The HVAC people were here today and have installed some ducts for the new system (yay for almost having air conditioning).
And they did some more framing: the brick wall in the kitchen, the door between the kitchen and the future utility/laundry room, and the wall and door between the utility/laundry room and the new half bath.
And now for the bad news part of the post. We were out of town this weekend and realized last night around 9:30 that our fridge was not on and had not been on for a while. So we have no food, pretty much. We had to throw out almost everything, just to be on the safe side, but here is what we could save:
That's right: cheese and liquor (and lemon juice and hot sauce, but what good are they by themselves?). So when the apocalypse comes, we'll most likely survive off cheese and booze. Good to know. There are worse ways to get by, I suppose.
So for the record, the following appliances currently do not work in our house: washer and dryer (the power is cut off while they're working downstairs, plus the dryer's broken anyway), stove (no gas, which is also responsible for no dryer), and refrigerator (power to the circuit was cut off while they were working and forgotten about). Wait, I take back the refrigerator; Michael ran an extension cord from the top of the stairs on the third floor down to the fridge to plug it back in. So we have a working fridge and a lovely orange extension cord hanging down off the top of the stairs. Good thing we've run out of appliances to not have working. I don't think I can take much more.
The kitchen is almost completely closed in again. There's Tyvek covering the walls now - serves me right for being so lazy about taking more pictures. But it is raining right now, so it's probably best that the walls are covered.
Exciting, isn't it? The look on the inside is much better - you can see the room coming together quite nicely.
I know it doesn't look that great, but it's really very exciting for us. The wall on the left is the back wall; you can see half of where the door will eventually go. Next to the door is where a window and sink will go.
The other wall is the side of the house; the dishwasher will go there, and you can see part of where the pantry will go on the right.
Some plumbing has been done, too. It looks like pipes are in place for the sink and the dishwasher. I tried to get pictures of those (exciting, I know) but it's hard to see anything. But there is this picture of some new plumbing that's under the house. Notice that it's UNDER the floors, not along the outside of the walls like elsewhere in the house. I'll post pictures of that when the work moves upstairs and into our bathroom.
Our new back door and kitchen window have arrived, so those should be installed soon, I hope. They're hanging out in the front room, which has turned into a storage area while work turned to the kitchen.
One more thing about the kitchen for now: the exposed brick. The wall between the kitchen and the dining room used to be the back wall of the house before the deck that was converted into a kitchen was added on. So we have the entire wall exposed right now, and we're deciding what to do with it. As much as we like exposed brick, and assuming this wall would clean up nicely, it's probably too dark for the kitchen. I'd like to keep it as bright as possible since there's not a lot of natural light getting in. So we're thinking about putting in a half wall and white washing the rest of the brick that's exposed. It might be a nice tie-in to the exposed brick in the front room. Here's what the wall looks like now; I'm not sure if the brick is just really dirty or if there's paint on it.
A lot has happened since the last update. Work in the front room has stalled a little. While we were on vacation two weeks ago, they demolished more of the back room (the future kitchen) and found some problems (surprise, surprise). That room was once a deck, then someone decided to enclose it and make it a room but did it poorly, so there were all sorts of structural issues back there. There were floor systems upon floors systems, and you can really tell because there's a space of about 20 inches between the back door and where the first floor system was. So here's what we came home to, after a week at the beach in a very nice house:
Here's a close up of the space between the bottom of the door and the foundation:
Some more demo work was done in the old bathroom. They've taken out more of the wall so that the brick used when the house was partitioned is exposed. And they've torn out part of the wall between the laundry room and the bathroom. That whole wall will come down and be rebuilt, and we'll probably move the door over a bit. Right now, we're thinking that we'll put a half bath where the laundry room is and move the washer and dryer in where the bathroom used to be.
We have a new water heater, temporarily next to the stairs, partly blocking the path to the laundry. But that doesn't really matter, since our dryer's broken. We were going to have it repaired, but the gas has been cut off (because they took out the old water heater and the gas was connected that that), and will remain cut off for several weeks, so there's really no point in repairing the dryer when there won't be any gas to heat it. No gas also means we can't use our stove upstairs. But I think we can make do with the microwave, toaster oven and George Forman grill. Or we'll just go out to eat more.
Before all the drama with the back room, there was significant progress in the front room. We have the studs for the half walls and columns now:
Now back to the back room. Not only were there problems with the floor, the walls weren't in such good shape either. So they tore down the two exterior walls. And since our bathroom on the second floor sits on top of the back room, we were advised not to shower in there until there was better support underneath. Yay for sisters-in-law who let me use their showers in the evenings; boo for feeling gross all day because of the showering at night. But, it was just for two days, so it could've been a much bigger inconvenience.
So, here's a series of pictures of the gaping hole in the back of our house as they tore down the walls and started to rebuild the room. We have a very weird porch back there, which is also getting redone. It has to be the most useless porch/deck ever built. It had this enclosed space with plexiglass around it, but it was a tiny enclosed space so I don't know what you would use it for. We used it for storing appliances. Seriously, I don't understand this porch.
Of course, one of our concerns with having no walls, which means no doors with locks, was security, so the two doors left wide open were covered with some boards. The next pictures show the side of the house again, but without the siding and everything underneath it, stripped down to the brick. There are also some temporary posts along the back of the room for support.
Thursday they started putting in the new floor system (just one this time), and yesterday we had the back, load-bearing wall replaced. We haven't had a chance to look at the progress yet (we're currently in Pennsylvania for a family reunion) but I should get pictures up soon, once we're back in Richmond. But we are desperately wanting to see The Dark Knight, so we may not get back to the house in time to take pictures tomorrow.
And now for the bad news part of the post. We were out of town this weekend and realized last night around 9:30 that our fridge was not on and had not been on for a while. So we have no food, pretty much. We had to throw out almost everything, just to be on the safe side, but here is what we could save:
That's right: cheese and liquor (and lemon juice and hot sauce, but what good are they by themselves?). So when the apocalypse comes, we'll most likely survive off cheese and booze. Good to know. There are worse ways to get by, I suppose.
