Our (gulp!) Massive Home Renovation

This is the end, beautiful friend...

2009-07-13T09:43:00.002-04:00

...of the blog. If you are still reading this, you are one loyal reader and friend indeed. :) What I will do in this post is offer my reflections on the whole renovation process: would we do it again? what did we like best? what mistakes did we make? what do we wish we had done differently? I'll also post a few more photos from the finished product, now that we're all moved in. I had semi-promised a "virtual tour," and I did attempt to make a video. But the darned thing was 11 minutes long and very wobbly (I'm not much of a cinematographer), and the camera angle was too narrow to show off the space well, so I decided to spare y'all.

Would we do it again?

This is an easy question: Without a doubt, yes. We're thrilled with how the project turned out. Our new master bedroom is large and gorgeous, and the master bathroom is sheer indulgence and luxury. Quite frankly, the laundry room itself has made my life so much easier that I would've done the renovation just for it.

People are always curious about whether or how much the project went over budget or past the deadline. It did both, to a small extent, but for understandable reasons. When Wagner first bid the job, I told him that I realized that it would be hard to determine the exact cost ahead of time. He surprised me by saying that, on the contrary, his bid would likely be right on target, unless Jon and I made a bunch of change orders. And this is in fact how it turned out. We went over budget, but in each case it was because of decisions that Jonathan and I made during the process to do things differently. For example, when we didn't like the first skylight and had it taken out and replaced with a wider one, that added to our cost, but we feel it was well worth it. Wagner had also budgeted a certain amount for the tile work in the bathroom, which I greatly exceeded when I picked out the expensive floor mosaic and border options. But these were increased costs we were happy to pay in order to have the bathroom look the way I wanted.

In terms of total cost/value, it's hard to know for sure, but up until the recent real estate implosion, I think we would've been able to sell our house for at least the combined cost of what we paid for it and the renovation. Today things aren't selling so well, so it may be a couple of years before we recoup our costs. But it doesn't matter, as I have zero intention of moving out of this house any time soon.

We also finished the job maybe a month behind target (well, besides the built-in bookcase, which was delayed even longer--but I'm not counting that because we were able to move in without it). That's not bad at all considering what a lousy winter we had with weeks of temperatures too low to allow for any brickwork, and the two weeks we lost in the ice storm.

This is a photo of the foyer to our addition. The painting is entitled "The Far Side of the World," which is rather fitting, because when the doors to the addition are closed, I can't hear the kids or anything going on in the rest of the house, so I feel like I am in a separate world of my own.The painting was done by Peyton Higgison, an artist I met through the Piano Forum.

Random thoughts and advice, in no particular order, for others thinking about or embarking on a renovation

1. Hire John Wagner, or someone like him. Wagner is the main reason this renovation has been such a positive experience, and I've read enough horror stories of renovations that go badly to know that we are truly fortunate to have been able to work with him. You want a contractor who is accessible, reliable, detail-oriented, and obsessive-compulsive. Wagner often drove his employees and subcontractors crazy with his instructions and tendencies toward micro-management, but as the client, we appreciated it greatly and were delighted with the outcome.

2. Know ahead of time what you want the space to look like and how it will be furnished. Okay, that sounds obvious enough, but this a point where we failed miserably, occasionally with less than optimal results. Some of the delays we encountered on the project were due to my inability to reach timely decisions on major issues like carpet choice or cabinet finishes. I sort of went into the renovation adopting a "just in time" mentality, thinking that I didn't have to, say, select a washer and dryer until the day before we needed them delivered. Had I done all my research and shopping much earlier--in the case of the washer and dryer, before we had even planned the layout of the laundry room--I would've known, for example, to put the hookups in the right place.

As another example, when we designed the bedroom, we sketched out a plan for four smaller rectangular windows and the large picture window. The bedroom was built before we even went furniture shopping for it. As a result, when we bought the furniture and had it delivered, I discovered that if we put our bedside tables in the logical place--i.e., at the side of the bed--they overlapped with the windows somewhat. Had I known what furniture was going to go in there before we drew up the plans, I probably would've put the windows farther apart or located them higher. It's not a big deal and it doesn't look bad the way it is; it just isn't optimally laid out, in my opinion, and it bothers me a little because if I had planned everything in advance better, we could've made it look perfect.

I don't know if I could've done things differently, really, as having all these decisions made in advance would have required a tremendous amount of advance planning and time that I didn't have the luxury of engaging in. But it's something for people planning their own renovations to consider.

3. Take a sabbatical from your job if possible; failing that, free up time SOMEHOW. The only way I was able to maintain my sanity this past year is that we did the renovation while I was on sabbatical. I honestly don't know how I would've coped if not. Most days I was talking with Wagner or doing research/shopping/decision making for the renovation at least an hour a day, and often I'd be putting in six-hour days on nothing but the renovation. This is probably the best advice I can give here: Undertaking a major renovation will suck up more of your time than you EVER imagined, so don't do it unless you're okay with that concept.

The corollary is that you should plan your renovations around major life transitions carefully. Don't decide to renovate during your maternity leave for your first baby on the reasoning that "I'll be sitting home all day doing nothing, anyway." (All experienced parents are laughing hysterically at that premise.) Don't undertake a renovation during a critical time in your job or career trajectory. Recognize that while the renovation is going on, you won't be getting much done on other life projects that might be important to you.

In short, you and your family need to come to be at peace with acknowledging that your project will take very high priority in your life for an extended stretch of time. To this day my kids have developed a conditioned aversion to Home Depot due to the many long hours they were forced to follow me around there.

4. Inspect all work involving subcontractors carefully immediately upon completion. If I had followed this advice, I would've noticed the stain on the carpet right when it had been installed, and we would have had a basis for asking for a replacement from the carpet company.

5. Don't be afraid to spend big money on high-visibility items. From a purely economic perspective, I shouldn't have bought the bathroom floor mosaic. That little square of floor cost $1200. And I knew when I was ordering it that I was giving in to an extravagant impulse. But now that I see the finished bathroom, well, I just love that mosaic. It has become the focal point of the bathroom and transforms it into something special. The tile mosaic may be my favorite individual feature of the renovation. I don't regret it in the slightest. Keep the time scale of the project in mind and don't be afraid to amortize. If you're going to the expense and effort of undertaking a major renovation, it doesn't make sense to feel a little let down every time you walk into your new space. And if this sounds just a little like fancy rationalization for spending big bucks on a tile medallion or an electric blue washer/dryer set, well, you're probably right. ;-)

This advice only works if you adopt the converse, and economize where you can or where you don't care. For example, we took a fairly inexpensive approach to our bedroom closets. We could've gone to a specialty firm and got all sorts of walnut shelving and built-ins, the way a lot of houses with big master suites do. But this was an area I felt we could safely economize, as we'll be keeping our closet doors closed when we have guests over.

6. Tempur-Pedic mattresses are very, very nice. We hesitated before spending so much on a mattress set, but the 90-day free trial convinced us to give it a go. All I can say is... wow! Here's a product that all those commercials and testimonials are actually right on target. We love this new mattress set. I am a light sleeper and used to wake up several times a night. Now, it's not at all unusual for me to sleep the entire night through without waking. Jonathan used to wake up with backaches. No more. And, best of all, the Tempur-Pedic mattresses don't develop those annoying little permanent gullies where you've been sleeping. I wish we had bought some years ago.

7. Take your time to research and measure before determining placement of items. I've talked before about my spatial skills deficiencies. There were a lot of times in this renovation where Wagner would call me over and I'd have to decide where to locate things like towel bars, toilet paper holders, and the like. Most of the time I'd have this slightly panicky and helpless feeling that I had no idea what the exact best spot would be. Most of the time it ended up not mattering much, but sometimes it did. The cabinet above the toilet, for example, ended up being way too high. I can't reach the top shelf, which limits its usefulness. The grab bar by the toilet is also too high. In retrospect, I probably either should've gone around and found examples of object placements in other houses that I liked and then recorded what measurements or dimensions they used, or maybe I should've tried temporary installments of things for a few days to make sure I liked it. Yeah, I could always shift things around after the fact, I suppose, but I also know we'll probably never get around to it.

8. Walk-in showers are wonderful. If you ask hubby Jonathan, he'd probably say that his favorite feature of the new renovation is the walk-in shower. He loves being able to just wander in and out and not have to squeegee any doors. I'm kind of surprised, actually, that this kind of design is not more popular; I guess it's because they require more floor space. Wagner also mentioned a couple of times that they're trickier to design because you have to make sure the floor slopes at just the right angles so you keep the water where it belongs.

9. Honeycomb blinds aren't the best choice if you want to keep windows open. We ended up installing honeycomb blinds on our bedroom windows. I liked the look of them, and I'm particularly happy we went with the cordless design. It looks a lot better without any cords dangling. But now that we've got them installed, I'm thinking we should've gone with draperies instead. Jonathan loves fresh air whenever possible, so we sleep with our windows open if the weather permits. However, we've discovered that if we have the windows open but blinds lowered, the slightest breeze will set the blinds to knock-knock-knocking against the window frame. And have I mentioned that I am a light sleeper? ;-) What this means is that we either have to keep our windows closed or raise the blinds, too, with obvious privacy risks. We're probably going to end up having drapes installed over the blinds just so we can use them on nights we want the windows open.

10. The internet is your friend. Use it. I did a lot of research on the Web during the renovation. Particularly helpful was the Do It Yourself Forum, which has sub-forums on every possible aspect of home construction and desing. The Fine HomeBuilding website was also quite helpful.

11. Stay organized, or rue the day. I accumulated an enormous pile of brochures, business cards, pamphlets, paint chips, receipts, floor plans, etc. over the course of the renovation. My organization scheme was simple, but effective: I bought a large plastic file box from Office Depot and shoved everything renovation-related in there. I could've been even more organized and sorted the stuff by category or room, but this was good enough: If I needed to see a particular brochure, I knew that all I had to do was look through that box, and it would be there.

12. Go to lots of open houses or home tours to get ideas. There are a gazillion home design and architecture magazines out there, but most of them seemed to feature homes that were way out of our league and/or were places where people don't actually seem to live or put possessions in. So they weren't all that helpful. But going to see real people's homes, and lots of them, actually was helpful. I got lots of ideas for color schemes, built-ins, etc.

13. Avail yourself of the advice of people who do this for a living. I am truly grateful to many of the staff I met at various tile, electrical fixtures, plumbing fixtures, and other stores. These people know more about this stuff than I ever will. They could explain possible advantages and disadvantages of various options that never would've occurred to me.

14. Toto toilets are awesome. This toilet more than lived up to its enthusiastic billing on the Terry Love's toilet forum. It has been positively wonderful. So wonderful, in fact, I'm probably going to ask Santa to bring me another one for Christmas to replace our temperamental toilet in the half bath.

15. Marry my husband, or someone like him. Okay, so the first alternative is out, as I have no intention of letting him get away. But throughout this renovation, Jonathan has been fantastic. He'd give an opinion when asked but was also content to let me decide things on my own, and he didn't second-guess a single decision. He cheerfully wrote checks when I picked out more expensive items than originally budgeted. He patiently tolerated the inevitable disruption and inconvenience of the construction process. He has been so wonderful, in fact, that it has been exceedingly easy to remember that the renovation and our house is actually way, way, way low on the list of things that really matter in life. I am truly a fortunate woman, and it's not because I have a nice house. :)

And with that, I bid you all farewell. Thank you for reading my story! I hope you enjoyed it. :)

Our furnace is smarter than we are

2009-07-03T09:39:00.006-04:00

Okay, I lied. I forgot I wanted to write a post about our new furnace before my final wrapping-up post. You may recall all the angst I went through in selecting a humdifier. We opted for a high-end, combination high-efficiency gas furnace heat-pump unit. The HVAC guys explained it to me, but I will confess to being a little fuzzy on the details. Apparently this model is supposed to be quite good for the environment (we'll get some kind of tax credit next spring for it), and inexpensive to run to boot. When the weather is moderate, the heat pump works. Then once the outside temperature gets below a certain point, the gas furnace kicks in.

The unit also has a variable speed motor, which the HVAC guys assured me was a Good Thing. Apparently it revs up and down slowly, rather than gusting out blasts of hot or cold air at one speed. I will take their word that it is a desirable feature (something about saving on power costs and being easier on the furnace motor), but I can tell you that hubby Jonathan is less than thrilled with this feature. I think I have mentioned before his lovable quirk for getting up on cold mornings, cranking up our other gas furnace, and then lying on the carpet next to the floor vent and warming up next to the blasts of warm air. Of course, he can still do this in other parts of the house, so it's not a deal-breaker.

We had an electronic air cleaner installed on it, and the HVAC guy explained that we should run the furnace on "circ" mode all the time, in which the fan kicks in roughly 30% of the time to move the air through the cleaning system. He said it should only cost about 17 cents a day to do this, but the improvement in air quality is highly worth it. As an added benefit, I think it means we run the cooling part of the unit much less, too, because just having the air blowing adds to our comfort level.

