of carpentry however. What a waste.

The eleven windows pop out a bit more now.

This is the area that will get all changed around tomorrow. Instead of the one large window, there will be three smaller windows, all up higher for a little privacy. The furthest west space (right in this picture) will have a smallish awning window that will end up underneath the lofted sleeping/storage area. Next to that will be two larger casement windows. All in all, there will be more light and better ventilation. The furthest east was going to be a triangle window that would follow the line of the roof, but forget about that. Looked totally goofy in the scaled sketches.

Heading to the window store

Well, it's time to place that final window order today. So far, I have the 11 fixed stairwell windows, and I'll need a little help figuring out the south bedroom configuration. I have mocked up a loft to see what it looks like for wall space and made some preliminary drawings. It'll need
to be an egress window, so size will, as they say, matter. We'll see what the window guys say and then we'll run it by the client tonight.



preliminary fact-finding drawings

mockable mocked up loft

Missed it by that much.

Only one small revision to be made today along with framing the final two windows. The client would like this window moved two inches to the left. The way that it is situated now is such that it is about a half inch to the left of the window above it; just far enough off so that it looks like a mistake, not intentionally random.

After that, I'll need to draw out the windows for the south bedroom and get that order in.

nine-elevenths of the window framing

I managed to frame 9 of the mini windows today. 2 left to do tomorrow along with furring our the whole wall. Why fur out the wall? To make more space in the wall cavity for thicker insulation. The client was feeling generous and fit her vision mostly into the existing stud bays so I didn't have to put in too many new headers.

These windows go to eleven!

So it's been tough getting back into the swing of things and documenting, but I think I'm ready. This past week, it's been back to the grindstone after some weeks of other projects. Operation Get-A-Bike and Operation Launch-The-Kayak are now completed.

Yesterday I started furring out the south wall of the master bedroom (and moving all of the electrical boxes to fit) and framed the south window. It's a bit lower than we had anticipated, due to the persistent closed soffit overhang problem.

This morning I finished that off and the client and I mapped out where exactly she'd like the small windows in the stairwell located. I had made ten cardboard templates, thinking that I would have at least four or five left over, but as it turns out, what we really wanted was eleven (!!!) windows in the stairwell. And, as it also turns out, making windows look randomly placed is not as easy as throwing them up and seeing where they stick.

There's one that didn't stick so well.

All that old insulation will go.

This is one of last week's projects- putting in a small closet in the northest corner of the south bedroom. The new and improved safety ladder (borrowed from Lawrence, who was terrified of what I might do to myself on the old improved safety ladder) is resting in the closet now.