16 May, 2023

Finished (almost)!

2023-05-31T14:07:11-05:00Construction|2 Comments

Our construction project is all-but-finished and so I thought it would be fun to look back with some before and after photos. The only thing left to finish is the stucco on the outside of the dormer and that should be happening in the next few weeks.

For those that haven’t been following my series, the quick recap is that about 18 months ago, the pressed fiber tile ceiling on our second floor died of old age and fell down all over the bedroom and office that we had up there. We worked with my dad, a retired architect, to rethink the space; took months to find a contractor and get on his schedule; and in October, we finally started fixing the mess. Instead of just repairing, we decided to add a bathroom and replace all of the windows. The previous space was like a cave. There were no overhead lights, ancient insulation, and everything was covered with knotty pine paneling. We had been intending to update this space for about 20 years (not kidding) and we’d been saving up for it, but some other project always came up with more urgency (like replacing the furnace) and so it wasn’t until the house decided to self destruct that it forced us to jump in.

The previous photos are a before and after of the space. The following photos are the brand new spaces we created by cutting a giant hole in our roof where you see that row of closets. We added a second dormer, which made the ceiling high enough to add the bathroom and window seat.

One of the last fun details I added was to design some wallpaper for the inside of our linen cabinet. When they demolished the old walls and insulation, they pulled out huge booklets of newspaper from the 1920s that were used to insulate between the floors. It was very fragile, but I went through pages and pages and cut out all of the advertising that had to do with soap, toilet paper, and beauty products. I put together a collage of these that was about 24″ square and made a repeating pattern. The cabinet and drawers of this beautiful vintage furniture piece are now lined with this wallpaper, which delights me every time I open a drawer.

22 February, 2023

Construction Update: Waiting on the Snowstorm

2023-02-24T16:23:13-06:00Construction, Everything Else|3 Comments

When last we checked in with our construction adventure, we had floors. We now have plumbing and electricity and paint and bookcases! The project is actually really close to being finished at this point. But then we had to wait for the snow.

So once we got all of the floors done, they immediately covered them all up with brown paper so they could continue to work without anything getting damaged. Then our carpenter came in and started doing the woodwork. The whole downstairs of the house has all of the original 1920s oak woodwork and we asked them to match downstairs with all of the new stuff. And it’s just gorgeous. They recreated the wide base mouldings and the trim around all of the windows. And the paint crew color matched the trim downstairs too. Even though it’s brand new construction, that little detail really makes it feel like it all belongs to the same house. I am never in to popular trends and I really don’t like the minimalist/modern/Scandinavian style that’s everywhere right now, so that meant creating custom mouldings and so on. We figure this is a once-in-a-lifetime project so we are doing it “right”.

This little nook is a fun detail. There was originally a hole in the wall here where the previous owners had a space heater. It didn’t pass inspection when we bought the house so they ripped it out and there was just always just a hole here where you could see the original chimney from the old furnace. Instead of just covering that up, we added this electronics nook. It will have a glass shelf inside and it’s got USB and regular outlets wired right into the side of the cabinet. So we can charge all of our phone/iPad/watch devices. It is right next to where the foot of our bed will be so it’s perfect to drop things off when you go to bed.

We also built in bookcases specifically for our board game collection. We have a lot of them and they need a deeper shelf than a standard bookcase. These took a little back and forth with our contractors because, not being big board game geeks themselves, I think they didn’t understand when we said they needed to be both extra deep and extra sturdy. We had them paint the inside of these a color called “Indigo Batik“, which so far is the one little pop of color upstairs. The shelves aren’t there in the photo because they are still working on them, but they will also be blue with a little oak strip across the front.

And finally the bathroom is finished except for a last little bit of grout and caulk. One of the treats that I wanted as part of this remodel was to get some tile from my friends at Clay Squared to do a detail in the bathroom. I love tile and as much as I would have loved to do the entire bathroom in one of their tile colors, that was a little out of our budget. So instead I got 5 boxes of their “seconds” tiles in two colors (Pesto and NorthShore) and two sizes and I worked with our tile guy to make a stripe pattern that goes all the way around the bathroom. You can see that in the photo up at the top.