Everyone who has seen the unit who knows something about HVAC systems assures us that this is a Very Good Furnace. The guy who installed it kept raving about it and told us, "This furnace will still be serving y'all long after I'm gone from the planet." Okay, so maybe this wasn't the most reassuring comment in the world given that he looked 70 or 75 if he was a day. So I cast him a worried look and inquired, as delicately as I could manage, about the state of his health, and then I asked if--more to the point--the furnace would outlast me. He harrumphed a bit and allowed as he couldn't say because he didn't know how old I was.

And, after all that angst, I am delighted to report that the TrueSteam humidifier has been working wonderfully. Now that it's summer, we don't need humidification at all (quite the opposite), but it did a terrific job of maintaining the desired humidity level when we first got it up and running in winter. Even during the months when we were finishing up the renovation and thus kept the thermostat very very low in the addition, the TrueSteam was still able to keep the humidity at the target level of 40%... even when it was in the 20s outside.

I'm so happy with it, in fact, that we'll probably replace our old and not so effective humidifier on our other unit next winter. :)

Both the humidifier and furnace/ac are controlled with a top of the line programmable thermostat, the Honeywell IAQ system. The instruction manual for the thermostat is an intimidating thick booklet. The thermostat has a touch screen control panel, rather than the little round dial that I am used to with our other thermostats. There's several screens of commands you can scroll through, and I still haven't figured it all out. You can program this thing literally to the minute, with a different schedule every day if you want. I am embarrassed to admit that we turned off the scheduling feature and instead just manually turn it on/off when we want it. I kinda miss the round dial, to tell you the truth. ;-)

...but the system is still pretty crafty. It senses the outside temperature and simply will not allow you to turn on the gas furnace heat if the temperature is too high, nor will it allow you to turn on air conditioning if it's too cool outside. I'm sure this is good for cost-control and environmental reasons, but it makes me a little uneasy to think that my furnace knows what's best for me and will overrule my commands if it doesn't agree with it.

I think I'll call it "Hal."

The last piece

2009-06-07T13:26:00.004-04:00

Apologies to any followers of this blog for a very long absence without posts. The renovation has been completely finished except for the large bookcase unit for the bedroom, where we encountered delays when the carpenter couldn't get it finished before an overseas vacation.

But, I am happy to report, he returned, the bookcase got built and painted, and on Friday they came to install it. Now that was an adventure in itself. The unit is quite tall and wide--about 84" by 60". They were able to get it inside the house and around the first turn from the main hallway to the kitchen hallway that leads to the addition. But then they were stumped. The foyer to the addition is in the shape of a T, with a short hall leading to the laundry room on the left and another short hall to the bedroom on the right. They got the bookcase to the long part of the T and sat it down. And then we all nervously appraised the angle it would need to turn to negotiate its way into the bedroom. There were five us present: three of the carpenter's men, my husband, and myself. Two of us (hubby Jon and one of the carpenters) thought the bookcase could make the turn. The other three of us shook our heads and said "no way."

Tape measures were produced and measurements taken. Various options were considered. We briefly thought about taking the bookcase back outside and bringing it in through one of the windows. A quick run of the tape measure over to the window made it clear that wouldn't work. We thought about installing it in our kitchen nook instead. But, dang it, we had a wall in the bedroom dedicated for a bookcase, and there's just something nice about having books in one's bedroom. So then the carpenters said they could take the book case back back to their shop, cut it in half, and then install it in pieces. I didn't really like that option, either, as we had been waiting so long for it.

In the mean time my hubby and the carpenter who thought it would fit had been fiddling with the tape measure, and they swore the bookcase could make the turn. So we decided to go for it, and after about ten tense minutes, sure enough, the bookcase made it in the room with about an 1/8th of an inch to spare.

The photo above shows how it looks. I keep my impressive "literary" books out in the bookcases in our living room, to show off for guests. ;-) So this bookcase gets my less-literary but much-loved books: my Robert Heinlein collection, every novel Stephen King ever wrote, Ed McBain's 87th precinct series, other science fiction, and Tom Clancy's thrillers. This new unit is huge; it easily handled the contents of the two smaller bookcases we had in our old bedroom with several empty shelves to grow on.

We had opted to go for a less expensive type of wood and have it painted to match the trim. It looks nice, but now I kind of wish that we had opted for a higher-grade wood to match the furniture. But given how much we went over budget on this project, it's probably just as well that we didn't.

And, best of all, I can now say that the renovation is finally and officially completed. :-)

I plan on writing one more post, a kind of wrap-up with final reflections on the process and, with any luck, containing a virtual tour of the space. Stay tuned.

Rub a dub dub... the laundry room

2009-05-12T09:17:00.003-04:00

Believe it or not, this blog is coming to a close. I have a couple of more posts I want to write after the last remaining items are taken care of. (We're still waiting on our built-in bookcase unit for the bedroom.) And I want to write a longish retrospective concluding post on the lessons learned during the renovation. With any luck, Jon and I will never have to face as time-consuming and complex of a construction project again in our lives, but if we did, I feel like I've learned a lot and would be able to do it much more efficiently the second time around.

But the subject of this post today is to show off pics of our new laundry room. I knew when planning the project that I was quite frustrated with our old laundry arrangement (washer and dryer shoved in closet off kitchen, with annoying bifold doors that continually got in the way). So I knew I would be looking forward to having a dedicated laundry room.

What I didn't realize is just how much I would appreciate this new room. The photos above don't really get across how nice and big it is. Just having space to maneuver laundry baskets and sort/fold laundry is wonderful. Wagner installed a bar across one wall where we can hang-dry items. We re-used our former kitchen cabinets and counter, and they work well in the space. Being able to close off the doors to the laundry room (and also the addition) cuts out all noise entirely of the machines, yay!

But my favorite part of the room are my new Electrolux machines. You read in an earlier post how I was intending to buy a more economical set but was compelled to go with the Electrolux because they were one of the few models that allowed people to reverse hinges. After I bit the bullet and ordered them I wondered if I would regret the extravagance and wish I had gone for a top-loading model instead.

Well, maybe I'm just reducing post-decision dissonance, but I absolutely love the Electroluxes. They clean everything well, and because the washer has such an efficient spinning mechanism (more on that, later), it saves me 20 or more minutes of drying time. The capacity is huge, too, so I'm probably doing 1/2 as many loads. With the lessened energy and water consumption, I'm feeling good about the reduced impact on the environment. The pedestals seemed outrageously expensive at the time (they added maybe another $500 to the price), but they're worth it. No tiresome bending over to move stuff in and out of the units.

But that spin cycle: Wow. High-efficiency washers will spin very very fast, which they can do given their design and the lack of a center agitator. What do I mean by "very very fast"? 1200 revolutions per minute. When that thing gets going, it's like watching the inside of a jet engine. The first couple of weeks we had the washer, we'd all stand there transfixed, mouth open, gazing in awe as the spin cycle progressed. (Okay, so maybe we're easily amused, but you have to trust me that it's pretty darn amazing.) When I did research on HE models on the internet, I was a bit alarmed by some highly critical reviews I read where people complained about excessive vibration and noise. All I can say is that this has been a complete non-issue for me, and these machines just hum along and are substantially quieter and shake less than my 15-year-old Kenmores ever did.
And perhaps the best thing about it is that Isaac is captivated by the new machines and is actually eager to do laundry. He'll do all his clothes by himself, loading and starting the machines, and taking out and putting away his clothes. In fact, he'll even come to me and ask if there's anything else that needs washing because he likes to operate the equipment.

And that's just fine by me. ;-)

The cat has been acquitted

2009-04-29T08:04:00.002-04:00

The analysis of the carpet sample from our mystery stain showed that it was not caused by animal fluids, so our cat Slippers has been cleared of any and all crimes involving the new carpet. She is greatly relieved.

However, the carpet manufacturer rejected our claim, anyway, on the grounds that there was no evidence that the stain occurred during the milling process. They have a point, I guess, but I also know that *we* didn't make the stain, and I feel just as confident that it wasn't Wagner's crew or the carpet installer.

I didn't want to press the issue with the carpet manufacturer because there really is no way to tell when or how the stain happened, seeing as the carpet had been in the house for two days before I noticed it. So I was just going to let the matter drop, when Wagner said that he and the flooring wholesaler we bought the carpet from had agreed to split a $500 credit to return to us. I thought this was very gracious but not fair to them, as I was convinced neither of them was responsible for the stain. He insisted that we deserved some kind of credit, though. But then I pointed out that Jon and I shared some responsibility as well, because I didn't inspect the carpet thoroughly right after the installation and only noticed the spot a couple of days later.

So we decided to reduce the credit to $200 each from Wagner and the carpet store, which I still don't feel entirely right about, as it seems to me that it's the carpet manufacturer who should be paying.

We also decided not to attempt a repair through plugging in a new patch of carpet. The carpet installer said that over time the seams would become visible, and I'm guessing the cure will be worse than the problem. The spot really isn't noticeable unless you look carefully for it, and I am sure it is just the first of many spots this carpet will attract over its lifetime.

The important moral I learned from this incident is this: Take the time to inspect all work done very carefully, just as soon as it is completed. If I had gone to the effort to look the carpet over closely the day it was installed (instead of just poking my head in and saying "Looks great!" the way I had done), I would've noticed the spot right then and there, leaving no ambiguity about when it had occurred.

Of course, it's not exactly helpful that this lesson was learned at the tail end of our renovation and not the beginning. *sigh*

Our first night in the new room

2009-04-20T09:44:00.004-04:00

So Jonathan and I had our first night in the new bedroom. We're still only partially moved in, but we got the essentials taken care of and can move the remaining items more leisurely over the next few days. We were particularly looking forward to trying out our new mattress set. After decades of experimenting with different--and progressively more expensive--mattress brands but always being disappointed with the permanent gullies that would form where our bodies would lie, we decided to spring big time for TempurPedic mattresses, which are made of the memory foam that was guaranteed never to form any gullies. Jon had been waking up with back pain, too, and TempurPedic mattresses are supposed to help out with that as well. They were hideously expensive, but they came with a 90-day free trial, so if it doesn't work out we can exchange them for something else.

I think I was so keyed up over the big move that I had a hard time falling asleep, so it wasn't the most restful night's sleep I ever had. Our poor cat, Slippers, was even more keyed up. She started out sleeping on our old bed upstairs, but then she got lonely and came looking for us, meowing plaintively and loudly. I called out to her, but when she jumped up on the bed she got even more confused because Jon and I had decided to switch sides. (I wanted the side with the shortest distance to the bathroom.) I am more willing than Jon to devote the bottom 1/3 of the bed space to the cat, so she has learned to stick to my side. But all this disruption was too much for her, so she just meowed and crawled around on the night tables until I scooped her up and shut her down in the basement. Maybe I'll have Athena switch over to sleeping in our old room right away, and she can be the one to give up foot space and Slippers will have company...

The photos above (taken before the blinds were installed) show our room with the new furniture. Athena said, "Wow, mom, this is the first room in our house we've ever had where all the furniture matches." Sad to say, this is true. ;-) The top photo shows the fancy glass door to the bedroom. This is not as revealing as it appears, as we also have a solid wood door leading from the kitchen to the addition foyer, which can be closed for additional privacy and noise reduction.

Getting punchy

2009-04-08T08:24:00.005-04:00

It's hard to believe that this renovation is just about completely finished. Right now Wagner is just working on his punch list. (A "punch list" is the final list of tiny details that need to be fixed, like touching up painting, adjusting doors, and the like.) The other weekend he came over to the house and spent 3 or 4 hours going through the addition, waving a hand-held light over every inch of the walls to look for drywall or paint issues that needed touching up, trying out every door, etc., and taking notes for his punch list. Anything he saw that needed work got marked with a little piece of blue masking tape.

Progress accomplished this week:

--Touch up painting/drywall work, lots of it.
--Sconce in bedroom replaced; it had a faulty ballast so we swapped it out under warranty.
--Wagner moved out most of his stuff stored in the garage, so now Jonathan can park in there, too.
--New vinyl flooring installed in former laundry closet. (We had some left over from the garage study.)
--Washer and dryer hookups in former laundry closet dismantled, water line capped, spot where hookups were drywalled over. Closet repainted. We now have a large, functional backup pantry; see photo above.
--I was so pleased by how the new laundry closet floor came out that I asked Wagner to put down a new floor in our main pantry.
--Cleaned out main pantry; sorted and transferred all the household maintenance items (tools, light bulbs, etc.) to new closet; pantry will now be devoted solely to food items. Went overboard and sorted canned goods according to food type, though I stopped short of alphabetizing it all. I'm not quite finished (there's still a shelf of vitamins/medicines I need to reorganize), but my pantry has *never* looked this good. (See photo; you can't tell from this angle, but the pantry stretches out about 8 more feet to the right around the corner.)

