It's beginning to look a lot like a house

I've been lazy the last week, so I've got a lot to cover. Our house is starting to look like a real house again. They've taken out part of the wall between the kitchen and the laundry room; a new wall will go in its place, with the refrigerator in front of it. And they've put up the studs in the rest of the first floor, preparing to put up drywall next week.




There's been so much work that we won't be able to see once the new walls and ceilings go up. I've mentioned all the electrical work that's been done; here's a look at new plumbing on the first floor in the front room, for the new bathroom that will go directly above it on the second floor (more on that shortly).


The threshold between the front room and the middle/dining room needed some work; it needed more structural support, so here's what it looked like before it was fixed. This is looking up at the threshold, where we had just wooden beams supporting the brick:


And here's the after, supported by steel beams on three sides:


In the middle room, we have one oddly placed window. It's between the chimney and the wall shared with the front room. It's also an odd shape, tall and narrow, and is the only source of natural light in this room. Of course, just like everything else, it needs to be replaced. That's not surprising; just look at it:

They've taken it out, and we have a board in its place for the time being:

And that's about it for the first floor for now. They didn't want to start the drywall on Friday, so they moved upstairs and did a little work. I'll post pictures of the entire second floor eventually, but here are a few that I took before they demolished one of the walls upstairs. This is looking from the bottom of the stairs on the second floor and is directly above the entrance way on the first floor. The wall on the left is the wall they tore down. A new wall will go up farther to the left, and a closet and a bathroom will go in the space between the partition and the new wall.

The door leads to a small balcony, but since we're putting a closet in front of it, it will be sealed off. It needs replacing anyway (shocking). Here's a view of that wall from the other side:

This room will be a bedroom. We're using it for storage right now; all of our crap is shoved up against the other side. We'll be moving it out this weekend; most of the stuff is trash anyway. So here's what that wall looks like now:

The work done taking down the wall left a nice layer of dust over everything in this room and the kitchen, which is off to the right. The cats don't seem to mind, though, but their paws sure do get dirty. Kirin is gray, so it's hard to tell when she's filthy, but Tanga the orange tabby can't hide it so well:

Now that we have subfloors throughout the first floor and no access to underneath the house, we've the let the cats have free reign again. I never posted a picture of our system that kept them from getting downstairs. We originally just put up a large map at the top of the stairs, but Tanga isn't as fat as we thought and can fit through the railing on the side, so he would just jump down onto the stairs and make himself at home under the house. That is until the workers showed up and he couldn't get back upstairs. Anyway, after several attempts, we finally came up with something that prevented the cats from getting downstairs. Behold:

That's a door turned on its side and old framed posters lined up along the railing, plus the map at the top of the stairs. Stupid cats.

I mentioned last week that we were going to Lowe's to pick out some stuff. That was exhausting. It's hard enough to choose things when you need to stay within a budget, but picking out things that don't necessarily reflect our tastes because we want to be able to sell the house, ideally within a few years, makes it even more difficult. We don't want to spend too much money on something that we love but won't enjoy for very long. We don't want the house to look cheap either. Plus our tastes are very different from each other anyway, so we spent some quality time with Lowe's last Sunday. I think my feet still hurt from it.

We still need to pick out floors for the first floor. We're reusing original boards from the front room, but we're about 30 boards short to complete the room. The middle room will get new hardwood. We're still undecided about what to put in the kitchen. We thought we would just suck it up and put hardwood back there, too, but one of our friends pointed out that with all the appliances that use water in the kitchen, that might not be such a good idea. We're going to Caravati's today to see if they have boards to finish the front room, plus I've never been and would like to look around. I'd like to see what moldings they have; our house has door frames and windows like this:

It'd be nice to have that throughout the house. We're also going to a couple more flooring places. We've got a pretty big Saturday planned. I know this is exactly how Michael wants to spend his birthday.