We paired that up with some creamy white subway tiles on the walls and tiny hexagons on the floor. I couldn’t love it more. The last few tiles we added to the back of the shelf nook inside the shower. The electrician came back and finished the lights and the heat last week. We’ve had no heat at all in the space since October, so that has been really nice and cut down on the drafts downstairs. The plumber hooked up all of the plumbing so the bathroom is all ready to go. And both the plumbing and electrical got final inspections.

Today they were supposed to put in the rest of the windows but with 2 feet of snow on the way and lots of crazy wind we all decided that it would be better to wait for next week. So it’s been really quiet the last couple of days for a change.

12 January, 2023

Construction Week 11: Floors & Windows

2023-01-12T13:21:33-06:00Construction, Everything Else|Comments Off on Construction Week 11: Floors & Windows

This past week has been all about floors and windows! The bathroom floor tile is almost complete and when I talked to our tile guy yesterday, he was nearly as excited about the window as I was. It makes the room so much brighter. You can see that this isn’t finished yet. Everything takes lots of steps. But three of the new windows are in and they make such a huge difference. You can see we matched the style of the windows downstairs with the three dividers in the top pane. These will be painted to match the woodwork everywhere else upstairs which is dark stained red oak, copying the style from downstairs.

We only have some of the windows still. Two of them are still on order. Since May. And sadly, these aren’t exactly right. Some of these windows are supposed to have tempered glass in them to meet code requirements and they didn’t do that. (Not sure whether it was a mistake in the order or the manufacturing). Fortunately there’s a solution: a film you can add to the glass to which is acceptable instead of tempering. So that still has to happen. And they also forgot to make this window with frosted glass. Since it’s basically floor to ceiling, you would get a very good view of anyone stepping out of the shower. So that’s really not going to work. Fortunately they make the film in a frosted version too. So our contractor is working on tracking that down. It’s always something!

Another new thing I learned is that there is an inspection for everything. Yesterday’s was the shower pan/drain inspection. A guy in a safety yellow vest showed up and went right upstairs, ran some water down the drain to make sure that all worked correctly, signed off on something official and got back in his car and drove away. We’ve had two plumbing inspections, electrical, framing, structural. Honestly, probably a few more I don’t even know about. They are very efficient.

Right now you can’t see the beautiful floors in the rest of the room because as soon as they got them down, they quickly covered them up with heavy paper so they don’t get damaged while everything else is still happening. But I got a photo before that happened. We picked LVT or luxury vinyl tile that looks like wood. I picked one that was the closest match I could get to the original hardwood floors downstairs. Because I love the look of wood, but we really decided that real hardwood was probably not in our budget. We don’t have any carpet anywhere in our house. I just don’t like it and it’s impossible to keep clean when you also have a love for large labradors. I’ve started thinking about rugs, now that I have a better idea of what this new space looks like. If anyone has a place you love to get rugs, send me a link!

2 January, 2023

Construction Week 10: Drywall

2023-01-02T18:08:47-06:00Construction, Everything Else|Comments Off on Construction Week 10: Drywall

Week 10 means we have walls! This couple of weeks has been the messiest so far. It is amazing how much dust drywall generates! The space looks so so different at this point. Since I last posted, they finished all of the rough in for the plumbing and electrical. The roofers were finally able to get here and put a permanent roof on the dormer and do all of that roof finishing. The weather had been holding us up a little bit. We had a temporary roof of plywood with a giant tarp on top of it. We had a big snowstorm come through with crazy winds and the tarp blowing sounded just like thunder for 2 days. So I am really glad that’s finished. We also have insulation. Which is incredibly important in winter in Minnesota. The whole house feels a lot warmer. There’s still a draft because the windows are all covered in plywood, but it’s an improvement.