--New bedroom furniture delivered. It looks great, and to my relief, the dressers/armoire etc. match the new bed very well in terms of color and style. I was a little nervous about it given that I had only the digital photos of the bed to go by when shopping for the rest of the furniture. We're shopping for mattresses today; I'll post photos of the furnished room after they get delivered.
--Blinds ordered. I was overwhelmed by all the window treatment options and the cost, so I ended up going very basic: cellular (honeycomb) blinds on the bedroom and closet windows, wood blinds for the garage study. I went ahead and paid extra to get the cordless option for the honeycomb blinds, because I have never liked the look of strings hanging down, and our old blinds inevitably got the strings all tangled up. We also decided to pay extra for an "operational" blind covering for the fancy arch on our bedroom window, so we can open and close it, rather than getting a fan-shaped blind that would be permanently closed. So we'll start with that for our window treatments, and if later on it looks too industrial, we can add draperies.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--We had an episode of extremely heavy rain accompanied by strong wind. The new skylight leaked about 5 drops from one corner. This did not concern me. However, we got a veritable downpour for about 5 minutes coming through the doorway between our dining room and family room. Although this was completely unrelated to the renovation/addition, Wagner--bless his heart--sprang into action and got a roofing company to come out and investigate. Turns out that we had a roof vent that needed replacement. We also had to go through and replace a big chunk of insulation in the attic that had gotten soaked. The roofers also redid the flashing around the skylight. I wasn't sure it was necessary to go to all that effort (it had been a ferocious downfall, and we only had a couple of drops coming through), but Wagner just said sternly, "Skylights should NEVER leak" and insisted that it would be fixed.

--Two days after the carpet was installed, I noticed a small spot on it where the color is different, almost like a bleach stain. It is barely perceptible (Jonathan swears he can't see it at all), but... it is there. And it was a brand new, expensive carpet. We reported it to the carpet company, who have sent out two people investigating it. They even took a sample of the fiber to analyze it to see if they can determine the source of the discoloration. The guy who installed the carpet says it looks to him like it was a flaw of the milling process. The carpet people are eager to suggest that it occurred AFTER installation, perhaps by one of Wagner's men, or they even had the temerity to suggest that our cat had peed on it. I've seen how careful Wagner and his crew have been about cleanliness throughout this job, so I'm quite convinced the carpet came this way. And our cat has been so freaked out by the renovation process that she never even goes in the addition (besides, most of the time the door to that area stays closed).

So, we'll see. I have no stomach for making them replace the entire carpet. And the spot is barely perceptible. Unfortunately, it is located in a high visibility area of the room, not in some corner or where it would be hidden under furniture, drat it. But as Jonathan said, we're going to be making plenty of more obvious stains at some point in the future. On the other hand, we paid a lot for the carpet, darn it, and it should have been unblemished. The carpet guy said he could just plug in a replacement patch (we have plenty of leftover pieces), which would look better in the short term, but the seams could become visible after a year or two with repeated vacuuming or cleaning.

We'll wait to see what the carpet analysis shows, but at this point I'm leaning toward NOT doing the repair and just taking some kind of credit for having a new carpet installed with a blemish.

The garage "this is not an apartment" study

2009-04-07T12:22:00.005-04:00

I'm behind on posting some photos. The garage study, which--for the benefit of any Fayette County Building Inspectors who might be reading this blog--I will emphasize is not a garage apartment but rather a guestroom or study, was actually finished some weeks ago. Here's what it looks like. The first shot shows the kitchen area. These were our old cabinets we had in the main house kitchen before we renovated. The flooring came out great, I think. We ended up using a brand called "Konecto," and it sure looks like hardwood from a distance but is instead practical and easy-to-maintain vinyl. The refrigerator was a floor model clearance deal we got for a bargain because it had a small, imperceptible chip on one corner:

This shows the room taken from a different angle and gives a good view of the built-in bookcases that run all along one side of the room:

And here's the small but serviceable bathroom:

My gorgeous new kitchen backsplash

2009-03-26T15:14:00.003-04:00

Larry the tile guy and his assistant finished putting up the beautiful tile accent for the area above the kitchen sink. It's made out of hand-carved marble. We added the decorative picture-frame border around it, and then set a tile made of travertine to provide a backsplash in that area. An employee at the tile store had the good idea to set the tiles on the diagonal, which I think really adds to the visual appeal.

All in all, this really provides a beautiful focus to the kitchen and makes up for losing the window over the sink. And it's *infinitely* better than looking at a blank wall while I'm washing the dishes!

Certified for Occupancy!

2009-03-25T09:49:00.003-04:00

The building inspector came by on Monday and conducted the final inspection and issued our final occupancy certificate. WOOT!!! The finish line for the renovation is now in sight, and we are so close to being done that I can taste it.

The amount of work that has been done this past week is amazing, and I doubt I'll be able to remember or list it all:

Progress accomplished this week:

--Shelves installed in computer room closet
--Carpeting installed in computer room and both master closets. Wagner is holding off on the carpet in the bedroom proper until the very end, so as to minimize odds of staining it.
--Computer room and closet repainted.
--Closet hardware installed in both closets. The photos above are from Jon's closet.
--Lights over vanity installed. See pic above.
--Laundry room finished and turned over to me. Washer and dryer delivered and installed. Despite one minor setback (see below), many loads of laundry done, accompanied by tears of happiness.
--Old washer and dryer taken out and donated to 72 year old woman who has none at the moment so doesn't mind having to duct tape the dryer closed.
--New shelving installed in former laundry closet. We're going to use it as a backup pantry.
--Prep work for installing fancy tile mosaic above sink. The mosaic is hand-carved form marble and very very heavy, so Wagner had to cut out the drywall and install a kind of concrete board to attach it to.
--Mirror over vanity and full-length mirror in bathroom being installed even as I type.
--Furniture stores that are warehousing all the bedroom furniture we bought have been called and delivery scheduled, for April 7th. We're going to be out of town much of next week and I figured it was best to have a few extra days Just In Case.
--All sorts of minor drywall and painting touch up going on.
--General clean-up of Wagner's tools and stuff stored in garage.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Ceiling over vanity is not level. This was the pre-existing ceiling of the (former) garage, so there was not much we could do about it. We opted to keep the bathroom mirror level to the floor, but it means one of the vanity lights will have to be relocated upwards about half an inch.
--My failure to research washer/dryers and thus realize that the dryer should go on the RIGHT, not LEFT, led to my having to pay a lot more than I wanted to for a set with reversible hinges.
--Pedestals for washer/dryer were back-ordered. The salesguy asked, hopefully, if I could just wait two weeks or so to have everything delivered. I had four loads of laundry already piled up and no washer/dryer, so my reply was: No frigging way. He was not happy, but since it was their mistake (they had originally told me everything was in stock), they agreed to deliver the washer and dryer first and come back a second time to install the pedestals.
--Washer and dryer got installed, and they look beautiful. Deliverymen left. I started my first of 4 loads. It got through exactly 1/2 of the first load, and then the washer started beeping at me and flashing an error message: No water. Much gnashing of teeth. I called Pieratt's, distraught, and told them my beautiful new washer wasn't working and I had a load of sopping wet laundry in it, and three more on the floor. We purchased from Pieratt's (a small local business) rather than a big box store because they have given us great service in the past on other appliances. They came through this time, too: Within ten minutes of my call, I had a repairman at the door. It took him an hour to figure out what was wrong, which turned out to be that the fancy "Flood Safe" reinforced hoses I had bought for the washer and dryer (to protect against a hose breaking and gushing water all over the house) were incompatible with the Electrolux model. Hot water was going through but, for some reason inexplicable to the repair guy, not the cold water. Something about the fail-safe valve on the hose. We put the original hoses back on and all was fine.

I need an ambidextrous washing machine

2009-03-19T21:52:00.003-04:00

So today was a day long awaited for, a day dawning bright with enthusiasm and a vision of the wonderful life that would very soon be ours when the renovation was completed: It was the day that I went out to buy the new clothes washer and dryer, because Wagner told me that he would turn the laundry room over to us on Monday.

I had been doing a little bit of research about various washer/dryer models. We're buying new because our old set is 15 years old and on its last legs, especially the dryer, which requires fresh applications of duct tape on the door several times per drying cycle to keep the door from popping open and stopping the drying action. I am *very tired* of duct-taping my dryer closed.

I was leaning toward getting a front-loading washer system, because I liked what I read about their greater water- and energy-efficiency (yea! good for the environment!), their larger load capacities (yea! fewer loads to do!), and being more gentle on clothes (yea! clothes last longer!).

But mostly I wanted one because they came in all sorts of cool colors (turquoise, sea green, silver, cherry red) and were definitely sexier looking than our old Kenmore white box.

Because I was clever enough to know that Jonathan would not willingly shell out the extra money required for a typical front-loading washer (boo! mega-bucks!), just because I liked the color better, I marshalled the other arguments in favor of a front-loader. I then asked him when he wanted to go shopping for one. Jonathan hates shopping with a passion, so he visibly shuddered and told me he would trust me to pick it out on my own.

Heh heh.

"How much extra does a front-loader cost?", he asked. "Er... a couple of hundred, maybe. I don't know. But with the economy so bad I'm sure I can drive a hard bargain." He cast me a suspicious look but hauled out his wallet. And so, armed with a stack of $100 bills, I ventured forth to Pieratt's to see what they had.

At first all went easily. I explained to the salesman the features I was looking for. He showed me a deluxe Electrolux model that possessed an appropriately bright blue hue, not to mention a bunch of other fancy features. Then I looked at the price tag. $1299. Yikes. And that wasn't even counting the pedestal, which was another feature I was determined to have, as I had grown quite weary of bending way over to get my laundry out of the dryer. The pedestal would add another $249. The dryer and its pedestal would be another $1300 or so.

Gulp. My stack of $100 bills wasn't that big. Not to mention I also had to buy a refrigerator for the garage study at the same time.

So I asked the salesman to show me some less expensive units and settled on a Frigidaire set that went for about $800 each, plus pedestal, available in black, which while not as cool as blue or sea green was better than basic white. I was just about to bite the bullet when the salesman asked, "say, where is your dryer located right now? On the left or right?"

"On the left." In fact, when designing the laundry room, Wagner had asked me where I wanted to put the dryer. I said it didn't really matter, but since I was used to throwing the laundry into the dryer on the left, we might as well keep it that way. And so that's how he installed the hookups and dryer vent.

Well, THAT was a multi-hundred dollar mistake on my part. Turns out that it matters a great deal what side the dryer is on. The vast majority of front-loading washers and dryers are manufactured with their door hinges arranged such that the dryer needs to be on the right. Otherwise you have to carry your dripping wet laundry around two open appliance doors to get it transferred.

Oh man. I did NOT want to do that. It turns out that there are only a couple of models where the door hinges can be reversed, and at Pieratt's they only had one: The fancy Electrolux that cost the mega-bucks.

So I asked in a small voice what my other options were. I could go to a top-loading washer, and he showed me a few. But they were all ugly and white, and I really was hoping to reap the environmental benefits of a high-efficiency front-loader.

He then suggested that I could stick with the front-loading system, buy a cheaper pair, but then just switch their locations and stretch the various pipes and vent tubings criss-cross in the back. I didn't like this idea one bit, as it seemed to me that it would add at least two turns to the dryer vent hose, and I knew that bent/kinked dryer vent hoses cause massive problems. He assured me that it could be done as long as I didn't mind moving the unit out from the wall a few inches and had enough clearance.

I set him off to work up some prices and called Wagner. He was also dubious about the criss-crossing idea. He then started speculating about what would be involved in moving the plumbing and/or dryer vent location around, and I could tell right away it would be an expensive nightmare as it involved tearing into drywall and/or flooring. So I told him not to worry about it and that I would either get the expensive set with the reversible hinges or go for a top-loading unit after all.

At this point I was ready to dicker with the sales guy, who looked me in the eye and said that Electroluxes sold on fixed pricing and that they could not budge a penny on the sale. "Not even for the PEDESTAL?" I whimpered. "Nope, I couldn't even sell it to myself for any cheaper," he replied.

I was striking out left and right. I told the sales guy I wasn't ready to make a decision and made a quick visit to Lowe's. There the salesperson confirmed that only a few models allow you to reverse the hinges. They had the same Electrolux model as Pieratt's, at the same price, and he confirmed that they were not allowed to lower the price at all. Shucks.

But he also voiced the opinion that criss-crossing a cheaper set wouldn't be a good idea. He wasn't worried about the dryer vent so much, but he said that he would be concerned that the washer pump wouldn't be able to pump out the drain water efficiently over a longer distance.

So I went home, discouraged. I explained the problem to Jonathan, who said "how much would the reversible-hinge washer cost?"

"About $1200."

"For the pair?"

"Um... no. Just the washer." I wisely decided not to mention the pedestals for the time being.

A silence ensued, which I hurriedly broke by explaining about the good bargain I had at least been able to find on a refrigerator, a close-out floor model for about $500.

And now I've spent the last few hours scouring the web and trying, futilely, to discover whether it really is viable to criss-cross your placement of a washer and dryer, and reading a hundred or so passionately argued debates about front-loading vs. top-loading washers.

After slogging through all that, I'm still liking the front-loading units better. The data are pretty convincing that the extra upfront cost of the front-loaders are recouped after just a couple of years of lower water and electricity bills. I really like the idea of being a good environmental steward and not pumping so much detergent-contaminated waste-water into the ground. But I also don't want to have to worry about dryer lint accumulating in a kinked-up pipe and catching fire and burning my nice new addition down. So.... I guess I'll go for the Electrolux with the reversible hinges after all. They're in stock and can be delivered Monday. I'll finesse the Spousal Acceptance Factor by paying myself for whatever balance the stack of $100 bills can't cover.

