Studio Transformation

As you know, my other business is dyeing yarn, and for years I had a job weaving saddle pads on a giant loom.  Seriously, the loom was the size of my car.  In my studio.  ACK.

In addition to the giant loom, I had tall shelving along all the walls to hold Etsy inventory and supplies.

This summer, I ended my job weaving which meant the loom would be gone and I decided I needed to convert some of that wall space to gallery space for my artwork.  I love having people out to the studio and I want to schedule some open studio evenings next year for people to come see the artwork.  Eric and I thought long and hard about how to make the transition.

We took out the tall built-ins and book shelves and put in heavy duty rolling shelf units that are much shorter.   Then my brilliant husband took the wood from the old built-in shelves and turned it into table tops for the new units.   We love salvaged wood! You can just see some of them on the carts to the left of the tall lights.  They still show some pencil marks from their original purpose.

Eric also built and installed a narrow shelf to hold artwork on the back and west walls.  This way I can display a lot of my art at one time instead of keeping it wrapped up and hidden.

The cart shelves can be wheeled away from the walls whenever we need and I will be adding simple fabric curtains to hide the boxes when we have more formal studio events in this space.


All of the dyed yarn is in the carts, which means I can reach every skein without a ladder.  Yay!

My studio couch is no longer surrounded by boxes and stacks of stuff.  It's a comfortable place to sit and visit, rest, sketch, or browse through some books for inspiration.  I love that couch.  It folds out into a futon as well, which makes the studio a guest house as well.

One of the things I'd been tripping all over was the set of lights I use when photographing the art for the web.   They fold way down, but I didn't want to have to rebuild them every time I needed to take a quick photo.

I arranged things so that the lights can fit back against this section of carts, which is always set up for photographing.  There's a wide walk around so the feet aren't in the way.  Much easier and no tripping.

This is my painting corner.  Not much changed here, except that the rest of the room is much more open with the loom gone and that really affects how I feel when I paint.

The light is a chicken lamp, with a fluorescent bulb.  Very bright and a great feature until we get some track lighting up there.

Another change was to the dye and classroom area of the space.  It will never look like a magazine studio, but there's more table space now for classes and the sink and stove are right there, keeping the mess confined to that area.

The door on the left is to a small bathroom - essential for us since the current house only has one bathroom.   [A second is in the works.]

I keep reminding myself that this is a working studio - a hard working studio - and it's okay that it's always in flux.  We've got multiple projects going all the time.  [That's an antique table in pieces on the table there.   All stripped and sanded, ready for a final gluing and shellacking.]

All in all, I am thrilled with the new look out here.  It feels great and is conducive to peaceful, creative work.  If you're interested in coming to the studio to see my artwork, please let me know. We'll set up a time for you to come.   In addition, I'll be offering many classes here again next year and will be posting the schedule soon.   Stay tuned.

A Door Where Once There Wasn't

Going....

Lest you thought we had stopped all work on the house, I am here to reassure you that not a single picture frame in this house is level due to the continuous sawing and pounding happening still.

Seriously.   Not one stinking picture frame stays level for more than a day.   I'd blame it on the traffic, but...there is no traffic here.

Actually, there was a traffic jam once, a long time ago.  In the winter.   When, within a few minutes of each other, the gas truck and the school bus both went off the road on the hill just past us.  It stopped traffic for hours.  People still talk about it and it's been like 30 years ago.

 

Going...

At any rate, one of our current house projects is the moving of some doorways for...reasons.   Briefly:  We had to cut a new door from the area outside the bathroom to the living room, which used to be our bedroom so we could seal up the old door from the little hall in front of the basement stairs to the living room [which used to be our bedroom].  We'll be putting structural stuff in that hallway [that's the short version.]  Then we [and by 'we' I hope you know I mean Eric] sealed up the door that used to go from the the bedroom/livingroom to the hallway outside the basement stairs and sealed up the door that used to go from the little hallway in front of the basement stairs into the dining room, so we could move my desk in front of there so we could cut a big door where the pass-through used to be from the hallway in front of the up stairs and front door into the dining room.

Gone!

I know.   It's ridiculously confusing.   The girls will be home in a little while and they'll probably get lost trying to get from the hallway into the living room.   At any rate, we can get to every room and we can also get outside.

