Progress as of today...

I haven't posted photos in a while because whenever I think I should take a photo I think, "no, I'll wait until that bit is finished," or, "I'll wait until we've cleaned that up." But enough is enough. Here are some photos -- sorta befores and sorta afters (*I mean, the befores are not really of the house as I found it [except for one] and the afters are of the house right now, which is 90% done, but not done done.).

BEFORE: Remember this? This is when we were framing the walls for the kitchen and the ceiling for the main room. Man, framing was good times. That was ages ago.

AFTER: Here is a photo taken from the same spot. The kitchen cabinets are in, the track lights are in (the pendants over the island are not in yet), and many things are "finished". The blue color on the upper cabs is just a protective film -- all the upper cabinets are high-gloss white once the film is removed (which it has been on some of the cabs). The range hood is installed, but the rest of the appliances are still to come. Also the countertops. So yeah, it's not done yet.

BEFORE: This was right before we got the spray-foam insulation. I am standing at the front door and pointing the camera toward the dining room and kitchen.

AFTER: This photos is basically taken from the same vantage point.

AFTER: I don't have a before from this angle, but this is the new kitchen and the hallway leading to the master bedroom and the other upstairs bedroom (there are two bedrooms downstairs that I'll share with you at another time....). You can see the electrical boxes in the ceiling for the pendants that will go over the island in this photo (for those of you paying very very close attention).

BEFORE: This was a third room in the upstairs when I bought the house. It had no closet, so it couldn't officially be called a bedroom. But it was upstairs and next to another bedroom so I of course turned it into...

AFTER: ...a bathroom. The window in this photo is the same window in the photo above, but the door to the new master bathroom now connects to the master bedroom (and not the hallway, from which the last photo was taken). This photo just shows the window (replaced, as all the windows were, with a high-efficiency, double-paned, low E, argon filled, blah bitty blah... window), the new sconces, the new vanity cabinet (that doesn't yet have a countertop or the two sinks), and the glass tile floor and "baseboard/shower pan thing". Look at the next photo and you'll see what I mean about the "shower pan thing".

AFTER: This is the master bathroom shower (missing shower head and grout). Notice the glass tile "waterfall" that connects to the "shower pan thing" that continues around the entire room of the master bath. The main tile of the shower is a "green" slate (they say it's green, but it's really a lot of colors in addition to green).

AFTER: Another shot of the master shower. The toilet will go behind the wall that has the window in it. The "sill" of the window was designed to be extra wide so that it could be a shelf for shampoos and such in the shower. There will be a glass door for the shower eventually...

AFTER: I have no before photos of the second upstairs bath (the guest bath), but here is a photo of the tile we did for the tub surround. It's Italian, so you know it's hot.

Paint!

We got paint! It's great to hire subcontractors, go away for a day or two, and come back to a house transformed. The sheetrock was all hung in two days, taped and mudded in about 5 days, and I hired a guy just yesterday morning to prime all the walls and ceilings and he's already done. Wow. I guess we need to get back to work now.

Spray foam!

Spray foam went in last week. This stuff is as fascinating as it is effective. The installer (the guy in the space suit in the first photo) has a spray gun that is attached to two long hoses that go all the way back to his truck. He also required a 6-guage 3-wire cable that ran all the way from his truck to a 50-amp breaker that he wired directly to our electrical service panel. The truck has two fifty gallon drums of the "A" part and the "B" part, which are pumped through a heater and then pumped to his gun. The two parts mix as the stuff hits the wall cavities, and the mixing "creates" the foam. But to actually see it happen, it looks like magic. The guy sprays what looks like a clear liquid onto the wall -- it doesn't look like a foam at all. Then, a few seconds later, foam "grows" from the spot he just sprayed, like an organic fungus in a stop-motion time lapse movie from a nature show. It's the weirdest stuff!

The stuff is hard to the touch within minutes, and all of the over-spray can be cut back to the plane of the studs at that point. I don't have a photo of that, but they had reciprocating saw with a 2-foot long knife on it for that part of the job. It took them two-and-a-half days to spray the whole house at a cost of $5,800. It looks awesome... too bad the drywall is covering it all up now (photos of that soon).

The foam is noxious stuff, so this guy had a breathing apparatus that was attached to an air compressor outside with a filter on it. The foam stunk for a day or so, but apparently does all of its outgassing within the first couple hours.

pillows of uncut foam

foam after it was cut

photo taken from the living room toward the kitchen

master bedroom

Living room

These two photos were taken from roughly the same spot.

Stairs!

Stairs are framed today.  Plus, note the transom window in the back bedroom (1st photo) and the skylight over the stairwell (1st photo).  Also, all the HVAC is roughed in, most of the plumbing is roughed in, and the basement has a new insulated floor (1 inch of EPS foam, plus 2 layers of 1/2 inch plywood).  Also the walls are mostly framed in the basement.  So progress is being made, albeit somewhat slowly.  (Maybe that's why I haven't updated the blog in 2 months...

space closet

Skylights!

The skylights went in this week and have really brightened what will eventually be the kitchen.

This is a view from the same spot as the photo above, before the ceiling came out (and before a lot of other framing), showing how much darker it was before: