Bottom (coming) and top (going)

Today I got home and our roof didn't meet in the middle!  Todd took the middle out and put in the posts that will stay down the hallway in the middle of the roof.  Eleven foot high is quite high enough--so we'll make another plan to get light in the bathroom (probably skylights.)  He had Terrence help him carry these HUGE long heavy beams that he's using onto the roof this weekend and he said that sliding them onto the support posts was easy.

While the roof gets undone, the floor is getting done.  Here is the second pour of the foundation--the first one is the threshold where the front door will go,

this one is the outside wall on the cistern on the right and the wall of the root cellar on the left. We'll grade the walkway so that there will be steps to access the root cellar door that will be on the left outer wall in the middle (see the gap?)

Our living space

A lot of people have asked where we are living with the house all ripped apart.  It's amazing what one can do with the leftover space (the computer room, granny flat, laundry and our bedroom).  The first two pictures are upstairs--Miles' room and the TV room on one side, the kitchen, bathroom and dining room on the other.)

Here's our very full bedroom that looks like a bedroom/art gallery/library.  And Todd moved my built-in closet so that I have that too, just behind me when I took this photo.
Here's half of the downstairs computer room--a second living room.  This way we can be in one place reading the paper and Miles can be in another doing his thing.  On the side behind me we have the seedlings growing for the season, clothes drying rack and fridge.  One could probably call this an all-purpose room.
As we've made the adjustments I realize how much space we actually have.  Especially because David Slezak (teacher at my school) let us store some furniture in his basement.  But honestly, we have at least as much space as many city dwellers.  And then there's still the outside...

Progress

More demolition.  Todd got really smart and hired the son of our excavator (Terence) to help him haul all of the trash to the dumpster.  He was here again today removing shingles from the roof that's going.

This is the current view from the inside of the house.  The central (load-bearing) walls have been removed and there are temporary supports.  Great timing--we had a tornado watch on the first day of this!  Todd is reconsidering the clearstory windows--it may make the roof too high.  We'll check on minimum pitch before we make a final decision.
This is the view down to the cistern.  Todd is building forms to support the walls which he will pour on Monday.  The right hand space is for the cistern, the smaller space on the left (without the exterior wall) is the root cellar.
Annoying--I took photos of our living space today and they don't want to download.  It's really quite comfortable and not too crowded.  

Foundation (April 17)

Two views of the foundation as it proceeds.  Note the low piece in the center of the cistern (to sink a pump if/when we need to drain it).  Todd did this yesterday while the weather cooperated.  Today is still warm and sunny.   Todd demolished the roof of the screened porch, Miles and I did some debris cleanup.

April 16th--Demo and rebar

Todd got the footers ready for the first pour tomorrow (we passed inspection on Wed)--the sun has finally come out and the dryness is helpful.  On the middle photo you can see how he has supported the bottom of the footer above the cistern (with plywood supported by the existing house), at right is a view down into the cistern.

On the bottom is a view of my kitchen!  The whole house is a skeleton.  I don't think I was really aware that the house was essentially going to be gone (all but the floor!) but that's what's happening.  Lots of trash to get to the dumpster that is attractively nestled on our lawn.  Fortunately the downstairs loo is still operable--I couldn't face the trek upstairs at 3 am.  And 4 am.  

Day Four, Tuesday the 14th

We passed our footer inspection this morning.  Of course, it was raining today and there is rain the forecast for tomorrow, so I'm hoping to pour the footers on Friday.  The footers are essentially the base of the entire house.  In this case they are 18 inches wide and 12" deep; we have about 45' linear feet of footers to pour along the front of the house.  In addition, at the same time I will pour what is called a "monolithic slab" to form the floor of the cistern/root cellar.  The slab will be 12 inches thick throughout and will act as one large footer to support both the weight of the house along the perimeter as well as the weight of the water.  In this case, I am more concerned about supporting the water weight as opposed to the weight of the house.  Assuming the cistern holds 4000 gallons that will be about 32,000 pounds of water, distributed over an area of about 90 sq.ft.  In other words, about 355 lbs./sq.ft.  Not that much, everything considered, but still I wanted to make the slab as thick as possible to resist any potential cracking.  To further address this issue, the slab and footers will be reinforced with 1/2 rebar as well as being poured with fiber-reinforced concrete; the fibers help to prevent micro-cracking.