There have been a few surprises as Eric cut into the walls - there always are with this place.   We found an old doorway in one of the walls where no doorway had any business being and for the life of us we can't figure out why it was there.  Maybe that's why they boarded it up?   We also found an electric line that had no business being there.   Not to worry, it was discovered and moved without incident.

And not coming back.

There is less dust behind the desk because we moved it and everything on and around it and the law is that if it's moved, it is cleaned, but there is more dust on the desk because sawing.   As soon as I'm done with this post, I'll be dusting.  Again.

By far the most exciting part was when Eric was taking off the last little bit in the middle left there [see last pic] and everything on the walls and desk started dancing right off whatever surface they were on.  Never a dull moment here.

The pics are of the new doorway where the old pass-through used to be just inside the front door.   Pretty nifty.

In case you were wondering, these are not where the doors will be going in the end.  They're just temporary solutions until we get more other stuff done and the old structure ripped out completely.

Also, sawzalls are the Best. Things. Ever.

I'm going to go dust now.

#thisprojectisnevergoingtoend

Old Front Wall Down

Eric knocked the old front wall of the house down.  

The old living room addition on the front of the house was on the left. [Original house pic, below]  We built around that addition, put a room in the empty ell on the right and built the second floor over it.  




The new front of the house incorporated the old front of the house - the wall with the old chimney on it.  The foundation under that front was the only good foundation in the original house.   We kept it.

After Eric put in the new beams, he could tear out the old wall with the window and chimney.  He did.  It was a mess.   [Top pic]

The chimney went first.   It took 2 days of sorting and chipping off the old mortar to clean it up.   We saved all the unbroken bricks and chimney liner blocks we could.    Here's the stack.

We'll use them for paths or path edges later.

We spent a day taking apart as much of the old front wall as we could salvage. I kept the window sashes for cold frame covers.  We took the nails out of the good studs. [pic, right]  Yes, it was a pain in the rear.   A huge pain in the rear.   I assume we will be thankful some day.   That day is not today.



[Today is more a day of swearing than gratitude.]


Here's what's left of the old front room.   If you blow up the pic and look to the back of the room, you can see where the old roofline was where the front room addition attached to the old house.  



Next tasks:

• Tear out old floor and joists.
• Dig out new crawlspace.
• Gravel new crawlspace.
• Pour concrete to join new foundation with old foundation.
• Build new front wall.
• New inside floor joists and subfloor.

So that'll take a few weeks. 

House Update - Support Beam

Once we got the upstairs floors done and the windows and doors trimmed out we took a bit of a break from major construction.  

Our idea of a break is to do massive gardening, thinking, hauling, mulching, more thinking, figure out how to get ductwork  to the upstairs bedrooms so we could all survive the summer, disconnect the ductwork to the front end of the house, install ductwork to the upstairs [yay! a.c.!], more thinking, more hauling, digging, canning, move the master bedroom upstairs to the guest room, move the living room to the old master bedroom including the actual furniture that almost didn't fit through the actual doors, pull up the laminate flooring in the living room, rip off some of the aluminum [!] siding on the front of the house, cut a 'door' in the old front wall of the house, seal up the old hallway to the front room to keep the mess out of the house, gut the old front room, dispose of the debris....

It wasn't much of a break.

Especially since the next part involved mixing, by hand, a ton of concrete.  Not kidding.   Eric is my hero.

The concrete was for two footers and two piers [inside the front section of the house] upon which will rest a load bearing support beam.  Load bearing is a scary thing.   It means it holds the house up.    Hence all the thinking.   This is not something that we want to screw up.

Here's a pic of  Eric in what used to the be the front room.  Piers poured.  He was just getting ready to lay the boards down to build the I-beam that will support the center of the second story.

Wait.

'But, Robin!   How?..', you ask, 'HOW is the second story staying up now if he's just now building the beam??'  

An excellent question.   There's another beam in the floor of the second story that runs the entire length of the house and it's resting on stuff it needs to rest on.  The second story is safe. Those piers are dead plumb under the upstairs beam.  Once this new beam is in and a support wall between it and the beam above, the house will be EXTRA sound.   We like extra.

Here's a pic of the roof situation in the front of the house.  You're looking straight up into the ceiling of what used to be the front room.  

