Thursday of last week, the excavator dug out the area for the master bedroom wing (which will also have the library, office, and guest bedrooms). Today he dug out the garage wing. So we have lots of large dirt piles and an impressive loss of grassy surfaces. Tomorrow, the footers will be dug out. More on that later.
Here are the dug out areas for the master bedroom wing (photo #1) and the garage wing (photo #2).
Co-Del Construction had some excavation equipment out today for some preliminary work. They removed a tree, a tree stump, shrubs, an air conditioner, a brick fireplace, and part of a deck. They also added a temporary driveway and dug up some of the bank to prep it for taking more dirt when the footers are dug out.
More pictures follow after the break (click to embiggen). It doesn’t quite look like the house in The Money Pit yet, but we’ll get there!
Today was our official start day for the remodel! Co-Del Construction was out today to put in the marker pins for the excavation. As soon as the surveyor comes and signs off and the township signs off on the placement (which is already approved in the construction permit, but just has to be verified before they start digging and pouring concrete), then they can come out and start digging for the foundation footers. That could be as early as Thursday, but more likely, it will be Friday or Monday.
Tomorrow, they’ll be coming out to get rid of topsoil and extraneous landscape obstacles (little tree, bushes, stump, corpses, whatever…), so the place will finally start to look like a construction zone!
So as of the last update, we had gotten our construction loan and were hoping to start during the first or second week in January. However (of course there’s a "however"), the unpleasant, single-digit cold snap started right around that time. We met with the builder and he said he was willing to start, but wanted us to know what the risks were. Part of one of our additions is below grade for about half its length, so that part requires a concrete block wall. Since it’s also on the windiest side of the house, that means it’s at the highest risk for concrete cracking during the cold and, while you can take steps to mitigate that risk (cover it up with blankets, use a heater, etc), it’s a risk that we decided it would be best to avoid by waiting a bit longer. We decided to wait until the end of February as a possible starting time.
It’s now the end of February and there’s been quite a bit of single-digit, overnight temperatures, so we’re going to wait another couple weeks and hope the weather moves on to a warming trend here so the ground can thaw out a bit and we’ll have better conditions for excavating, laying pipe, pouring foundations, and building block walls. So as it stands, our anticipated target date is the week of March 16th.
I hope construction workers don’t need to take off for St. Patrick’s Day.
I recreated (and I use that term loosely) the real architect’s plans for the first floor living area of our house-to-be in Chief Architect’s Home Designer Suite 2015. I got most of the dimensions correct (more or less) which is all I wanted to do initially so I could try out some room layouts and see what worked and what didn’t. The software lets me create a 3D Virtual Walkthrough of the plans, so… that’s fun! Once I got the first floor layout done, I threw in some furniture and kitchen cabinets and created the walkthrough.
The finishes are not correct and some features are wonky since I didn’t actually “build” the house in the software. I just created rooms. So as far as the software knows, the house is a one-story structure that is floating roughly five feet over a lush meadow… which also means the stairs up and down can go nowhere… and the ceilings aren’t correct in some areas. Regardless of that, it’s an interesting (to me) glimpse of what the inside of the house will resemble.
So this is hanging in our window now.
In case that doesn’t show up well on your monitor, the project description says, "Full home remodel, 2 additions, Deck, Detached Garage + Enlarge Driveway." To quote George Carlin (from a really obscure episode of his short-lived television show), "That seems like a lot."
And it is. So what follows is a visual depiction of the changes that are about to occur.
This picture…
…is our house as it was on Thanksgiving morning (it’s the same now, too, but without the snow). It’s a little three-bedroom rancher with a two-car garage and a walk-out basement (the door’s around back). There’s some attic space, but it’s the kind where you have to crouch down and walk like a duck to avoid impaling your head on the points of old roofing nails.
Here’s the computer rendering from the architect of what our house will look like when we’re done. It’s moderately close to the same angle as the above picture.
You can’t see the deck on the back or the detached garage (which will be off to the left), but you can pretty easily see the "full home remodel" and the two additions and the enlarged driveway. If the angles were a bit closer in the pictures, I could overlay the current house onto the rendering, but you can use your imagination to see that the current house fits snugly right in the center of the rendering. The front doors would align.
So… tick-tock. We’re counting the days to ground-breaking day which should be about the middle of next week. From that point on, we’ll be surrounded by mud for the foreseeable future. Hooray. Mud.
No, really. Hooray, mud!
Way back in February of this year (2014, for those of you reading this in the distant future), Lori had started thinking that she might like to move somewhere with a bit more space than what we currently had. A little more land. A little more storage. Just a little more room in general. She had had to commandeer my library for a Pampered Chef work room and our two-car garage hadn’t been able to house two cars for over fifteen years. With the kayaks, it barely contained her little Scion xB, anymore.
So we went off house shopping. We hadn’t really made a decision to move, but it couldn’t hurt to see what was out there, right? We looked at a nice nine-acre farm with a pond and a bank barn, an eight-acre property with a very stately house (from the outside), and a lot of smaller properties with nice houses that just weren’t… right.