And if I'm paying that much, I'll go ahead and pay the extra $$ to get them in blue. ;-)

Progress Report --- Week 23

2009-03-15T21:07:00.003-04:00

Progress accomplished:

--Countertop installed. See pics above. We went with the "Giallo Quarry" style of Silestone quartz. I think it came out looking terrific. The photo also shows the cabinets installed.

--More painting of addition interior completed. I believe the primer coat has been put on everything, and he's been doing second coats and/or detail work on other parts.

--Interior doors hung.

--Toilet in master bath installed.

--Faucets for vanity sinks and jacuzzi tub installed. This was done after the photos shown above were taken.

--Plumbing inspection of addition conducted and passed.

--Clean-up of backyard, gazebo area done. Wagner had been storing some of his stuff in the backyard, and he got that all cleared out, along with some paving stones he had put down when we had to exit out the back yard through the other side of the house. He also stacked all the leftover brick neatly by the house, as we wanted to keep some spares Just In Case disaster falls.

--Decisions made on how to handle the area above the kitchen sink. Recall that we used to have a window there that had been blocked up in the renovation. I had thought about putting a bookcase there but ultimately decided that wouldn't work well. So I started looking around for a nice decorative mosaic or something we could put in as a backsplash. Wagner found a gorgeous, custom-made design showing a basket full of fruit. It's a lot prettier than it sounds; I'll put a photo of it soon. It was marked down less than half price, and it will make a wonderful focal point for the kitchen while I'm standing there doing dishes.

Obstacles encountered:

--Various illnesses of Wagner and crew slowed things down. There's a nasty stomach bug going around Lexington these days.

--Carpenter has gone on a vacation trip to Europe and was unable to get our built-in bookcase done before he left. So that's going to have to wait until he gets back and un-jet-lagged.

--When faucets were installed on jacuzzi, one handle looked longer than the other. We were mystified that the supplier would've gotten the set mixed up, but we went back to Ferguson's and told them we needed the correct size handle. Turns out that the handles were *exactly the same size* and it was just an optical illusion caused by us looking at them from the side. Given my well-documented deficiencies in spatial reasoning, I wasn't surprised to hear that I was mistaken about the handle lengths. But when I was talking with one of Wagner's men, he looked at me like I was crazy and said "No way those handles are the same length! That one is clearly a lot longer than the other!!" So I had him whip out his tape measure and we held it against the faucets, and the evidence was indisputable--they were the same length. Very weird.

All in all, the closer we get to being finished, the more I'm itching to get in there. At this point I'm guessing we won't be done by our (revised) projected completion date of the end of March. But I'm hoping it won't be too much later. I'm ready to be done. :)

The master bath shower, unveiled

2009-03-02T10:01:00.009-05:00

I finally got the chance to take some photos of the master bath shower. Enjoy! This first shot is taken inside the shower area, looking out to the drying off area.

Here's a shot of the main showerhead, with soap dish and recessed box for shampoo bottle storage:

The next shot shows the second handheld showerhead. Note the two grab bars installed on Wagner's strong ~~nagging~~ advice. In retrospect it doesn't clutter things up too much, and I suspect we'll be glad they're there in 20 years. Maybe sooner.

Shot showing detail of corner shelf and decorative border/trim:

And here's a view of the bench that runs along one side of the shower (covered with paper for protection):

And here's our whirlpool tub, covered with blankets for protection and to prevent me from getting in there prematurely to soak in the bubbles. ;-) The window lets in quite a bit of natural light but presents photographing challenges that exceed my meager skills in that area:

Progress Report --- Week 21

2009-02-23T09:36:00.002-05:00

I probably should've just numbered my progress reports rather than call them Week Whatever, as I think I'm off by a week or two. Oh well. At any rate, there's been remarkable and considerable progress done since my last report.

Progress accomplished this week:

--Installation of bathroom cabinets and crown molding completed.
--Primer coating of paint put up in bedroom/bathroom. Paint color looks as nice on the walls as on the paint chip, phew!
--Baseboard trim installed in addition
--Furnace and humidifier installation completed; furnace is up and going. It's an amazing system, and I will be shortly writing an entire post dedicated to it.
--Garage painting completed.
--Concrete poured on walkway besides addition. Now all we have left is to add the brick portion of the walkway.
--Plumbing in garage study connected and functional.
--Plumbing, HVAC, and electrician inspections of garage conducted and passed. Final inspection occurs TODAY, which means that this morning may be the last time--and I am getting all teary-eyed with joy writing this sentence--that I will ever have to scrape ice off my windshield. Wagner wanted to save half the garage for storage of his equipment, so that means poor Jonathan will still have to park his car out in the driveway. I felt guilty about nabbing the available garage spot, but that feeling soon faded. ;-)

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Grouting around the decorative trim in shower doorway in the walkway is too rough, making it difficult to paint neatly around it. Wagner is going to have the tile guy back in to smooth it out somehow.
--New garage door seal let in some water during the last rain. We had the installer out this morning to look at it under warranty.
--Sub-freezing temperatures (what a surprise) are preventing the masonry guy from laying the brick walkway.
--Medicine cabinet we picked out for garage bathrooms sticks out too much, but can't be recessed due to ductwork in the wall. We'll take it back and just put up a plain mirror instead.
--Plumber deemed our current setup (one hot water heater for the original house, a separate one for the new bedroom/bathroom) as not ideal. He was worried there wouldn't be enough hot water for the whirlpool tub and shower if we used them in close succession. So he attached the two water heaters together somehow so that they're connected and serve the entire house.

Bathroom talk

2009-02-16T12:53:00.003-05:00

So this morning Wagner wanted me to show him where to place all accessories in the garage study bathroom. We got the towel bar, medicine chest, and hand towel ring situated easily enough. Then he said, "Where do you want the toilet paper holder?" This was a matter of critical importance to me, as I definitely wanted to avoid situations like I've encountered in the past where you have to twist around and reach behind you to get the toilet paper.

So I sat down on the toilet (somewhat gingerly; the bowl has been installed but not the seat yet), reached my arm out to where I thought a comfortable place would be to grab the toilet paper, and told Wagner, "Right there!" He just shot me The Look and said, "Okay, but that's really very strange." "What do you mean?," I asked. "It's just that most people put their toilet paper holders over there," he replied, pointing to a spot that was much lower and further back.

So apparently I have weird bathroom preferences. I pointed out the whole logic of having the toilet paper at arm's length in front of you, so that you don't have to twist around in contortions every time you go to the bathroom. Wagner then started reassuring me that I should place the holder exactly where I wanted it, no matter how unusual such placement was. But the last thing I want is a weird bathroom that would be mocked and rejected by all the other bathrooms out there. So we compromised and put it somewhere in between. ;-)

While we're on the topic of toilet paper, I have to share my excitement over the toilet paper holder we got for the master bathroom. It's an ingenious design that does NOT involve one of those blasted little spring mechanisms, which I hate with a passion. The spring things in the middle always seem to pop open and fall apart in two pieces when you change toilet paper, and they always seem to be either too tight (so you have to exert the strength of ten to get it to fit in the bracket) or too loose (which means they keep falling out). But as bad as the spring mechanism kind of toilet paper holder is, they're still orders of magnitude better than the hook-shaped toilet paper holders, where every time you pull on the toilet paper the whole thing comes flying off the hook and rolling across the floor.

So you can imagine my heartfelt delight when I discovered a beautiful toilet paper holder at Ferguson's, the Moen Icon model, that operates with a simple pivoting arm mechanism. When it's time to change the toilet paper, you just swing the arm up, swap out the rolls, and then set it back down. Why every toilet paper holder in the world is not like that, I don't know. Here it is in all its beauty:

Progress Report --- Week 20

2009-02-10T11:00:00.004-05:00

Progress accomplished this week:

Hurray! It's amazing how much has been done once the weather and utilities started cooperating.

--Tile work in bathroom FINISHED. It is gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. I'm thrilled with it.
--Installation of cabinets in bathroom begun. Should be finished tomorrow.
--Knob selection for bathroom cabinets made. I must be getting better at decisions because it only took me an hour to decide.
--Exterior paint on addition/garage trim begun, should be finished tomorrow, weather permitting.
--Concrete poured outside garage (see photo above). Wagner says that the garage is close to being completely done and that we can set a date for when we can start using it to park our cars. Hurray!
--Design of closets begun. I'm using a free service that ClosetMaid has where you send them measurements of the closet space, tell them how much space you need for long vs. short hanging stuff, shoes, etc., and they ship back a plan with all the part numbers identified. We did a first round of this, but I want to tweak the plans they came up with a bit. I'm trying to decide between using mostly functional (and cheaper) wire shelving units vs. more expensive but better looking laminate shelving. Given how much I went over budget for the tile, I'm leaning toward functional and cheap. ;-)
--Caulking and prep work for interior painting in addition begun.
--Rest of bedroom furniture purchased. We found a nice dresser and chest of drawers that would match nicely the new bed we had already bought. It was a discontinued line and thus on sale. The snag is that the furniture store would only sell it as a complete set, including a bed (which we didn't really need) and an armoire (ditto). Jon still liked it better than the other dresser I had identified, so we went ahead and bought the set, on the reasoning that we can use the extra bed in the garage space and squeeze the armoire in somewhere. The children, who were sick and tired of me dragging them to furniture stores and looking at dressers, didn't care one way or the other as long as we bought something.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--The tile person had miscalculated the amount of tile we needed and we were short a couple of pieces for the floor. Rather than wait for a new order to come in, we used some of the leftover budget tile from the laundry room to put on the bathroom floor under the cabinets. No one will ever see it, but I think it bothered Wagner not to have it all uniform. "What if you swap out the cabinets?" he asked. I told him that (a) we probably won't ever do that, but (b) even if we did, we'd be putting new cabinets over it, so the different tile STILL wouldn't be visible. We'll still go ahead and order an extra box of the main tile just to have spares in case something happens, but this way we didn't have to delay work on the rest of the bathroom.
--Steady rain beginning this morning will probably delay pouring rest of concrete around side of addition and finishing exterior painting.

The Ice Man cometh... and stayeth

2009-02-06T08:53:00.004-05:00

When this renovation is finally done, I think I'm going to put the house on the market... and move to San Diego or Florida because I am exceedingly tired of this winter weather.

Just kidding, mostly, but man all this snow and ice and bitter cold temperatures is disheartening. We were without power for 3 and a half days last week. We got electricity back Friday afternoon, and I gleefully called Wagner and told him the good news. He was elated as well and lined things up with the tile guys to resume work on Monday. We packed up our clothes, cat, rats, and guppies and moved back to the house, where we enjoyed exactly two glorious nights of electricity. Sunday morning, though, Jon was outside shoveling snow when he heard the big "Boom!" of a transformer blowing out, and we were plunged into darkness and cold once again. So once again Wagner had to call off the workers and once again we had to pack up kids, pets, belongings and move back to Jonathan's office. It took another couple of days for the power to come back on, this time for good--we hope. Cross your fingers.

Of course we had thrown out all the food in the freezer the first time the power came back on and bought replacements... which I then had to throw out again. Sigh.

But finally, finally we were able to get Larry (the tile guy) back in action. I just love talking with him. He is a true crafstman in every sense of the word, and it is gratifying to see just how deeply he cares about doing a good job. The other day we were talking about some issue of the tile layout, and he casually mentioned that he had been "thinking about your job while lying in bed last night." I laughed and told him that I hoped he had much better things to think about at night than my shower. He replied that he took his work seriously and enjoyed doing jobs like ours, where it wasn't just a simple floor but more like "artisanship."

The shower is done, and the rest of the tile work will be completed today or tomorrow. We have to stay off it for 24 hours, but after that I'll take some photos and post them. It is absolutely gorgeous and well worth the considerable amount we went over budget for it. Here's a teaser photo of the floor with the medallion that didn't come out too well because the sunlight was glaring on it (I couldn't walk on the floor to take it from the other angle). It hasn't been grouted yet and will look a lot better afterwards, but this will give you a feel for what it will look like:

(Lack of) Progress Report -- Week 19: ICE STORM

2009-01-30T09:19:00.003-05:00

Progress accomplished this week:

--Much of tile laid out in shower last weekend/Monday, including decorative trim. Even though it hasn't been grouted yet, I can tell it will look very very nice when it's done.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--But that's the only thing that got done this week, because Lexington was right in the middle of the bad ice storm that swept the Southeast. The nasty stuff started falling Tuesday, and when the street began to look like an ice rink, I shoveled and scraped a path from the addition to the workers' truck and told them to get home so I wouldn't have their deaths on my conscience. That evening the ice built up so much that tree branches and entire trees started falling all over the city, knocking down power lines. We lost power Wednesday morning, and Kentucky Utilities is saying nothing besides a recorded message that it may take "weeks" before the power is restored. Yikes.

I can't complain too much, because we are safe. Jonathan's office has a nice little apartment on the second floor, so we packed up the kids, cat plus litter box, two pet rats, and two fishbowls full of guppies and are camping out there for the time being. The schools have been closed all week long so we are enjoying plenty of, er, quality time with the kids.

Poor Wagner calls us periodically to ask, with hope in his heart, if the power is back on. I assure him that no matter how much HE wants the power on so his crews can get to work, WE want it on even more.