WARNING!   This pic is confusing.   Also, it's blurry.  Sorry about that.  It was darkish in there.  I've labelled a bunch of stuff and then tried to explain it below.   You can click to biggify the pic.

Explanation:  Start from the top of the pic on the left side.

• See the new beam?   That beam runs the length of the house.   It's in the floor of the second story.   The new ceiling joists [which are also the floor joists of the upstairs] are on top of that new beam.
• You can see the plywood decking above the new ceiling joists.   That is the floor decking for the new upstairs.
• The blue round things are old light fixture innards on the old ceiling joists of the front room.   Notice that the old ceiling is about 2 feet LOWER than the new ceiling is.   [Don't get me started on the ceilings of the old house.]
• On the right side of the pic you see the Old Roof Decking and the Original Roof Rafters.   Yes. That's part of the original old roof, tucked under the new addition.   Eric stripped the roof when we put the second story on, but only took out the peak of the roof and enough to set the new beam and build over the old stuff.  There were excellent reasons. All that old stuff is about to come out very soon.

I kind of love this picture because it really illustrates the careful thinking and bizarre sequence of events we've had to co-ordinate to live in the house comfortably-ish while doing a major renovation.

Eric is a genius.

Oak Floors

So, there's been an extended period of radio silence here.  Sorry about that.   We've been busy doing the upstairs floors.

The guest room floor is installed.  We used more of the salvaged maple that we used for the other bedrooms upstairs.

The common room is almost done.  We used salvaged oak - from the same house the maple came from.

On the back of the oak we found this stamp:

Henry Buchholz Hinsdale ILL

We did a bit of research and found that Hinsdale is up near Chicago.   Henry Buchholz was a builder and developer in the early 1900s.  He liked oak.   So do we.

The oak floor is going much faster than the maple.   We can't tell if that's just because we really know what we're doing or because it's drier this time of year and we're not fighting swollen wood or what.   At any rate, we're grateful.

This is what's left of the oak today.   Our boards ranged in length from 12 inches to 15 feet long.  One of the things we have to do to make the best use of the wood is to put it together like puzzle pieces so that we don't make cuts and can fit the existing pieces together.   So, we arrange the wood by length.   It's tedious, but worth it when it comes time to lay out the rows for installation.   Layout is my job.   Installation [running the Super Nailer] is Eric's.

Layout involves fitting the boards to the correct length and attempting to get 100 years of mystery gunk off the tongues so the boards fit together well.  Sometimes I can get it off.  Sometimes it's cement.  If it doesn't then Eric goes at it again with the box knife [pic below] before final placement and nailing.

Turns out we had enough oak to do most of the floor upstairs and in front of the stairs. Woo-hoo!  We have enough maple left over to do the rest of the big room upstairs.   We considered getting new oak and keeping it all the same, but neither of us really wants to use the rest of the maple anywhere else in the house and we don't want to toss it, so we decided that we'd have a 'mixed' floor and let that be part of the house's story.  

We probably could have done something fancy to show off both woods up there, but we didn't know exactly how much square footage we had to begin with or how much maple we'd have left over after the guestroom without doing a way more intensive count than anyone wanted to do, so we winged it.    When we started with the oak, we looked at the stack and said, 'If we can get from the bookshelves all the way over to the stairwell with oak, then we can do the other area in maple and at least the oak and maple areas will make sense.'   We'll have exactly enough oak.  The floor upstairs won't match, but it's a good story. 

The New Bookshelves

Our January project is finally done and it was worth the considerable amount of time it took.   Eric built these shelves on the wall around the 'will be a bathroom someday' door.  [Right now that little room is full of salvaged doors and door frames that I picked up last year, plus the pile of tiles for the someday bathroom, plus a few rolls of tar paper for the floor, a pile of assorted wood, the drywall buckets and tools, etc.]

He used birch plywood, stained and shellacked to match the other doors and trim upstairs.  

They are beautiful!   I've started moving up some of our gazillions of books.  This will let us clear out the smaller bookshelves in other areas of the house that have been double-stuffed during the building project.    Since the girls both work at a library, they are graciously allowing me to do the first pass at organizing the books, then they'll finesse, and then I get the final OK.   We are one step short of putting Dewey decimal numbers on everything.   [I heard you laugh.   When I was a kid, I had a prodigious collection of books myself and I DID put faux library labels on every single one.]