We had a tiny bit of drama with the drywall delivery. A huge crane truck pulled up in front of the house but the operator decided that our neighbor’s mulberry tree was in the way, so he told our contractor that he was just going to “trash it”. Our contractor looked at him like he was nuts and explained that trashing the neighbor’s property just really wasn’t an option. So they drove off in a huff with all of our drywall still on the truck. They simmered down a little while later, figured out a different option and our crew carried all of those drywall sheets up the outside stairs. I am again glad that was not my job.

My favorite part of this few weeks was getting to see the real shape of the space. I told my dad (who was our architect) that I think it almost looks faceted. Because it’s an attic, there are angles everywhere. There are really only a couple of walls that go floor to ceiling uninterrupted. Most of the others are divided up by a sloped ceiling or an angle. I was considering painting some bold colors upstairs but I am now thinking that with all of those angles it might just need to be one color. I can’t wait to see how the light plays across everything once the windows are in. We finally have some of our windows about 8 months after we ordered them. Two more are still in limbo; we aren’t sure when they will be ready.

Today they’ve started to lay down the floor in the main room and the tile guy is here working on the bathroom floor to get it prepped for the tile. I’m excited to see how much lighter the space is with the maple colored floor and light creamy tile.

14 December, 2022

Construction Week 7 Tour

2022-12-24T12:04:03-06:00Construction|2 Comments

Here’s an update after 7 weeks of construction. When we last talked, the upstairs was still open to the outside. They’ve spent a couple of weeks making things more finished and closed in. The electrician has been here and replaced our electrical panel with a larger one to accommodate the new circuits upstairs. The plumber was here to connect everything up from the basement so we have water, vents, sewer and everything all connected up. The power and water were off again for a day so they could make all of those connections. On one memorable day, we had 5 different people simultaneously working in 4 levels of our house (that includes 2 guys up on the roof!)

They also did a lot of finishing to the new roof section and getting everything weather tight. We really enjoyed talking everything through with the electrician to help figure out where to place lights in the new spaces and how we are going to use the spaces. He is going to put some extra light in that end room because we mentioned that we like to play board games and he thought we’d like the extra light there. You can see some of the wire spaghetti down in the basement in the photo below.

Although we aren’t really doing any of the work, it is surprising how tiring it is just having all of that activity going on around us. There’s just a lot of coming and going. Mostly they’ve been able to use the outside staircase that they put up early in the project, so not everyone has been through the house. But the plumber and electrician both needed to work on every level to get everything all tied together. They like to start early in the day and I am not really a morning person.

We’ve been trying really hard to keep Stanley out of the way so he’s not getting in the way of people trying to work, eating chunks of plaster off of the floor, or barking at the new people. So we’ve started a ritual with him that after all of the workmen have gone home for the day we announce “You are free to move about the cabin” and then we open all of the doors and gates downstairs. He always grabs a toy and runs around wagging and gurgling at us. (We call his happy noise a gurgle; he sounds like a Wookie.)

27 November, 2022

This week they cut a hole in the roof.

2022-12-07T09:55:19-06:00Construction|1 Comment

What a couple of weeks it’s been! Once they got all of the asbestos, old insulation, walls and all of the rest out of the way, it was time to start creating the new space. This wasn’t without a few hiccups. First they needed to cut open the floor to install some new joists in the floor to hold up the new dormer. Our house was built in 1927 so nothing was what you would do if you were constructing it new today. Things have different sizes and spacing. And for some of the spaces, we weren’t sure where the supporting or load bearing walls were exactly or how they were constructed because all of that is hidden. So there was at least a day of investigating and measuring.

Once they had done some preliminary work to make sure the roof and walls could support it, it was time to cut open the roof. And then it snowed. Sigh. We knew that the snow was going to be a problem at some point during this project. So they delayed a day, but meanwhile the crane showed up to deliver two steel beams that are now helping to hold up the new roof.