We finally made the decision to actually make the move because we really needed to have a contract on our house before anyone would take an offer on a house we wanted to buy. So we got our house all staged for sale and put it on the market in May. Thanks to exceptionally good advice from our real estate agent (thanks Pat Manalli!) and Lori’s hard work getting the house ready for showings, we got a full-price offer in two weeks. The offer we accepted had a June 20th closing date… and we had nowhere to go.
We put offers in on the two multi-acre properties I mentioned earlier, but we got out-bid on one and rejected on the other. In the mean time, Lori had noticed that this property (where we are now) was for sale and both of us had, for years, driven by it and made comments about how nice it was. It’s a nice corner lot on a back road with about an acre and a quarter. Woods on one side and nice neighbors (behind a tree line) on the other help make it a great location. The only problem was that it was a tiny ranch-style house, which didn’t exactly match up with our plan to upsize our living arrangements.
However, Lori went to the township building and asked whether the house could be expanded. With the help of the township guy, she found that there was a ton of expansion potential, so we got our agent to schedule a viewing the same day, went through the place, and decided to make an offer then and there… with a June 20th closing date (which was now only three weeks away!). We expected to get a good response on our full-price offer, but rejected on the exceptionally close closing date. To our surprise, the offer got accepted on both counts. We had somewhere to move!
Before we even moved out of our old house, we met with a builder (Co-Del Construction) to discuss expansion plans and that started the whole remodeling ball rolling. Now, finally, we’ve got finalized plans, finalized financing, and finalized building contracts. We should be starting our mega-project in less than a week and it will take about nine or ten months to complete… while we’re still living here.
Let the chaos begin!
In my ongoing effort to show that our cats are not spoiled, I here present exhibit… 21,467.
But first, a little background might be in order. Chex Mix (known colloquially as “Chexie”) is our youngest cat and our newest addition. I think we’ve had her for close to two years. She’s sweet and got along with the other three cats for many months (cue dramatic music). But then, Peanut, who is sweet but evil, decided that Chexie was no longer deserving of acceptance and proceeded to attack her and do other, more odorous things. So, to keep the peace, Chexie became a permanent resident of our master bedroom… and has her own cat tree, her own toys, and her own servants to turn on the faucet for her so she can drink directly out of it rather than from a bowl because, you know, that’s just so gauche.
What she doesn’t have… or more accurately, didn’t have (until today) was her own outdoor, window-accessible enclosure. The other cats all share a rather elaborate one, so it hardly seemed fair (by cat standards) that she was denied such luxury.
Well that inequity ended today… and I have the scrapes and cuts to prove it (and the photos, but that’s secondary to my physical discomfort).
Since this enclosure had to be installed in a second-story window, I couldn’t make it as huge and unwieldy as the one for the other cats. It had to fit through the window from inside the house. Much like the process used to create the first enclosure, a vague and sketchy plan was devised at the kitchen table using various scraps of paper… and then promptly disregarded (mostly). The important parts were the measurements of the window… which I took at least 7 times in hopes of avoiding that “Oh crap!” moment caused by the box not fitting in the window.
So off I went to Lowes with papers in hand to buy supplies to build this thing. I didn’t have a shopping list, per se, because the plans were actually morphing in my head as I drove to the store. I had a rough idea that I needed plywood, some outdoor carpet, some angle brackets, bolts, cage wire, and… some other stuff (like actual plans).
I did fairly well with my ever-changing mental list, even getting a great deal on a carpet remnant. I got all the stuff together and organized in the garage and, realizing I didn’t really have any decent plans, went to bed.
Sadly, the cat box fairies did not visit during the night to do all the building for me, so I worked out the details of my construction effort and made all the wood cuts (with Megan’s help) and the carpet cuts. Then came the [profanity removed] cage wire cuts with dull wire cutters and multiple, unintentional blood-lettings.
![I hate this [profanity removed] wire.](http://www.digitalchum.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/CatBoxWire001.jpg "I hate this [profanity removed] wire.")
That done, the assembly process could begin, complete with hammering, drilling, stapling, screwing, and bolting. It was relatively uneventful other than a few minor errors in assembly order that were easily remedied by removal of carpet staples and an unexplained mislocation of several bolt holes.
Once the two main pieces were attached, it started to look like something that might actually come together. It was sturdy and, thanks to my excessively high number of window measurements, passed a test fit in the window with flying colors.
I had to make another trip to Lowes to pick up some additional fasteners to attach the wire to the base, but after everything was attached (and after a couple more unintentional, but minor, blood-lettings), it was ready to go in the window and be cat-tested.
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In the window it went. The fit was perfect (well… close enough to perfect for me to call it perfect), and it was very sturdy. I showed it to Chexie and held the door open for her and she walked right out onto it, sniffed around, and came back inside to use the litter box. I’m not sure if that was a sign, but I really hope not.
Here are some final shots of the installed enclosure.
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