Next project:  Installing the floor in the guest room [Feb], then the floor in the Big Room upstairs [March]. 

Lily's Antique Door

A year ago I got some old doors from a local salvage place. I was thrilled.  $25 each.   What a deal.

Not.

More than $200 in paint strippers [yes, plural] and hours of stripping later, I decided that would be the last batch of painted doors I'd be getting, unless I was planning to just paint over them.

Stripping [in any sense of the word] is not my idea of a good time.

I was so disgusted by the whole process, that I didn't get any 'before' pics.   You'll just have to imagine 8 layers of paint over a beautifully shellacked original finish.   The stripper killed the original finish.   The door hardware was covered with layers of paint as well and had to be stripped.  The lock was full of mud and bug guts.

The door:  Turned out to be fir under all the paint. I'm guessing the original finish was Garnet Shellac.  Gorgeous, red.   I can't get that here made up, but I can get the Amber and Clear.  [I'm not interested in cooking up my own yet.  Maybe later.]   So,  I went out and got some Varathane Red Chestnut stain and stained the door. 

If you look at the pic of the finished door, right, you'll see lots of black lines.   This door was stored in a barn and over the years it swelled and cracked the paint, then fungus got in there and started some spalting.  I love it.   I was able to save most of the spalting by not scrubbing too hard during the stripping.

Also, if you look really hard, you can see bits of paint I didn't get out.  I worked on these doors for hours, using maybe 6 coverings of stripper.   Enough already.  Plus I like being reminded of the door's past.  Plus, you already know my Let's Get On With It Already philosophy. 

In the end, the spalting looks great with the Red Chestnut stain and a coat of Amber shellac on top of that.   I love it.   Love. It.

The Lock.  Mortise lock full of crap.  Full story here.   I gerry rigged a fix, then when it came time to put it back in the door, it didn't quite fit, so I finessed a bit and now it fits and works great.

The Door Hardware.   This stuff was covered with almost as much paint as the doors.   Decades of it.   I gave it a long bath in hot soapy water [a couple of days' worth] then pulled out the paint with a bamboo skewer.   You can see bits of the old 'japanned' finish left under there, but way too much of the base metal showing....and rusting.   As much as I wanted to keep that old finish, in this climate, we'd have been fighting rust constantly, so we decided to spray.

Long story short, I went with Rust-Oleum's metallic paint in Oil Rubbed Bronze.   Note:  It doesn't say oil rubbed bronze on the can.   You have to just look at the cap.   Basically, this is black paint with bronze-y sparkle in it.   Tip:   Spray the backs first, then flip and do the tops.   This stuff dries fast, so you can do the other side in about 15 minutes.

In person it comes off as brown, not black, but it's really hard to photograph.

Still, it wasn't the look we were after, so we decided to highlight with some paint I had around the studio.  I grabbed a pot of  Versatex pearlized bronze pigment. There are other metallics also:  silver, bright gold, copper... This stuff is designed for silk screening paper and fabric [which is why I had some.]  We tested it on an iron rosette from another door and it dried fine and would not rub off at all.   A product that is designed more for this kind of thing is Amaco's Rub 'N Buff.  Check out all their colors, here.


The process is simple.   Sit down and apply with your fingers.  Stop when you think it's enough.  Since this is Lily's door, she was in charge of highlighting as much as she wanted.

When it looked right, she stopped.    We let it dry overnight, then installed everything the next day.

Et voila'!   I like how it changes in different lights.   Look up at the first pic again to see how it looks in a different light. 

Lily's bedroom door is done.    Claire's is up next with a whole different set of issues.

Bedroom Floors Finished

The bedroom floors are done!  

Before I forget, these are the products we used for staining, sealing and finishing.  

I'm very happy with the finished product.

This is Lily's floor, done, with the morning light coming in her window.    I love it. 

Love.  It.

And this is Claire's room done.   

Love. It.  


What do you think?!

House Update: Bedroom Floors

I know it's been forever since I've given you an update on the house, but the truth is drywall is boring.

Drywall mudding is boring.   Also dusty.

Painting is boring.   Also messy.