When we drew up the design and bid for the renovation project, we contemplated at great length including a whole-house backup generator that would cost roughly $10,000. We ultimately decided against it, due to the expense and our assumption that we wouldn't need it all that often to make it worth the cost, and besides we would always have Jon's office to stay at if we lost power at the house. Oh well. As Jon pointed out to me, we can't second-guess that decision just because of some temporary (I hope!!) inconvenience, and even if we had decided to get the generator, it probably wouldn't be up and running at this point.

Progress report -- Week 18

2009-01-21T09:07:00.004-05:00

Shot of complicated tile work that needed to be done around whirlpool tub, with holes drilled for the faucets:

Photo of the elusive plush carpet with a mixture of colors (which I talked about in a previous post):

Here's our shower floor, all tiled and grouted:

Progress accomplished this week:

Good heavens... where do I start? Wagner says the house should be finished by the end of February. I'm not sure I believe him (the addition still looks very, well, unfinished), but he's the expert. At any rate, we seem to be very much on schedule, which is a minor miracle given the weather.

--Underlayment for garage study floor installed
--Cabinets in garage study hung. We're re-using our old kitchen cabinets that we had replaced during the kitchen renovation this summer. They are still quite serviceable and look fine.
--Cabinets in laundry room installed. We re-used some more of our cabinets/counters from the kitchen here.
--Tile work begun in shower and bath area. This is probably the most visible and important progress made this week. Larry (the tile guy) got the shower floor put down and grouted, and he is now hard at work putting the wall tiles in place. We hope to have the shower portion done this week.
--More closet doors installed throughout addition

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Cold weather has prevented work starting on pouring concrete around garage. Man, I'm tired of putting this down as an obstacle. The temperatures have been in the teens or even single digits all week, never approaching anything close to freezing. This is particularly frustrating because Wagner made the off-hand comment, "Too bad we haven't been able to pour the concrete, because otherwise you'd be able to use the garage for your cars." I think of that comment every time I'm scraping ice off the windshield in 5 degree weather on dark mornings.
--We don't want to put up the rest of the fence until the concrete is poured (to avoid any mess or concrete splatters), so we still only have fence posts in the back yard.
--The doorknobs I had chosen for the addition doors have not yet arrived. They were a new product line that Home Depot had samples of, but the shipments have been delayed with no assurance that they will be in stock any time soon. I'll have to go pick out some different ones. In keeping with the goal of adopting universal design for the addition (to plan for the future should we need things accessible), I had selected the lever kind of doorknob (as opposed to the round kind). But most lever types don't look very attractive. This new model was quite nice, so I went with it. I'll have to look around some more and see if I can find another lever type that looks as good, or maybe switch back to ordinary round doorknobs.

Maybe, just maybe, a decision on the carpet

2009-01-15T20:45:00.005-05:00

As you know if you have been following this blog, I've had a hard time making the flooring decisions for the addition. I must have been to a half dozen carpet stores, and some of those on 3-4 occasions. I didn't think we had exotic tastes, but it still turned out to be very difficult to find a carpet that met all of Jonathan's and my criteria.

Jonathan's needs were simple: He wanted something thick and plush. Easy peasy. There are roughly 43,617 thick and plush carpet styles.

My needs are rather simple, too. Recall that my main criterion for choosing a shower tile was something mottled and containing the color of soap scum, so as better to hide dirt. I used a similar rationale for choosing a carpet color. I had noticed that, with our current carpet (which is a very plain beige colored plush), the slightest spot (such as when I spill coffee bringing it to Jon) or stain (such as when Isaac throws up) stands out like a sore thumb.

To me, it makes a lot more sense to have a carpet that contains a mixture of colors in an irregular pattern rather than a sheer expanse of unblemished and pristine sameness, which in my household is going to last a day, maybe two, at the most. Finding such a carpet shouldn't be a problem, as there are roughly 38,992 mottled color pattern carpet styles.

Putting those two sets of requirements together, it meant that all we needed to do was find a thick plush carpet with a mottled color scheme, preferably a color scheme including shades of coffee and vomit. Just joking (mostly) on that last bit. ;-)

You would think that would be an easy carpet to find. The reality is the intersection of those two sets is scarily close to zero. (Who'd've ever thunk that New Math I learned in grade school would actually be relevant???) There are lots of plush carpets, but they're almost all just one pure color. There are lots of mottled color carpets, but they're almost all shag or frisee/twist style carpets. And because neither Jon nor I were willing to budge on our criteria, I spent an awful long time looking at carpet samples. (Note to any carpet manufacturing executives who may be reading this: There is a real and potentially quite lucrative niche here that needs to be filled. We can't be the ONLY family in the world who wants a plush multi-colored carpet.)

Wagner had long given up on his gentle hints ("You really need to pick your carpet soon so I can order it") and moved on to more desperate tactics of escorting me to carpet stores, showing me various samples, and asking with a hopeful tone his voice, "how about something like this?", only to be crestfallen when I would say, "no... it's not mixed enough" or "no, it's too shaggy."

But we finally found something we liked. It's beige with speckled flecks of browns, greys, and blacks sprinkled throughout it. And it's a nice thick plush. I tried to find a sample on the web so I could post a photo of it, but I couldn't find one. But trust me, it's a lot prettier in person than how I described it.

The only snag, of course, is that it is more expensive than most carpets. *Sigh.*

Progress report -- Week 17.5

2009-01-13T13:56:00.003-05:00

Jonathan and I were out of town all last week at a coin show, so I have been swamped and not able to post as much. When we got back, the tile had just been laid and I wasn't able to get into the addition to scope it out. So I'm sure that more was done that I just don't know about yet.

Progress accomplished this week:

--painting in garage and garage study finished
--painting begun in addition
--door frames, window frames, and crown molding installed in addition
--handrail installed in garage stairway
--most interior doors hung in addition, except for fancy special order door for bedroom
--tile put down and grouted in garage bathroom
--tile put down and grouted in addition laundry room/foyer area; status of tile in bathroom unclear because I couldn't get in there to see how much has been done
--fence posts for new fence put in
--telephone line rerouted to or through garage
--replacement whirlpool tub has arrived
--design for built-in bookcases in bedroom settled on
--new bed purchased. Jonathan and I decided to leave our current bed in the upstairs bedroom and let Athena use it when she moves in; this way Isaac can inherit her bunk bed, which he is greatly anticipating, and we'll leave his twin bed in our soon to be new dedicated guestroom. Our current bed is a beautiful antique that belonged to Jon's grandmother, quite huge and ornate, but it is also--to put it delicately--a pain in the butt to make and a bit on the shaky side. So we decided to buy a new bedroom set. I had been visiting the local furniture stores to see what they had, when I spied a nice queen-size sleigh bed with leather padding at one store. (Jon also decided he wanted a bed with a padded headboard given his penchant for sitting in bed early in the morning sipping his coffee.) It was priced at $1849, but the floor sample was a clearance item marked down to $875. The only snag is that it had a "SOLD" sign on it, but I am not easily deterred. Looking at the "sold" sign I noticed that it was dated November 1, so I asked the saleslady if it was possible that the customer was never going to consummate the deal and volunteered that we'd be willing to buy it outright in cash right away. She disappeared and after a few minutes came back and told us that she could sell us the bed, and they were also willing to store it in their warehouse until the addition was completed and ready for move-in. So now all we need to do is find a dresser/bedside table set that's a reasonably close match.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--I wasn't crazy about the paint color on the vaulted ceiling of the addition. We had originally asked to have it match the ceiling color of the rest of our house, but for some reason (the greater amount of windows and thus natural light coming in?) it looked much darker/tanner in the addition. So we're going to have the poor painter repaint the ceiling.
--weather has been too cold/snowy/icy (what else is new?), so we are unable to pour the concrete
--my absence and consequent inability to show exactly where I want the fancy trim to go in the shower has slowed tile work in shower

Progress report --- Week 16

2009-01-04T12:26:00.005-05:00

Progress accomplished this week:

--Carpentry details on garage study installed (baseboard, windowsills and window frames, doorway frames, doors installed)
--Carpentry details in addition begun
--Several doors in addition installed
--Tile for bathroom delivered; tile work starts Monday. This photo shows samples of the 3" decorative border and the trim piece.

--Painting begun in garage
--Weather cooperated and the masonry work on exterior of garage and addition is finally finished! WOOT!
--Continued working on perplexing leak in chimney that has plagued us since we moved into the house 5 years ago. We've tried everything to fix it, including rebuilding it from ground up. Until now, nothing's done the trick. But Wagner had his men seal it again and check/redo the flashing. He discovered a small crack in one part of the flashing, and fixed it, so maybe, just maybe, the problem is resolved. It didn't appear to leak any with the rain we had last night, so keep your fingers crossed.
--Meeting with concrete man to plan/start paving of ground outside new garage and rework our front walk to be accessible
--Back yard graded
--Sod for back yard put down

These last two steps sound simple, but they probably represent the most visible dramatic progress on the site, and I'm sure it's the step most appreciated by our neighbors. We no longer have the huge dumpster in the back yard and the mountain of dirt excavated for the garage. Wagner had to scramble around to find anybody with viable sod at this time of year, but he got a truckload of it in. He worked feverishly to get it all down yesterday before the heavy rains that were predicted started falling. But now our back yard looks like a back yard (albeit with a monstrous garage plopped down in the middle of it) rather than a construction site. It makes me think that, yes, this renovation *will* eventually be finished! Here's a shot of our new, flat, green back yard, with fence (temporarily) removed, showing the neighbor's shed now located firmly on his--and not our--property. ;-)

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Representative of the whirlpool tub company came out and looked at the tub and deemed it too damaged to repair. We are returning it under warranty and awaiting the replacement.
--During the grading process, the backhoe/bulldozer machine uprooted a tree stump, which pulled the telephone wire off the pole. No phone service. Phone repairman was out here for 3 hours yesterday, during which they discovered all sorts of other problems with the line. It was finally repaired and stayed repaired for, oh, about 12 hours. Noticed this morning the phone service was down once again. They'll send somebody out again tomorrow. *sigh*

Floored once again with indecision

2009-01-01T14:16:00.006-05:00

In a previous post I announced that we had finally decided what to put on the garage study floor, namely a very cheap oak laminate that I had found at Lumber Liquidators for something like 78 cents a square foot.

However, the more I looked into it, the more misgivings I had. The customer reviews on the Lumber Liquidators site were all uniformly positive, but I wasn't sure I could trust the site to post any negative reviews. The people on the do-it-yourself forum, on the other hand, were largely disapproving. On top of that, other sources I looked at said that you really need laminate to be at least 8 mm thick to avoid denting and other problems. The inexpensive laminate I was looking at was only 6 mm thick. And more than one source argued that laminate was not a good choice for kitchen areas or anywhere you're likely to have water spills. Hmmm.

So then one day I was walking by the flooring display at Home Depot and saw an ad for a product called Allure by Traffic Master. This was vinyl, but instead of being in big squares that you glue down, it's in the shape of planks like laminate flooring that have little strips that you stick together... no gluing down involved. It looked more realistic than the square vinyl fake wood floor. Best yet, it was unlike any other flooring option I had encountered so far in that it didn't require any special sublayer or floor preparation. You could just plop it right down on our wooden subfloor. That made it the least expensive option we had discovered so far.

So I went home and researched it on the internet. The Home Depot website listed nothing but rave reviews, with the flooring getting very high ratings from all customers. Again, you gotta wonder about the possibility of bias, though. But the other forums also rated it positively, with several landlords saying that they had installed tens of thousands of square feet of the product and had been very pleased with how it held up.

So I told Wagner that I had (*ahem*) changed my mind once again and wanted to get the Allure viny planking for the garage. He picked up a couple of samples pieces and laid it down in the garage. There was a bit of a roadblock when I showed it to Jonathan and the kids, and the color choice I favored (hickory) got overruled by the rest of the family. So I dragged them all to Home Depot where we decided on a light oak color instead.

At this point I thought we were all set to place the order, especially after Wagner told me that he had been able to negotiate a very attractive price on it, when Wagner came to me and said that he had been researching the product and was a bit worried about how it would hold up under changes of temperature and humidity. Apparently there have been reports of the planks separating and curling up off their little glue strips under temperature changes. Hmmm. He said he wanted to ask around a little more, as he's never used that product before and is more used to traditional vinyl stuff that you glue down solidly.

In the mean time, we're having a little debate regarding the stairs to the garage study. The carpenter has finished installing them, and they look great to us as is. But Wagner wanted us to either paint them and put down rubber treads (as the paint will wear off), or put carpet down. Jon and I don't want carpet (too hard to clean), but we also were worried that treads would be hard to clean. And to us the stairs look lovely. But when we proposed that plan to Wagner, instead of him being pleased that we were (finally) cutting expenses by not requiring the stairs to be finished, he objected "But there's different kinds of wood on the stairs! The wood doesn't all match!" We tried to assure him that the lack of feng shui truly didn't offend us, but he got that look on his face again, the look that says "these folks are making a big mistake."

So at this point, we're very much unsettled regarding the garage. Yikes.

