Absolutely slabulous

Hey look - our garage is going to have a foundation!

Aaaand... when you visit, you won't fall through that treacherous hole in the middle of the floor!

Good news all around.

The bad news - at least for the purposes of this blog - is that B and I are out of town visiting friends and family at the moment, so the updates may be few and far between for a little while. I should have set up a webcam - is that creepy? What? I just miss my house!



UPDATE - big thanks to Steven for sending the following pics of the completed foundation!

Quick pic

Not a lot of new shots to share with you today, because we visited the site sans camera (duh!). However, Brandon snapped this one with his cell phone:

You can see that the crew has added a second floor to the entryway area at right (hooray!) - that actually happened yesterday. Today a whole lot of dirt got moved, as ground of the future garage is much lower and more level than yesterday.

We were excited to run into our fantastic designer, Steven Varnum, just as we were getting ready to leave the site. He mentioned that he is going to feature Turtle House on his website as well, so I wanted to provide a link for you TH junkies. Haha. And in all seriousness, if anyone in SE Michigan is looking for someone to work on a house design project, we absolutely can't say enough good things about Steven!

Houston, we have a porch

I didn't do an update yesterday because the progress was mostly more impossible-to-photograph framing, but here are a few of the better shots. (I am going to work on a floor plan post next, which I will link here when it's done - that should make everything a bit easier to understand.)

Our bedroom wall now goes all the way to the ceiling!

Here is the door from our bedroom to the upstairs bathroom:

There was also more progress on the cinderblock walls of the future garage...

Today we were excited to see more progress upstairs in the loft. It now has the beginnings of the south wall, which will be helpful for not crashing out of bed into the living room.

See that window? It's actually an interior window that will be lined up with windows in the future dormer (out of this picture to the right). Another terrific idea by the designer, since it will let us see the river view from the bedroom! However, it's a bit lower than we thought, so we are going to have to make sure it's not accessible to certain overenthusiastic canines (ahem, Simon).

The carpenters had also begun work on our closets - another major upgrade for us in storage, which of course gets me all giddy (neatfreaks unite!). Here are three shots panning from my left to right showing the two big closets, and the space in between which will be a small window seat.

 

Here is Brandon pretending to hang something up in his future closet:

The grand finale for today was discovering that they'd started work on the porch! It's not quite all there yet...

 

...but that didn't stop Brandon from pulling up a chair and enjoying the view!

Freeze frame!

(Hat tip to my favorite song when I was two. Not entirely appropriate, because the poor crew was actually framing in ninety-plus degree heat... but I am running out of snappy titles including the word "frame.")

Lots more progress to report today! This was the view when we walked up to the house:

Cinderblocks! Yes I may have jumped up and down and squealed a little bit. The foundation guys were here all day working on our future garage. Here is another view of the pile o' future car home:

The following pictures are a series where I panned around the whole scene from my left to my right. Please take special note of the last picture. I asked Brandon to smile and pretend he was modeling the new wall a la Vanna White. This is what he did. I am not sure he's ever seen Wheel of Fortune (or at least I never remember this side of Vanna...).

 

Once we made it inside, we were excited to see lots more framing in place. Unfortunately, it is really hard to take pictures of framing and have it make sense at all! Suffice to say, they'd started putting the new stairs in place, along with framing for both bathrooms!

You couldn't really get all the way up the steps, since the part above the landing actually goes outside the current exterior wall (it is where we're adding a new room upstairs above the formerly flat-roofed first floor addition). However, I got this shot from below before we climbed a ladder to check it out up close:

The door to the right in the picture above will go to our bedroom, while straight ahead (middle part of the picture) will be the laundry nook, behind which will be the upstairs bathroom. I AM SO EXCITED TO HAVE LAUNDRY UPSTAIRS, you guys. No more hauling clothes down a rickety staircase into a creepy basement!! Life is good.

Off on the right footer

Lots more progress to report today! First of all, the carpentry crew must have been hard at work, because the loft is back! Only two days for them to rip it all out and rebuild it better than ever. Here are some shots of the new and improved second floor from below:

And from above, after climbing a ladder (no staircase yet!):

It feels so much more sturdy than it did before... and happily, no giant holes or rotten wood anymore. Always a plus.