Sorting antique flooring is boring.    Have I told you about this flooring?   I found it at a salvage place, without nails [!], for 69 cents a square foot.  About a thousand square feet of 2-1/4 inch maple and oak antique flooring from a 1910 house up near Chicago.   [With the miller's name stamped on the back.  Henry Buchholtz.]  Also, every board was numbered and labelled with the room it came out of.   Cool!   We brought it home, wiped it down and stored it for a year in the basement.   Then we had to haul the blasted stuff out of the basement to the upstairs, which meant up the basement stairs, through the house, outside and up the ladder, over the roof, through Claire's closet.   Piles and piles of flooring.  Also, it was very hot.  There was a lot of complaining.    

I wanted to sort by number/room, but I was out-voted.   Okay, the truth is, I caved to all the glaring.   We sorted by length and end configuration:  flat, tongue, groove.   Flat/flats here, flat/grooves there, flat/tongues here, tongue/grooves there.   Then it was just a matter of being as efficient as possible with the sizes so that we wasted as little wood as possible.   Once the wood was laid out by size, it wasn't too hard to find a board very, very close to the size we needed.  

Laying antique flooring is not boring, but it is a big pain in the everywhere.  Old boards have gunk in the grooves.   They are bent.   They had been refinished once before so the tops didn't match up when nailed down.  It took weeks to get the floors laid.    If you ever need tips for laying antique flooring, then give us a shout because Eric is expert now.  Triangle jigs are your friends.

Then there was hand planing the worst of the unevens down.   That was my job.   I used this Bosch 6 Amp 3-1/4-Inch Planer .  I am a great planer.   [After the first 15 minutes or so of getting used to the crouching, pushing and noise.]  Planing was kind of fun actually.   It's the loud power tool thing.  Also, planing is dusty.

Then there was the sanding with the monster sanders that we rented from Menard's.   Sanding is boring.   Also dusty.  Also really exhausting.

We had to make some important decisions during the sanding.   Most importantly, how perfect do we want the top to be? 

Answer:  Not perfect.   It's old wood.   With a lot of stories [my favorite is the very old ink stain we found in between two boards.   Very old.   The top stain had been sanded off when the floor was refinshed earlier [1970s?], but I am dying to know Who spilled that ink and when?]  There are places where the old finish is still there where the boards were uneven and the megasander just didn't get down that far.   There are places where the awful dark walnut finish from the last re-finishing  didn't come quite all the way off. [Who in their right mind would finish light maple flooring with a walnut finish?   I ask you!]   There are nail holes from when the floor was originally laid in the original house.   There are cracks and dings in some of the boards.   I want those stories to stay there.   I want to look at that floor and be reminded of all the people who walked on it and worked on it for the last 100+ years.  I love every imperfection.

Also, I'm lazy and there's just only so much sanding I can stand before Let's Freaking Move On Already.

Then there was the cleaning of all the dust.   Three times, just to make sure we got as much as possible off the walls and the floor before the floor finishing.  

In short, we've been so busying doing the house [and the jobs and the garden and the canning and the occasional house cleaning] that there just was not time to document it.   Sometimes you have to choose between doing something and taking pictures of it.

However,  this past weekend,  finally,...FINALLY! we finished the floors.  And I remembered to ask Lily to take a pic so there would be at least a little documentation.   The pic above shows me just starting the first coat of shellac in Lily's room.  Dig that apple green wall color.  It's cheery, I tell you.

This is what we did:

First coat: Amber Shellac, by Zinsser.   I heart shellac.   It's old.   It's fun.   It's got that period look we're after.   Also all of the doors and trim we've salvaged had/have shellac on them, so...matchy matchy!  Also, have you SEEN what shellac does to wood?   Gor. Geous!  

Then:  Light sand with 220 grit,  and wipe down with tack cloth [cheesecloth soaked in wax.  Awesome!]

2nd coat:  More of the shellac in Lily's room.  Claire's room is in a corner of the house with a totally different light, and darker wall color and she only needed one coat.

Then: Light sand with 220 grit,  and wipe down with tack cloth.

3rd and 4th coat:   Sealer, by Zinsser.   It seals up the wax coat in the shellac and preps the surface for the polyurethane that comes next.   Then sand and wipe down after each of these coats.

5th and 6th coats:  Minwax, Ultimate Floor Finish, Water-based polyurethane.  It was a lot more expensive, but everything Eric studied recommended it so we went with it.   We only want to do this One Freaking Time and if you don't pay in quality materials, then you will definitely pay in time and aggravation.  [I know this for a fact.]