Progress report --- Week 15

2008-12-23T11:33:00.003-05:00

Progress accomplished this week:

--New high-efficiency gas furnace installed in addition
--Drywall work completed in addition
--Trims and casings for garage and addition selected; trim work begun in garage
--Kitchen repainted
--Protective paper and plastic shielding removed from kitchen; kitchen is now officially COMPLETED, just in time for Christmas dinner, hallelujah!
--Exterior masonry work continued
--Concrete board installed in addition, as prep for laying tile
--Access panels for various electrical and mechanical units installed in addition
--Tile for bathroom ordered. Wagner is a master negotiator and got them to come down on their prices quite a bit.
--Sliding doors for (soon to be former) laundry closet area purchased. We were looking at interior doors for the bedroom when Wagner spotted a section full of clearance items. There stood a set of sliding doors that would fit our laundry area perfectly, and which we needed as we wanted to get rid of the bifold doors that had caused us so much grief by constantly bumping into the door to the addition. The doors were priced at $110, marked down from the original price of $277, which I thought was a spectacular deal. But by the time Wagner was through negotiating with the department manager, he got the whole set, including track work, for $50. I told you he was a master negotiator. ;-)
--Door for bedroom selected and ordered. We're getting a fancy door with a beveled/frosted glass inset. Very attractive, and will help let in natural light from the bedroom to the foyer area.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Bitter cold temperatures, snowstorm halted all work one day; masonry work has been much delayed
--A light test of some sort revealed that the whirlpool tub did not arrive with an adequate seal or lining or something in two spots. I didn't quite understand what the problem was, but Wagner assured me that it would be taken care of adequately, or we would need to get a replacement tub under warranty.

Progress report --- Week 14

2008-12-15T10:22:00.005-05:00

All I can say is: Wow!! Just wow! Wagner warned me that "things will start happening fast now," but I can't get over the transformation. The addition now looks like part of the house (albeit an unpainted, unfurnished part of the house). I'll post a bunch of photos, but I really need a wide-angle lens to show everything off in its glory.

Here's a shot looking into the new shower. You can see the two arched doorways, the first leading into the drying off area, and the second to the shower area. No more squeegee, WOOT!

This is a shot taken from the bedroom looking into the new master bath. The first opening to the left will be the vanity area; the second is where the toilet will be. Shower and whirlpool will be on the right. At the far end is my closet. Note there is a window there... that was the pre-existing window from when this space was our garage, and we decided just to leave it there, in spite of my aversion to windows in closets. ;-) (FYI, the space-age looking yellow thing is a nifty work light Wagner uses... puts off something like 1000 watts of light.)

This is the interior of the bedroom, with the door to Jon's closet at the left and the main door to the bedroom on the right.

Here's a higher shot, attempting to show the vaulted ceilings, but not very effectively. I need that wide-angle lens:

A shot standing from the door to the bedroom looking toward the opposite corner:

Progress accomplished this week:

--Drywall installed in addition
--Brickwork just about finished
--Glass brick windows in master bath installed
--Gutters installed on addition area. Several months before starting the renovation we had put up, at considerable expense, new EverClean gutters that allegedly never, ever need cleaning out. (It probably goes with out saying that Jonathan's and my gutter-cleaning habits are every bit as unreliable as our granite-sealing efforts.) Wagner was able to carefully remove them from the garage and re-use them for the addition.
--First skylight in kitchen removed; new skylight installed. It does a MUCH better job of letting in the light, so I'm glad we went to the effort and expense of swapping it out. We ended up locating it slightly off center so as to necessitate cutting only one room beam instead of four. It looks fine, though:

--Approaching closure/final decisions on tile. Wagner found a new tile store that had a huge number of sample displays up and great selection of trim. I found a new trim piece there that is considerably cheaper than the border I had picked out at Louisville Tile ($8.99 per linear foot compared to $30-something) and looks nearly as nice, so I think I will go with that, and then get the rest of the tile as originally selected.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Massive indecision on my part regarding humidifier selection. At this point, we're going with the True STEAM, but we're waiting for a callback from the HVAC guys to make sure it will fit okay in the furnace room.

Moisture on the brain

2008-12-11T21:05:00.002-05:00

So I have spent WAY too much time the past two days researching humidifiers. The HVAC guys Wagner got estimates from recommended two possible units: a Honeywell True STEAM humidifier, or a Trane evaporative unit. Thanks to my time on the Piano Forum, I knew a little about basic types of humidifiers (pianos need very precise humidity control for a number of reasons), and I had a dim memory of some brands receiving greater praise than others. So I told Wagner I wanted to study the choices before making a decision.

Talk about a headache. While there are plenty of reviews of small portable humdifiers, there are very few objective reviews comparing different whole-house humidifiers. There are plenty of websites discussing individual brands, but they're all biased (published by the company selling the brand), and they all make their own particular brand sound like the be-all and end-all of humidifiers. Rather more troubling was the fact that I could find next to nothing about Trane humidifiers.

On the other hand, the True STEAM was getting rave reviews from a number of corners, including various HVAC and do-it-yourself forums. Apparently it is very effective because it heats water directly into steam, and thus converts essentially 100% of the water that flows through into humidity, as opposed to the evaporative type of humidifiers, which run water through a pad and thus as much as 2/3 of the water just goes straight down the drain. (This type in turn is infinitely better than the old-fashioned drum type of humidifier, which rotates a spinning pad on a drum through a standing pool of water and is thus prone to all sorts of bacteria and mold problems. Whatever you do, don't buy one of those types.)

The snag is that the True STEAM is a fairly new unit, introduced only in the past year or so, and thus with not much of a track record for longevity or reliability, and it also cost twice as much as the Trane. I also could find only one post talking about the cost of running the unit, and it mentioned that it raised their electricity bill by about $40 a month. That adds up to a lot over time.

But with the internet remaining scarily mute on the Trane, I didn't know if I wanted to spring for it. On the other hand, the Piano Forum (and other places which presumably knew more about humidifiers) also raved about the Aprilaire or Desert Spring units (both evaporative types). Of course neither of those were offered by the HVAC people we were having doing the furnace.

Then I noticed buried in some forum a post which asserted that Trane was the same as Aprilaire. Huh. I called the Aprilaire people and spoke to a VERY nice and helpful young man who was reluctant to confirm that they were identical but did confirm that Aprilaire's parent company also manufactures the Trane unit. I pressed him a bit on the issue, and he said that the main units were probably the same and that the main difference would be in how they were packaged (e.g., the humidistat supplied with it, etc.)

At that point I was leaning toward the Trane/Aprilaire, when I mentioned we were getting a high efficiency gas furnace for the addition. In that case, he said, we strongly recommend that you connect the humidifier to a hot water line. Because the furnace is so efficient, it doesn't run as much, and therefore the humidifier isn't operating enough. Using the hot water line would help it humidify better during the shorter time it was running. This, I knew, could be a big snag, because Wagner had only (thus far) run a cold water line over to the furnace room.

Uh-oh.

So then I called the HVAC people and asked them about it. I spoke with the technician who is installing our furnace, and I spoke with the owner of the company himself. They both said that while both humidifiers were nice, they preferred the True STEAM. I mentioned the operating cost issue, and the owner said that he had installed three of the units in his own house and did not notice a big change in his electric bill. I didn't know what to make of that. He wouldn't lie to me (would he?), but he definitely had a vested interest in selling me the more expensive unit.

Grapple grapple. So then I decided to go to the horse's mouth and call Honeywell directly and ask them how much their units cost to run. And here is where I get all irritated. Any Honeywell execs reading this, you should know this: Your customer service sucks. First, your website is hard to navigate, with some pages slow to load or resulting in the dreaded Error 404 (page not found) message. Worse, there is no customer service phone number posted under your contact information. There's just an email form where you can submit a question, but when I tried to do that and clicked "send," nothing happened.

Finally, I found a pdf brochure for the True STEAM linked through the site, and way at the bottom of the brochure in tiny 4 pt. font was a customer phone number. Heh heh. I dialed it, rubbing my hands and cackling evilly. But first I had to navigate three separate menus before I even got to the recorded voice that told me that my wait time "might exceed ten minutes." Then I was treated to a scratchy, poor quality audio recording of an instrumental version of "You Light Up My Life." I'm sorry, but the Honeywell person who designed that hold tape should be the first casualty of the economic downturn.

Finally, finally, I talk to a real person... who, judging by his accent, was sitting in a large call center in India. Before I can even start my question, he asks me for my telephone number, name, zip code, and shoe size. Just joking about that last one, but I finally got all snitty and asked "Why do you need to know all that?" "We want to ensure our call quality," was his reply.

Finally I got to ask my question: What is the typical operating cost of the True STEAM system? "Oh, I'm sorry, ma'am," he replied, "I can't discuss that. I can only talk about the various features of our products." This stumped me momentarily until I came up with a clever rejoinder: "Hmmm.... well, it occurs to me that the typical operating cost of your unit IS in fact a feature of your product."

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but it is impossible to predict how much it will cost to run. Say that I am in Texas. ['fat chance of that,' I think to myself] The cost of electricity and the weather conditions will make the operating cost of the True STEAM unit very different than what you might pay."

I begged him to just give me a ballpark range... was it a dollar or two a month? Forty dollars like the sole mention of it that I found? Or 100 dollars a month? He stubbornly refused to budge, and I ended the call much disgruntled.

So, at this point I'm leaning toward the True STEAM unit, simply because I do find the literature compelling and believe the people who say that it is more effective. I was finally swayed by something the HVAC company guy said, which is that moist air will migrate toward dry air, so the new humidifier unit should also help out with the rest of the house... and our current humidifiers do not do a great job of keeping the humidity high enough in the winter. The final straw was when he casually asked, "Say, didn't Mr. Wagner say you have a piano you were concerned about? This True STEAM would be better protection for it."

I am fiercely protective about my piano, so even if it costs more to install and run, I guess I'll go for the better unit. Perhaps growing weary of my changing my mind every couple of hours, Wagner told me to "think it over tonight" and let him know for sure tomorrow morning.

Progress report -- Week 13

2008-12-09T10:55:00.004-05:00

Progress accomplished this week:

--Most of the interior framing/carpentry work for addition finished
--Insulation installed in garage
--Installation of insulation in addition started
--Electrical panel relocated
--HVAC inspection passed
--Brick work continues (slowly)
--Tile layout for bathroom finalized
--Drywall in furnace room put up
--Whirlpool tub installed

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Bitter cold weather has made it impossible most days to lay brick
--Frame for whirlpool tub initially made too wide. We had decided not to have steps leading up to the tub, because it was only 21" off the ground and we thought we could just step into it easily. But the first frame built for it was too wide, and Wagner feared the building inspector wouldn't approve it without a step. So we got the carpenter back in today and he will cut it back.

This should be an exciting week, as most if not all of the drywall in the addition will be put up and then it will start looking like part of a house rather than a construction site. We're supposed to get an inch of rain today, though, so Wagner wants to wait until the rain is done, just to make sure there are no leaks in the addition before putting up drywall.

Back to earth

2008-12-06T21:37:00.004-05:00

I had talked in an earlier post about selecting the tile for the master bath and how I had selected a beautiful layout, complete with 40" x 40" mosaic medallion to install on the floor and elaborate decorative trim to go in the interior of the shower, around both arched shower doorways, and around the whirlpool tub area.

We are now getting to the point in the renovation where the drywall is ready to go up, and seeing as we had a more definite idea about interior layouts and measurements, Wagner thought it would be a good idea to go revisit Louisville Tile and get the order processed.

Well, that was an exercise in reality-testing. During my first visit, when I had made all the selections, there was one teeny-tiny little detail I had forgotten to ask about, namely, how much all of this stuff cost.

Uh-oh.

Turns out that it costs a lot. A whole lot. Take the decorative border. I had planned on a top border with a little leaf motif, about 2.5" wide, then a 3" decorative trim that matches the mosaic medallion for the tile, and then a half-inch bullnose trim below that. Taken together, those three little trims cost something like $70 a linear foot. Yes, per foot. And the big floor medallion was hideously expensive. Yikes.

It was time to rethink. I thought, briefly, about skipping the floor mosaic. But I had really, really fallen in love with it, and I rationalized it to myself by saying that in the broad scheme of what we were paying for the renovation, the floor mosaic was a mere fraction.

So we're keeping it.

The decorative trim was another matter. I knew I wanted the trim, but maybe I didn't need to have it go all the way around the whirlpool area and I could just keep it in the shower. And maybe I didn't need to use the expensive 3" trim that matched the floor mosaic. So I looked around and found a plainer trim with a leaf design that could work, and I found a cheaper bullnose. (It disturbed me greatly that the half-inch bullnose trim was within a couple of dollars as expensive as the much fancier, wider top decorative border I had picked out.) But the more I thought about this alternative version, the less I liked it. Kathy had noted that the new trim was all the same bland color and thus wouldn't represent as nice a decoration as would the original trim, which was multi-colored (and designed specifically for the tile we had chosen).

So then I went to Plan C. I decided we only needed trim on the exterior of the first shower arched doorway, and we would leave the interior arch (the one that separates the drying off area from the shower proper) plain. And then I realized that I didn't really need that bottom half-inch bullnose border, either; I think it will look good just to have the top border and the matching 3" decorative trim, and then go straight to tile. That will save us about 1/3 on the trim costs.

And then I resorted to Plan D, which was to ask Jonathan across the dinner table, "Don't you agree that we should make the bathroom look really nice and the way we want it to, even if it means we go over budget and have to pay a little more?" My wonderful hubby just laughed resignedly and said "yes."