     Once the footers are poured I will be able to work on forming up the foundation walls over the weekend and hopefully should begin pouring those next week.  The foundation will be built from two pours so the concrete will have built-in control joints where needed.  I decided to pour the whole foundation (as opposed to using concrete block) for two reasons:

1)The concrete block and masonry joints are more porous and weaker than a poured wall, both of which are important for the cistern.

2)On the upper section of the house the new footers intersect with the old footers at the corners and the poured foundation will be stronger than a block wall in case of uneven footer settling.

No pictures for today, although most of the sheetrock is down in the back half of the house.  I will finish tearing down sheetrock tomorrow and built my temporary walls to support the back section of the roof so I can take down the two exterior walls and build the new ones.  This way I should be able to leave the majority of the old roof on (which is good, considering the rain we've been getting) until the new roof is ready to go on; the new roof will literally be built over top of the old one.

The PLAN (Read this first)

Originally we wanted a little more space (change the TV room into a baby room and increase the size of the living room so that we could use it for television also), as well as add a mudroom to keep the outside outside.  The plan was to bump out the two rooms (Miles' and TV) about 2 feet, then bump out the living room 8 feet to do this.  Huh!  The county wouldn't go for that--we're too close to the property line.  So back to the drawing board.  What Todd figured out was this:

He made the outside wall parallel to the road and extended it to the end of the screen porch.  The TV room will go beside the screen porch, the mud room will fit just before you enter the living room.  We'll add double windows in the kitchen and dining room (good south facing light), skylights in Miles' and the baby's room.

The second big issue (and this was really more important than space) was our low, icky ceilings.  The original house was a modular home, so the ceilings are only 7.5 ft tall with horrible textured stuff on them.  Makes for a very claustrophobic feel, and it's really difficult to make the ceilings smooth.  We also needed a new roof, so it seemed the right time to take the plunge.  Here's the plan (see the sketch above):

Above the walls on the edge of the house, the roof will start at 8 ft.  From the front of the house (over living room, baby and Miles rooms) it will rise to 11 ft.  From the kitchen and bathroom side, the roof starts at 8 ft and rises (more steeply) to 15 ft.  At the join, we will add clearstory windows so that we get natural light into the bathrooms.  The roof should look pretty cool from the front because it's triangular in shape (see the floor plan).  The roof from the back is at an angle that is optimal for the future installation of our south-facing solar panels.

Footer inspections tomorrow, hope all goes well.

Day 2

Today Todd built plywood walls to shore up the footers that will get poured as soon as we have them inspected (can't do it tomorrow 'cos it's Thomas Jefferson's birthday and the County is closed!).  There's a challenge looming where the end of the footer fits on top of the future wall of the cistern.  The footer gets poured first so it has to be supported but there is no wall below it.  Hmmm...

The other picture is just a view of the "house" from the bottom drive.  You can see that we took down the 3 big oaks that were really close to the house so that we'll get more light, won't have thirsty trees next to our cistern, and we can harvest solar power from the south.  Also less mess in the fall!

I'll post the master plan for the remodel soon--I guess it would make more sense if readers had a sense of our goals and issues.  I spent the weekend emptying the old living area of the house.  We've moved Miles' room, the kitchen and bathroom upstairs, the living room is now in the computer room and our closet is in our bedroom.  I've got one more salvation army run to make, but it's quite cozy and not too cluttered.

Saturday the 11th of April.  First full day of the remodel.  Fifty-nine to go.  Today I removed the rest of the kitchen cabinets and put them outside for the same woman who bought our dining room set to take.  Cut and capped the water lines to the downstairs bathroom and kitchen, and started to demo the kitchen.  We also moved the last pieces of furniture into our new "living room".  Lisa spent time moving stuff out of the work zone.

Picture of the Rinnai Tankless I installed in our laundry room.  We have been using it for about a month and have been pleased with the heater itself.

To the right is a picture taken along the front of the house.  The string line in the front of the picture will be the eventual front line of the house.  The picture shows the excavations for footers, which should be poured next week.

  The picture to the left is looking at the west end of our house (the front of the house is to the left).  The big hole in the ground will be our future cistern/root cellar.  Both it and the actual house will extend out to the end of the screen porch and tie into the porch (so the north side of the screen porch will actually be a wall).