The only downside to the removal was the potential waste of the good wood still up there -- giant (oak?) beams and yellow pine. However, we've saved all of it that was still usable. The beams will probably get used in the new ceiling over the stairway (to match the rest of the ceiling), and Brandon might use the pine to finish the underside of the porch roof. All to be determined, but we are trying our best to avoid waste whenever possible. As a result, the boathouse is beginning to look like a lumber yard.

Other exciting news from inside the house -- we have new framing for the future windows! The views kinda stink right now, but here is the guest room window (it looks north toward the back yard where the garden will be):

And the future dining room window, which will look out to a forested area to the west:

Hooray!

There was also progress outside -- the foundation guys dug and poured concrete for the footer, where the garage and new entryway are going to be. I don't think it's possible to get an attractive photo of dirt and concrete, but for the record here is how it looks!

It was neat to see the actual dimensions of those future spaces. We were worried that the garage would stick out so far that it would be tricky to turn around, but it's not too big and there is plenty of space.

I took another "east side" photo to add to the "Progress" slideshow in the right sidebar. I can't figure out how to get the captions to show here on the blog, but if you click on the slideshow it will take you to the Picasa album, which has dates for all the photos.

Heading back out to the house now for a cookout with some friends -- luckily cookouts don't require an actual house!

Construction catch-up

Here is the promised "whirlwind recap" of the construction progress prior to 7/6/2011. There has been a lot of behind the scenes work, and A LOT of picking stuff out, but I'll say more about all that in future posts. This one will just focus on the last couple weeks of site work.

The first sign of life at Turtle House was the appearance of a dumpster and a porta-potty -- two items that you don't generally associate with glee and excitement (6/21/11):

That same day they also demolished the decrepit outdoor deck on the northeast side of the house, resulting in an interesting "stairway to nowhere"...

The next day continued the demolition theme, with a bunch of debris turning the "stairway to nowhere" into a "stairway to large pile of debris" (6/22/11):

Doug and the rest of the carpentry crew also ripped the icky, rotting flat roof off the west side of the house, replacing it with a tarp that cast some pretty neat light into the future dining room:

The next week we really started to see some progress. The stairway to nowhere was completely removed... (6/29/11):

...and we're pretty sure we know where it went:

A whole bunch of materials showed up, including large stacks of wood:

The carpentry crew sistered all the joists in the main floor, to help stabilize everything and remove the "trampoline floor" feature of the house.

They also leveled the main floor using these shims. These look frighteningly flimsy to me, but apparently these small bits of wood are now holding my house up...

Most exciting (to me), they started framing in walls on the main floor! It was so cool to see the layout (that we'd spent so long thinking about) start to come to life. This is the view from the dining room into the guest room:

And turning the other way, from the dining room into what will be a wall, behind which will be the stairwell (you can see where the landing will be):

The next day (7/1/11) I remembered to document the super official looking permits for the construction site.

We also finally said goodbye to the offensively ugly chimney that had blighted our poor little ugly house (OK, among numerous other blights).

 

Also, the future dining room got a roof! This is where the old flat roof used to be, and where we are adding another room on the second floor.

The morning of 7/1/11, Brandon and I met the crew at the site to help/document the crazy process of getting our MASSIVE new ridge beams from the ground to the top level of the house. This amazing process was really worthy of its own post, but suffice to say we were incredibly impressed by the ingenuity of rigging, pulleys, and trucks that managed this feat. Here is Brandon with the massive beams:

And here are some shots of the process...

Success!!

Finally, they also shored up the ceiling in preparation for removing all the strange scaffolding up there, and replacing it with the new ridge beams. Brandon and I thought it looked like they were getting ready to build a boat.

 

And that brings us all the way to yesterday (phew!), 7/5/11. Yesterday marked the beginning of the excavation work, which will apparently be ongoing tomorrow. They dug the area where the new entryway will be:

And then started work on the foundation for the garage, but hit a snafu when the gas line was not where it was expected to be. As of now, we are expecting the gas company to come out tomorrow to look into options for moving the gas line so that foundation work can continue. The excavator also has a bunch of work to do in the backyard where the geothermal loops are going to be. While the excavator was there, the driver offered to get rid of Brandon's nemesis, a.k.a. the unnecessary cinder block wall next to the boat house... see ya, cinder block wall!

And... I think that brings us up to date! I will be adding more background info in other posts, but now I should be able to post quick construction updates for friends and family (and myself, when I'm happily moved in and need a trip down memory lane!).