Pics of finished floors coming soon.

Installing Windows

We brought some of our new windows home during the holidays.   We went with a stock size so we could afford to get bigger windows.   These are 36x60.   Lots of light!

The trick was how to install these very heavy windows in the 2nd story without dropping one or doing physical damage to any of us.

You have to install windows from the outside of the house so that you can seal them up tight against
the elements.



This means installation happens from a ladder.  But there's no way that even a strong guy can safely carry a big window up a tall ladder, swing it around, caulk the opening and install the window.    Without hurting something.
 

So Eric devised another plan, using two extension ladders, one in front of the other.

He set up a smaller ladder between the big ladder and the house.   He'll climb up the ladder with the yellow rope, which is set at a proper, safe distance from the house.  

The shorter red ladder is for holding the window.  At the top of that ladder, Eric put a Pivit Ladder Leveling tool.   That gave him a place to park the window until we got the rough opening caulked and ready to go.  

It worked this way:

1.  The girls and I carried the window to the rough opening.  Eric climbed the ladder.

2.  It took all three of us girls to lift the window, tilt it and get it through the rough opening, where Eric caught it and parked it on the Pivit, leaning against the house.  Claire and I held onto the window the whole time.

3.  Eric caulked around the sides and top and passed the caulk gun in to me, and I caulked the bottom of the opening.

4. Eric lifted the window into the opening, centered it and Claire and I pulled it into place. 

5. Eric nailed it into place. 

6. We cleaned  the smeared caulk off the windows with mineral spirits.   Installation is messy.

We installed 6 windows over that weekend.   Only 5 more to go and 3 of those are much smaller.  

Fascia Board

The fascia board on your house is the board that covers the rafter ends and is the board to which your gutters are connected.  

It's important.

It protects your rafter ends from exposure to wet and therefore rot.

We hate rot.

As you can see from the top pic, installing the fascia happens way up high.  Our boards were 16 ft long and had to be installed at the top of a second story.   

By one guy on a ladder.   Eric. 

Soooo, the first thing he did was make a jig.   Two, actually.  It's a piece of plywood with a notch cut out to hold the board up while he nailed it in place.   He screwed the jigs about 9 feet apart...

 ...and put a pulley between them. 

Then we roped the board in the center and Eric climbed the ladder while I pulled up the board with him. 

It worked brilliantly!

One thing we learned was to make sure the jigs weren't too high.   If they were, then the boards wouldn't slip in easily and that was a pain teeter tottering the heavy board and trying to hang on to the ladder while getting it all steady and then lifting into place.

If you place the jigs a bit low, then the boards pop in fast and you can shove a few shims in the jig under the board to raise the board into place while you nail.

It does mean moving the ladder back and forth a few times and it's slow, but it allows one person on a ladder and one on the ground to do the work safely.    Safe is good.

And now our fascia boards are on.    They'll be covered with metal when the metal roofing goes on.  Then the gutters can go on.

After the Rain, the Roof

Finally.  

After the rain.  The roof.

Eric went with rafters instead of trusses because we didn't have any way to get prebuilt trusses up there, but rafters can be built in place.  

First Eric had to put in the ceiling beam for the second story and set in all the ceiling joists.  That makes the bottom of the roof triangle.

Then he had to build a ridge beam to make the top point of the roof triangle.   Then all the rafters had to be cut  and attached to the ridge beam and the joists/walls below [which is the ceiling of the new second story.]  

Did that even make any sense?

The pic is from late on the second day of roof building [the second weekend of the Big Building Phase].   

To make extra sure that the rafters would stay in place, he cut gussets [trapezoid shaped pieces] that he glued and  nailed in on each side of the roof [inside] where it joined the second story ceiling.   Sorry no pic.   The gussets support the bottom points of the triangle where the lower edge meets the edges of the triangle that go up. 

It took a lot of precise cutting and heavy lifting to make that roof.   It also took some nimble feet and careful walking so as not to slam one's head into the shorter attic area.  

See the red ladder on the left?   That's how we're getting up to the second floor right now. 

Yeah we're the cover story for White Trash Homes and Gardens.  I keep telling myself it could be worse.  We are, after all, living in a construction site.

You can sort of see the general shape of the new part.  The windows are not cut out yet up top.   The back shorter addition will be ripped off and replaced with something with an actual foundation under it, taller ceilings and a roof that doesn't sag. 

