Two Flat: Remade

In my last post, about the Garage build, I mentioned we got a stop work order from the Building Department claiming our permit was invalid, which they later agreed was incorrect and allowed us to proceed. Unfortunately, that isn’t the end of the story. At the conclusion of that email with the building inspection supervisor, he indicated he would try to ‘pull back’ the case and if he couldn’t it…

Ok, the short version is we have a garage now. I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this and not just looking at the photos, that you want the play-by-play. Once again, I’ve done a poor job of keeping up with blogging, but I’m trying again. With Sarah and I moving the neighbor’s fence back a couple of feet the length of the garage, we had a few conversations with them about why that was…

After a number of quotes, we bit the bullet and signed on to get the garage built. We made an initial deposit on Friday and they said they’d be in touch Monday to discuss scheduling. Instead, Monday they showed up with an excavator. Unfortunately, even though the concrete demo was done, we weren’t quite ready for them to start. Monday morning surprise excavator! Primarily, we needed to get the…

I’m going to skip over all the things that I haven’t kept the blog updated about and go straight into covering various projects. So, I apologize that they won’t be posted in chronological order, since we’ve done a ton of projects since I fell off the posting timeline and the effort involved in getting caught up on everything is a big reason I haven’t bothered. So, concrete demo. Let’s back up a…

Just a heads up that my WordPress theme died and now the site looks dumpy. Even though I haven’t been posting, I try to keep things working. I’ll hopefully get it straightened out soon. In the meantime, let me tease you all with some projects we’ve been working on and I intend to write posts about: the front yard, the basement stairs, the basement exterior walls, the back yard concrete demo, and…

If you aren’t a regular reader or weren’t paying close attention, you might not even notice that an entire calendar year separates this post and the previous one. What can I say? I fell off the blogging horse. What happened in the past year? Is the house done? Well, I’m not going to cover a whole year of work, but the big development is yes, just one week after the last post, we moved…

With the edging installed and the railings varnished, we moved on to balusters. I bought three different kinds of wrought iron balusters to make up a pattern: plain straight, a swirling pattern intended to tie with the front door that we called “squiggles”, and “baskets” where several pieces wrap around to make a ball. Originally I was planning to put “knuckles” for these, little diamond-shaped…

Stair Edging and Finishing

As I mentioned a couple posts back, Sarah took on the project of adding a hardwood edging to the stairs that go from the second floor to the attic as well as the attic hallway that overlooks the stairwell. Carpeting will cover the remainder. The first step was to add a piece of veneer plywood to each step riser using glue and a stapler, next cover the holes with Drydex (spackle) and prime the…

Stair Newels and Railings

In addition to the stair cladding, I also needed to do the newel posts, railings, and balusters. We’re going to have stained red oak newels and railings, and iron balusters with some spiral pieces to tie thematically with our front door. I did a bit of online research and started ordering the parts I needed. I got the newel posts from the same company that made the stair treads, we ordered…

I’ve been working on the stair railings, and I’ll have a post about them hopefully soon, but there’s been a bunch of other things going on we should get caught up on. For starters, we got our countertops! Sarah and I went shopping for stone countertops for the kitchen as well as the three bathroom vanities. We learned that while there are lots of installers, they all buy from distributors and the…

This was a relatively small project. I’d left it on the back burner for a while, but since I was waiting for some (more!) deliveries to move forward with the stair railing project, I decided to knock this one out. Back when we had temporarily (several years) had the washer and dryer on the first floor, we ran a gas line up to it, using the segment that was future-intended for the stove. This…

After my sister Jessica helped us assemble the upper cabinets and Dan helped us get them hung, we realized we needed to adjust the height to match the full height cabinets. Dean came over and after helping get the full height pantry and refrigerator cabinets assembled and in place, we got the other upper cabinets down and rehung. Dan returned and he and Sarah started assembling the base…

Back when we started this project, we decided we wanted hardwood floors. The house had hardwood floors originally, but they were too far gone to save. For one, they didn’t go through the whole house, as areas like the kitchen had been torn up and replaced with plywood at some point. Next, we were changing the floorplan, so we couldn’t leave them in place. Perhaps most importantly, they were…

I built the first floor stairs quite a while ago, back in August of 2014, actually. They’re a combination of LVL and OSB, and the intention has always been to skin or clad them in wood. We debated a bit whether to do all stained or white risers and skirts with stained steps, and we finally settled on the latter, since the underside of the stairs is drywalled, and the stairs up to the attic are…

After the whirlwind post I did almost a month ago, I was planning to be better about posting more frequently to keep up to date on everything, but that didn’t happen. So here we are again with a whole bunch of updates to get you current. The good news is that this time around there are some things that are actually finished. We’ll start with tile. The tile installers didn’t show up on Monday,…

Among our many recent purchases for the house was light switches . I’ve been a fan of smart homes since before they really existed. As a kid I read an article in the September 1990 issue of Popular Science magazine about the “world’s smartest houses” and have been incorporating automation and remote control ever since, first with “Plug’n Power” controls from Radio Shack (a rebranded X10…

Not Much Finished, but Lots of Progress

I haven’t updated in a while, which isn’t all that uncommon, but in this case there’s been a lot going on with the house, we just haven’t finished much. There’s something about writing a blog post about something that we’ve made progress on but haven’t actually completed that is neither satisfying to write or to read. However, enough time has gone by and enough has happened that I feel we should…