Gosh, I love that man. :)

Throwing the switch

2008-12-04T08:46:00.002-05:00

So today is a big day for the renovation. It is the day where we relocate the main box thingy where all our electricity comes into the house. It had previously been located right outside the (former) garage, which is now inside the (new) bedroom closet for Jonathan. Kentucky Utilities, however, is rather picky about where the electrical box goes, so we have to install a new box that will be located outside the addition.

If all goes well, the transition will not be a big deal and we will be without power for only about an hour. I wasn't nervous about it until I became aware that Wagner was feeling a little nervous about it, because he kept assuring me that he would "be there the whole time the transition takes place," and that he wouldn't "leave until you got power restored, no matter how long that takes." And then he casually mentioned that it might be a "good idea" to turn the thermostat way up a few hours before the work starts so that the house will stay warm "as long as possible."

Gulp.

The good news is that the worst case scenario is not all that bad. Even if there is a problem, we can simply camp out at Jonathan's office for a night. Or more. Athena is more worried about her pet rats than anything else, so I promised her I'd hang around the house all day as well and be prepared to swoop them (and the cat) off to heat and safety should there be any delays in getting our power back on. The guppies will have to fend for themselves.

...But now it's time to power down the computer so it doesn't get fried during the switchover.

Floored by options

2008-12-03T09:22:00.003-05:00

As much as I wanted to, I couldn't rest on my laurels of choosing the master bath and laundry room tile. We have several other important surfaces that needed decisions, and Wagner kept dropping little hints like "You need to start thinking about what you want on the garage study floor," and "You need to begin thinking about the bedroom floor," with the hints gradually increasing in urgency to "I really need you to decide what you're going to use for flooring." Gulp.

The problem is that there really are so many different choices, and they range in price from expensive to scarily expensive. I initially thought the garage study would be easy. Again I'm not anticipating the room will get heavy use, so I thought it best to go with something economical (= dirt cheap) and easy to maintain. If ever a space was designed for vinyl or linoleum flooring, this was it, I thought. Well, guess again. First, Wagner got that disconcerted look on his face again and said "Of course, you should get whatever you want, but if you're going to all this expense you may want to consider something that will hold up better." Then when I looked at vinyl samples at places like Home Depot and Lowe's, the staff there all kind of sniffed and said "Vinyl really isn't being used much at all these days." Not to mention that it wasn't as cheap as I had thought it would be. I was interested most in the vinyl that looked like fake hardwood or fake stone tile. These still cost anywhere between $2.00 and $4.00 per square foot. That made the 99 cent per sq. ft. tile we ordered for the laundry room look very, very attractive indeed, and I gnashed my teeth thinking we should've ordered a whole bunch more of it for the garage study. But it was a close-out with limited quantities so that wasn't an option.

Then Jonathan suggested carpet for the garage. I was less than enthusiastic about this, for several reasons. First, as expensive as tile and vinyl was, carpet was even more expensive. More important, though, was the cleaning factor. Here I must confess that we do not own a vacuum cleaner. We used to have one, but we loaned it to step-daughter Larissa when she moved to town a few years ago. We have a cleaning service come in every week to the house, and that's proven to be sufficient in terms of keeping our upstairs carpet nice and tidy. But I wasn't planning on having them clean the garage study, given the extra expense and minimal amount of use I anticipate it will receive. Even if we bought a new vacuum, I wasn't wild about the idea of lugging it back and forth to the garage. So I nixed the carpet idea.

That left us back with the fake wood vinyl flooring I saw at Home Depot, which cost $1.97 a square foot and would entail suffering the snide looks of the Home Depot employees if we ordered it. ("Hey, look, here comes that lady with absolutely no taste in interior decorating again!") So I was brooding over the options when I ran across an ad in the local newspaper placed by a firm called "Lumber Liquidators" and advertising genuine oak laminate flooring for 78 cents a square foot. This seemed too good to be true (I had seen that laminate flooring at Home Depot costing five or six times as much), but I had to check them out. Sure enough, they had two kinds of 6 mm thick oak laminate flooring for a mere 78 cents a square foot. This is the stuff that come in long planks that you just click together sort of like a jigsaw puzzle. It looks like a hardwood floor but is a lot cheaper, because it's so thin. But it looks a hell of a lot better than the fake wood vinyl. And it was cheaper. Talk about a win-win situation.

It didn't end up as cheap as I had originally dreamed, however, because it turns out that you can't just plop the planks down on the floor; you have to purchase a pad with a water barrier to go under it. When I asked the employees "Do I really need that pad or can I just plop the planks down?" they gave me that awkward look I've been getting a lot during this renovation from various stores ("Man, I can't believe this lady's lack of basic home construction knowledge") and assured me that a pad was essential to avoid moisture problems and keep the planks from popping up. They also said that failure to use a pad would void the 10-year warranty. Okay, so that convinced me. The pad they recommended cost another 50 cents a square foot, which brings the total to $1.28 a square foot for the laminate, which *still* represents a hefty savings over the fake wood vinyl while looking infinitely better. So that's what we're going to go with.

Oh, and there's also the expense of the trim. We can order a primed white quarter round for something like 45 cents a linear foot, which can be painted to match the walls. Or we could order oak quarter rounds matching the stain of the floor for a whole lot more, $22 per 7.5 foot length. The white cheapie seems okay to me, so we'll probably go with that.

Now that just leaves choosing the flooring for the garage bathroom, the entry foyer to the addition, and the master bedroom itself. Yikes.

Progress report --- Week 12

2008-12-01T09:12:00.004-05:00

Progress accomplished this week:

--Electrical inspection of new garage/study passed
--Half of electrical wiring for addition part accomplished (photo above shows one of the recessed can lights that will be in the bedroom)
--Framing work continued in addition for interior walls
--Bricklaying continued; nearly finished with exterior
--Tile workers came in and measured so that tile can be ordered

--Door from Jonathan's computer room to new closet in addition put in. I haven't talked about this part of the renovation before. The garage was originally on the other side of our small study that Jon uses as his computer room, where he hangs out and plays video games. We could use more storage room for that area (his video game collection is quite impressive), so in planning the addition we decided to put in a door that would lead to a walk-in closet area where we could put bookcases, a table with room for a printer/fax/scanner machine, etc. We had quite the animated discussion as to whether to have a door installed or just leave the opening to the closet area open. Wagner and I were advocating heavily for the door option; Jon was arguing just as strenuously to leave it open. Wagner ended up putting a door on "just for the time being" to insulate the house from the rest of the addition area (which is still very cold all the time due to not having all the windows installed yet or furnace in place). We are both hoping that Jon will get used to the door and not object to it staying there. ;-)

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Well, it's hard to call Thanksgiving an "obstacle," but it did slow down work.

Flush with options

2008-11-27T21:51:00.006-05:00

Of all the decisions we had to make for the addition, the one I took most seriously was: Choosing the toilet. Yes, the toilet. I spend a lot of time on mine, as I have a bladder the size of a walnut. (That's probably more information about me than you want to know, but it's important for establishing the background.)

I also realized that this was not going to be an easy choice. You are probably aware that in 1992 the U.S. government passed the National Energy Policy Act mandating that all new toilets use no more than 1.6 gallons per flush, as a step toward water conservation.

The snag is that the early 1.6 gpf toilets were horrendous. People were having to flush 2 or 3 times just to get the, er, stuff down, and that kind of defeats the whole purpose of trying to conserve water. It got so bad that a black market of the older 5-7 gpf toilets sprang up across the nation. I had a dim memory of reading some article about the situation, with the author concluding that some of the new toilets were definitely better than the others.

Since we like to be environmentally conscientious when possible, I didn't want to use a black-market toilet, but I also definitely did not want a toilet that wouldn't flush. So I turned to the internet and delved into the wild and woolly world of toilet research.

(Incidentally, do you know what some companies use for testing toilets? Tofu turds. I'm not joking. They take tofu of varying consistencies and mash it into little sausage shaped turd substitutes.)

A couple of sources kept referring to one particular website as the mecca of toilet lore, a site run by a plumber named Terry Love, www.terrylove.com. If you want to spend an entertaining evening, I highly recommend this site. He offers a detailed report on what he considers the best low-flow toilets out there, complete with links to a toilet forum that he also runs from his website.

Yes, I said toilet forum. Given that I spend way too many hours on the Piano World forum, I should be more sympathetic to the notion of a toilet forum, but I have to tell you that this forum cracks me up. It is full of people talking about their toilet purchases, toilet experiences (shudder), and photos of their toilets that they have felt compelled to share with the 6 billion people on the planet.

But it's the comments that are the most hilarious. My favorite was this gem by JH, who reported on his purchase of a Toto Ultramax toilet: "These toilets are deadly with solid waste, no 'victory lap' around the bowl. You simply say 'brown buddy, you're going down,' and that's that."

That recommendation clinched it for me, so I initially decided I had to have an Ultramax toilet for myself. So I went to the Toto toilet website and searched for the nearest distributor. There weren't any in Lexington, but there was a dealer in Nicholasville, not too far away. I called up and asked if they had any Ultramaxes in their showroom, and the woman said, "Yes, in fact, we have one installed in our women's room."

WOOT. I couldn't resist the chance to try one out in action, so the next day I sped off to the showroom, where Gina showed me the toilet and was very gracious when I asked if she could excuse me so I could try it out.

I will say this: The flush and refill action on these toilets are awesome. The whole thing took literally no more than 8 seconds from start to finish. I was in toilet love. I absolutely hate getting up in middle of the night, doing my thing, then laying in bed for what seems like hours waiting for the %@$%!& toilet to shut off so I don't have to worry about getting back up and jiggling the %$@#(! handle.

The only thing I didn't like about the Ultramax was the appearance (it was a one-piece unit, very contemporary, which looked nice on the company website but in person seemed a little too edgy to me) and the price (very expensive, around $750). So I asked Gina what other options I should consider. She said that the Toto Drake model was their best seller, and it had the same flushing mechanism as the Ultramax but was a two-piece unit in a more traditional style. She then walked me over to the men's room where they had it installed. I asked her to excuse me once again (I told y'all I had a small bladder...), where I tried it out and verified that it was every bit as satisfying to flush as the Ultramax. Better yet, it was a lot cheaper: With a slow-close seat, it came to something like $425. ("What's a slow-close seat" you ask? It's a seat with a special hinge so that all you have to do is drop it down and it lowers itself carefully and quietly to the resting position. No more unpleasant WHAM! when you accidentally drop a lid or seat down.)

We chose the ADA-compliant "comfort" height model of the Drake, one where the bowl is 16.5" off the ground, which is slightly higher than a traditional toilet. This is one aspect of our desire for following a unversal design strategy in building the addition that I will use and appreciate right away, as decades of running and overtraining have made my middle-aged knees sore much of the time. The comfort height toilets are a lot easier for me to sit down on and get off of, and have I mentioned that I have a small bladder and go to the bathroom a lot? ;-)

The photo above shows what the Drake looks like in white. It also comes in a color (Sedona Beige) that is identical to the biscuit tub and sinks we had ordered, so we are all set to sit.

Progress report -- Week 11

2008-11-24T10:16:00.003-05:00

Laundry room plumbing:

Main showerhead plumbing, accompanied by Isaac:

Insulation in garage:

I've been out of town, and then when I returned the whole family came down with one of those very nasty norovirus stomach bugs (trust me, you don't want the details), so I haven't been able to post lately. I'm probably also leaving some things out.

Progress accomplished this week:

--Plumbing has been routed through walls and pipes in their final locations in the addition
--Plumbing finished in the garage/study, and building inspector approved
--Electrical wiring finished in the garage/study, and building inspector approved
--Insulation added to garage
--Furnace and ductwork installed in the garage. Wagner convinced Jonathan that it would be best to leave the furnace up in the attic area, but he rearranged the ducts so that the warm air would be coming out at the floor level of the study. That was a more feasible compromise than exchanging the furnace.
--More framing/carpentry work done in addition. Archways for shower built.
--New wider skylight ordered, will be installed after Thanksgiving.
--Lighting fixtures for addition selected and ordered, will be installed this week.
--Blocking for grab bars, towel racks, etc. laid out in master bath. Wagner thinks we should go ahead and install the grab bars for the bath, tub, and toilet, again with an eye to having everything accessible for the future. I'm not quite as convinced, as those grab bars are awfully big and clunky looking. I asked Wagner, "how long does a typical tile job last in a shower?" and suggested that we could always add the grab bars the next time we retile. He replied that it could last as long as 15-20 years, and then he asked, "How old is Jonathan?" (56). Point taken. We may compromise and just put one bar at each location and block for the others to be installed later as needed.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--I realized that I forgot to tell Wagner we wanted a humidifier installed with the new furnace in the addition area. Oops. So now he has to route a water line to the furnace room.
--Horrible weather here... rain, bitter cold, snow flurries. This has slowed brickwork.

Progress report --- Week 10

2008-11-16T20:36:00.005-05:00

View of where Jonathan's closet in the new bedroom will be, complete with newly installed window (the one on the left). The holes where the other two windows were (facing us) will be walled over.