Also, we'll have a real stairway inside the house.   We are not planning on using the ladder forever and entering through the girls closet.   

In case you wondered.

Vacuuming the Rain

So, for some days after we started cutting out the old roof and starting putting up the second story, our house was not under roof.   It was sort of under tarps, then it was under the subfloor of the new floor for the second story, then it was sort of protected by the new walls, then the joists for the ceiling of the new second story, then the new rafters for the roof, then the new decking on the roof, and then the new tar paper on the new decking on the new rafters over the new second story at which point the lower story was protected from the weather, though the roof was not quite finished with the new metal on it yet. 

In between all those thens, it rained.  Several times.

On one particularly rainy day, we had the second story walls up and many of the new ceiling joists up to.   But not enough to cover with the tarps to keep the wet out.

So, we pulled out our wet vacs and vacuumed the rain for about 8 1/2 hours.   Luckily it wasn't raining super hard the whole time - just continually.

We used a couple of vacs like this one:

 

and I'm happy to report that they were very effective.   Most of the time Eric's vac lives in his truck and mine lives in my studio.   They live quiet, uneventful lives, saving their energy for emergencies.
Like basement floods or plumbing accidents or tidal waves of purple dye [Don't ask.]

Or rain in house.  These are the moments that wet vacs live for.  It took the four of us constant effort for 8 1/2 hours to keep the rain mostly off the new floor [which was over the old house], but we managed to avert total catastrophe in the structure below. 

That said, at the end of the night, after the rain had stopped, we went downstairs to discover that the ceiling in our bedroom was bulging.   After evacuating our mattresses, Eric poked 9 holes in the ceiling to release the rain water that had come in through the most open area in the new construction and let the water run out into buckets - lots of buckets.    By the next morning, the drips had stopped and Eric sealed up the holes.   Crisis averted.

Standing the Walls

I told you on Thanksgiving that it was only with the help of our friends and neighbors that we were able to stand the walls and roof.  Over the course of three weekends, ten of them came to help us.   Mark even brought his saw down for us [He's a cabinet maker] to make things go faster [It did!]. 

This is what it looked like the morning this phase began. They broke into teams and laid out the walls, nailed them together, put the decking on [plywood on the outside] and the supports and then they all stood them together. 

It was totally nerve wracking to watch.  

Each wall had to be scooted to the edge, but not allowed to fall over before it was nailed in place. 

Think about it.  It took at least 6 people to support every wall section while it was nailed in.  Except that one that Mark built which was twice as long as the others and which took every last person to help move, stand and get into place.  [He decided smaller was better after that.]

Mind.  Blown.

And they did it laughing the whole time.

You can see the exterior walls in the top pic and this one.  On the left you can see the diagonal supports that we held on to while the wall was scooted to the edge.  Once the wall was nailed in place, the supports were nailed in place too, to keep the walls from falling over before the ceiling and roof were put on.  

This is the pit where the stairway will eventually go.  You can see the old roof covered with tar paper inside the pit.  Eric cut the peak of the roof off, but left the rest to be taken out when we redo the downstairs.  

Right now we're using a ladder to get on top of the back addition roof and then walking up that roof into the new addition via the girls closet.

By the end of the second day, we had all of the exterior walls up and a lot of the interior walls up.   That's the closet area between the girls new bedrooms. 

After we got the walls in, the ceiling beams had to be set so the ceiling joists could be put in and the roof put up.

In the meantime it rained.   A lot. 

Old Roof Out, New Floor In

At last we got all of the new 2nd floor floor joists in and the old roof cut out.

Next we did the decking, which is the subfloor for the new second floor.

Here's a pic of the floor of the new second story.  It's kind of open to the wind and weather.

Which makes it kind of tricky to work up there if you have vertigo.

I have vertigo.    I did not enjoy my time up there, except that one last very warm evening when we were scrambling to get the last of the decking on and the whole thing under tarps before the rain.  [We did that A Lot during this project.]   That last night was glorious.   Beautiful warm late October breeze, beautiful sunset, great company [Eric].  

Then the weather turned cold.   The next step was to raise the exterior walls and enclose the space.  Then the interior load bearing walls.  Then the roof. 

And for all of that, we decided we needed some serious help.   And not just the therapy kind.