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:

Change over time

Here is a set of photos essentially all taken from the same place.

The original.

The original after we'd stripped it of drywall.

Now some of the overall plan is starting to take shape.  The front door has been moved toward where the camera is so that we could put in a flight of stairs between the door and the wall next to it.  That wall behind the stairwell has been moved about 1.5 feet further from the camera.  The ceiling is gone and there is a giant ridge beam (which is structurally serving the same purpose (sort of) as the ceiling joists were). Also, that hallway back to the bedrooms has shifted over, and the old hallway is now going to be the master closet.  The kitchen is still going to be in the same place, but it will be smaller.  But it will feel bigger (because we're using magic).

Interior shots

Here are some shots of the interior before we went to town on it, so to speak:

This is the living room taken from very near the front door.

Another shot of the living area, taken from near the kitchen and the hall that led to the bedrooms.

Living room taken from the corner seen in the last two photos looking at the front entrance (on right), the door to the kitchen (left) and the hall to the bedrooms (center).

Living room taken from the dining room.  (That's my dad wistfully contemplating what a ridiculously huge project this is going to be.  And he had no idea how big it really was going to be.  Neither did I.)

This is the house

Here is the house on fine fall day, totally unaware of its future.