They lifted the beams with a crane up and through the window in the front of the upstairs to get them up into the space. Steel is very heavy so it wasn’t practical to try and carry it up a flight of stairs. We didn’t know it at the time, but when they delivered the steel, they basically dumped the beams off a flatbed truck into our front yard and the brackets to secure them got bent. We’ll discover that a few days later.

Once the steel was in place, it was time to cut open the roof for the new dormer. Yikes! In order to have enough room to put a bathroom, we needed to take the sloped part of the roof and make it taller, so they cut out a huge piece of the roof and built a new section and new outside walls. Here’s me standing in the opening. If I took a big step forward, I would be just about in the doorway to the new bathroom. Up over my right shoulder you can see a reddish beam in the rafters on the other side; that’s one piece of the steel. If it looks like it’s a little wonky that’s because it is. And yes we are looking at the outdoors. You can see the roof of my garage and the big tree in the backyard.

Next they started putting in the new roof and walls. You can see the beginning of that here. Unfortunately things went a little sideways here. Our contractor, who is completely awesome, had to be out of town for a couple of days and the crew that was working on this part of the project were a little underqualified for the job. Things progressed really slowly for a couple of days and things like the bent brackets on the steel and some other major details got missed. I won’t go in to the details of that, but let’s just say that it was all completely fixable and because our contractor is awesome, it’s fixed now.

Meanwhile, the plumber was also here getting the plumbing set up to add that bathroom upstairs. He had to join in to the plumbing stack in the basement and snake it all the way up through the first floor to get it up here. They had to move some wiring so our first floor bathroom lightswitch is in the hallway for the next little while. Here’s a photo of the wall they cut open, but before they got the new plumbing in place. The new electrical will run through this same space. This was one of the major unknowns: figuring out if there was enough space to get everything up through this wall without having to tear out part of the downstairs bathroom too. So far so good! He’s got everything now connected from the basement all the way to the upstairs floor and you can see where the shower and toilet will be.

Next comes Thanksgiving, so we get a couple of days off from construction chaos. Hah! We had Thanksgiving brunch because my husband had to work in the afternoon and there’s a giant hole in our house so we weren’t going to go anywhere. For those of you that don’t know, Mr. Becka has a little side job working as a replay tech for the NFL for Vikings home games. So there was a Thanksgiving day game and he was off on the football field for most of the day. I was just settling in to watch a movie and work on some holiday gifts when the dishwasher started making an unhealthy sounding racket. Stanley was barking at the noise and suddenly there was water pouring out the front of it. I turned it off, I threw its circuit breaker. Still water flooding the kitchen floor and running through the floor into the basement. And not just into the basement but pouring down a pipe directly into the electrical breaker box. The shutoff valve for the water to the dishwasher was completely corroded and stuck. After a frantic couple of minutes, I managed to get the main water shut off and throw the main electrical breaker to the house. And then when the water was *still* pouring down the wall, realized it was siphoning the hot water out of the water heater. I called my dad to help me figure out where the shutoff valve was for that.

I was drenched. Every towel in the house was wet. And I spend the rest of Thanksgiving day in the house with no power, no water and no heat (since the power was off, the furnace couldn’t run.) I called 2 emergency plumbers and 8 electricians trying to get help on whether it was ok to turn the power back on. No one could help me until the next day. So Stanley and I curled up on the couch with a book on my iPad and a down comforter. That whole saga had absolutely nothing to do with the construction at all. We figured out the next morning, when there was enough light to see, that the water pump for the dishwasher had broken. So we Black Friday shopped for a new dishwasher and we are hoping that the plumber (who will be back this week) can install it while he is here. Except for the dishwasher everything else was fine and we were able to get it dried out and turned back on. Please think us calm and unchaotic thoughts for next week! It’s supposed to snow on Tuesday again and we are scheduled to get the new roof done, so I am hoping the weather gods cooperate with us!

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