View of the new bedroom, with beautiful picture window installed. You can see a little of the vaulted ceilings here.

Progress accomplished this week:

--Picture window installed in bedroom
--Skylight in kitchen installed, dry-wall repaired
--Framing done for interior of master bedroom/bathroom suite
--Stairs built in garage
--Shower unit moved to garage study
--Kitchen cabinet installed in garage study. We're re-using the old one from our kitchen renovation, although we will need to buy a new sink to satisfy the building inspector. Wagner says he can trim some of our leftover Corian countertop to fit it.
--Brickwork done on most of garage
--Foundation at front of house dug out. Turns out that we do have a footer for part of the front stretch, so we're only going to have to pay $2000 for two support piers. Phew.
--Cabinets for master bathroom selected and ordered. We're ordering AristoKraft cabinets, Landen door style, Maple wood in a saddle stain. The photo on the bottom shows the cabinet style but in a different color; the one on the top is the stain color we're going with.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Jonathan and I changed our minds about the skylight and the furnace location. See previous post.
--Cold rain for a couple of days. This slowed/halted brickwork.
--Bathtub deemed too small and swapped out. See earlier post.

More photos, this time of the garage study:

Why Wagner has every right to gnash his teeth

2008-11-16T12:30:00.005-05:00

Yesterday Wagner came over and spent two hours walking through the addition with Jonathan and me, pointing out what had been done so far and what was planned for the future. He may very well end up regretting having done so, as Jonathan and I managed to complicate his life greatly.

First there was me and the skylight. I was hoping the skylight would replace all the natural light we had lost when the kitchen window was blocked over. And the skylight in our bathroom had done a terrific job of lightening up that space. But when the skylight was put in the kitchen, the total effect was rather underwhelming. Even though it was probably the same size as the bathroom skylight in total area, it was skinny and rectangular in shape, and it was sitting on top of a much deeper, narrower trench, as there was more roof/ceiling area it had to go through.

The end result is that it just didn't let in as much light as I was hoping for. So... even though this skylight was already installed, with the drywall work all completed, and everything was ready for the kitchen to be repainted, when Wagner bravely volunteered "I can make it wider if you want," Jonathan and I thought it over and decided to go ahead and redo it and put in a wider skylight. As much as I hate to inconvenience Wagner and make his men come out and redo the whole thing, we figured it would be better to go ahead and make it the way we want it now, while everything is in an uproar anyhow, and before the kitchen got painted.

The only snag is that there are some roof joists in the way. (That's why Wagner put in the narrow one in the first place.) He can put in a header and cut out one of the joists, if we don't mind an off-center skylight. But if we want it centered, there are two joists that would be affected, and he didn't want to cut out both, for structural reasons. So if we go the centered route, we'll have to leave the joists in, where they'll be exposed (though we can paint them) and it might look a little weird.

Then we toured the new garage. The carpenter got stairs built to the upstairs study, so it was the first time we had seen that area. It's going to be HUGE, and very nice. We're going to have built-in bookcases along one edge, with the kitchen area on the other side. Wagner then pointed out the pull-down staircase where there would be access to the garage attic area, where he intended to put the furnace. You may remember from an earlier post that he had decided to move the furnace up to the attic to make room for a workbench area and our cars on the main floor of the garage. I could've sworn I had briefed Jonathan on that change, and maybe I did but all the ramifications hadn't been obvious at the time.

Anyway, when Jon looked up to see the space where the furnace was going to be, he realized that the hot air would be coming down from the ceiling, which bothered him. Hot air rises, so it seemed more efficient to Jon to have the ductwork and heat coming in at the floor. Jonathan also has this thing about sitting or lying down near heater vents in cold weather and enjoying the blast of hot air right next to him. It's just one of his lovable little quirks. ;-) So Jon told Wagner that he didn't want the furnace in the attic space. Wagner got his "uh-oh this complicates things a whole lot" look on his face and said, again bravely, that if we were going to make that change we needed to decide right then and there because the furnace was already ordered and the duct work was going to start next week.

We spent half an hour or so going over various options, and we ended up deciding to put the furnace back on the ground floor of the garage, where we had originally planned to put it, in the space under the stairs. That was where Wagner currently intended to put the hot water heater, which meant that we had to move THAT back upstairs. We're going to add a little closet space next to the bathroom where we can stick the hot water heater.

Jonathan realizes it will cost extra, because we're probably going to have to exchange the furnace for a new one (Wagner had ordered one designed for attic spaces), with a resulting restocking fee, and there will be extra drywall and carpentry work for the water heater closet. Not to mention essentially having to redo the skylight. And then there's the little matter of my tile and vanity cabinet choices going well over budget.

Oh well. If anybody would like to buy a narrow skylight, cheap, let me know. I happen to know where there will be a lightly used one available soon. ;-)

Rub-a-dub-dub

2008-11-12T21:20:00.003-05:00

So we had a little crisis with the whirlpool tub. It was delivered this week, but when it arrived, Wagner took one look at it and thought it was too small. I had picked it out of a catalog with the help of Tarla at Ferguson's, but they didn't have a sample on their showroom floor, so all I had to go on in picking it out was a small photo on the cut sheet. And y'all know what my spatial and visualization skills are like (i.e., very poor).

The original tub was 56" long, which seemed at the time like it ought to be long enough. But when the carpenter drew out a stencil and laid it out where it would go, it looked like a tea cup. Not to mention that somehow we had picked up an extra 6 inches in the general bathtub area, so we had more space than we had originally planned.

So even though it would mean a restocking fee, we thought it would look better, not to mention being more comfortable, if we traded it in for a bigger tub. So we went down to Ferguson's and looked at our options. One choice would be a larger oval tub, one that would be 63" long, or possibly we could go with a triangular shaped tub to fit in the corner area. The bigger oval had a nice sloping back rest and more leg room for stretching out, and I sort of liked the simple look of it, so that's what I went with.

We scampered back to the house with the new cut sheet and drew out another stencil, because I *really* wanted to avoid the situation of having to send back a second tub. Once we were sure the new tub would fit and look good, we confirmed the swap. The good news is that they'll get the new tub delivered tomorrow, pick up the first tub, and it will only cost another $200 total.

This is not a garage apartment

2008-11-11T13:48:00.003-05:00

The building inspector came out yesterday on one of his regular visits, and he told Wagner that he wanted to make one thing clear: He would not approve an apartment on top of the garage. (Remember the zoning laws in our neighborhood that allows only one appliance in a garage apartment, er, study.) Wagner assured him that the space on the top floor of the garage was definitely not an apartment. The inspector then asked him "well, then, what's this plumbing doing right here where it looks like you're going to install a sink?" Wagner said "It's going to be a break room, and they want a sink for making coffee."

The building inspector then fixed Wagner with a long and steely stare and finally said, "I don't know what's going to happen to this space after I certify it for occupancy. But I'm not going to approve it with a full-size sink."

So, it looks like our plans to re-use our old kitchen counter and sink won't work. We can use the base cabinets, but we'll have to find a new countertop with one of those little bar sinks. And that's fine by me, as I seriously doubt we'll have anybody actually living out there, unless maybe it's Isaac when he's in college. And I'm sure that if we're just using it as guest room space, a small bar sink will be more than adequate.

I was in fact worried that we were going to all this expense to build an enormous garage with a room that nobody would use at all. But it sounds like that won't be the case. Instead, we're all squabbling over who gets to use it. Hubby Jonathan wants it as a second home office/library for his coin books. Athena wants to use it for slumber parties, or as a gigantic free-range area for all the pets she plans to get to put in it. (Fat chance, that scheme!) It would make an excellent place for Isaac to practice his violin. Or drums. And I kinda have my eye on the space for myself, as a quiet place where I could choose to work/write at home if I wanted.

But whatever we use it for, it won't be an apartment. ;-)

Progress report --- Week 9

2008-11-08T13:47:00.006-05:00

Progress made this week:

--Bricks put on about 75% of the garage
--Walls on addition portion finished, with openings cut out for windows
--Roof on addition portion put on
--New double window hung in kitchen
--One of the old kitchen windows removed and opening drywalled over
--Cut-out of addition roof made to accommodate upstairs dormer
--I spent a morning at a cabinet store making choices about the bathroom vanity cabinets and countertop.
--A structural engineer came out and investigated the big crack we found earlier running down the front of the house. He and Wagner were both flummoxed to discover that the foundation of the front of the house lacked a footer. What this means is that they will have to dig out a trench and install anywhere between 2 and 5 support piers (depending on just how long of a stretch there is without a footer) to prevent further sagging of the house. This will cost an additional $1000 a pier. Yikes. Apparently this was all caused by the bad droughts we've been having the past couple of years, where the soil has dried up and caused the sagging, which caused the cracks.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Rain one day, slowing down work.
--While I liked the vanity cabinets I decided on, I'm not thrilled with the tank topper that goes with that style. (A tank topper is a cabinet that hangs on the wall above the toilet.) I really like the one we have now, which came with the house, and I'd love to be able to find one that matches whatever cabinets we choose to put in. I think I may have to go out and look at some other cabinet stores.

In sum, I think this week has seen the most visible and remarkable progress. Yeah, I know the early stages where all the underground pipe and duct work is going on is incredibly important and impressive in its own way, but it's hard to get overly excited about a hole in the ground with some pipes sticking out. There's just something really gratifying and amazing when you have walls going up and roofs put on. Jon and I have a much better idea now what it's going to look like, and I think it's going to be beautiful.

The end of "minimally disruptive"

2008-11-05T20:20:00.007-05:00

Back when we were still debating whether or not to go forward with the renovation, Wagner looked us in the eye and swore that, most of the time, the renovation would be "minimally disruptive" to our lifestyle--much less intrusive, in fact, than the kitchen renovation over the summer. I had a bit of a hard time believing him on that, given the scale of the work to be done. But for the most part, he's been correct. The work to date has all taken place outside, so apart from losing our garage and having to park our cars in the front, it really hasn't affected our day to day activities.

But that all changed this week, as we are moving into the phase of the project that Wagner warned us would be disruptive, which is the part where we remove two of the kitchen windows, install a skylight, and replace the third kitchen window with a double-wide window.

In preparation for this work, the crew came in and put down butcher paper all over the hardwood floors and a carpet section near the door, to minimize the tracking of dirt and drywall dust and the like. Then they taped up big plastic sheeting to close off the eat-in section of the kitchen where most of the work will be done. (I had to move out the little table and chair set and the ficus we kept there.) One of the plastic sheets had a zipper built in so you could open it to walk through but otherwise leave it fairly airtight, a trick Wagner picked up from his work in hospitals where you have to be very careful about minimizing dust etc. for the patients.

The end result is that we are (so far) getting very little construction dust or dirt in the rest of the house, but the kitchen looks like something out of a Biosafety Level IV lab. ;-)

With any luck this phase won't last long. He's already hung the double window in place, and it looks terrific. (The photo shown above is from before the window was replaced; I'll be posting an "after" photo later.) The prep work has been done for removing the second kitchen window, and the light fixture where the skylight is going to go has been taken out. They're predicting rain in a day or two, so he's planning on waiting until next Monday to install the skylight, so that we're not in the position of having a big hole in the roof all weekend while it's raining.

A closet conundrum

2008-11-04T20:57:00.005-05:00

Yesterday evening Wagner was showing my hubby, Jonathan, and I around the work site. We were looking at the part of the addition where one of the walk-in closets was going to be situated, and he asked "Oh, by the way, do you want a window in your closet? We could re-use one of the kitchen windows we're having to take out."

My immediate reaction was to look at Wagner in disbelief and think "are you kidding?" Why on earth would anyone want a window in their closet?!? After all, much of the time when you're going into a closet, you either have pajamas or a robe on or no clothes at all. The last thing I want when I am fumbling around for my clothes at 6:00 a.m. is to have to remember to close the drapes.

So all of that was going through my head as I shook my head confidently and said "No way." Unfortunately, at the exact same moment, Jonathan was saying thoughtfully, "Yeah, I'd like a window." Then it was my turn to look at him in disbelief. I went through all the logical arguments as to why a window in one's closet was unnecessary, nay, undesirable. I also pointed out how a window would simply take up valuable space one could use for hanging clothes.

"So what?" he replied. "We can just use that wall for putting our shoes on a rack underneath the window." Then he got a calculating gleam in his eye and said, "And anyway, isn't that going to be MY closet? Why do you care?"

He had me there. Our plans call for two walk-in closets: one off the bedroom itself, and the other at the rear of the bathroom. The one off the bedroom is the one that Wagner proposed adding a window to, and it's the larger of the two closets. But it's also the one we had earmarked for Jon. This is because I get up earlier than he does, to shower before waking the kids up and fixing them breakfast. So I thought it made more sense for me to take the closet off the bathroom. That way when I wake up, I can tiptoe into the bathroom, close the door, turn on the lights, shower, and get dressed without bothering Jonathan, who can remain content and undisturbed in blissful slumber until I bring him his first cup of coffee, which he drinks sitting up in bed in the darkness. I'm such a good wife. ;-)

So then I informed him that, because of my sacrifice in taking the smaller closet off the bathroom for the sole purpose of allowing him to remain content and undisturbed in blissful slumber, I had sort of been planning all along to put some of my clothes I don't use often (fancy party dresses and the like) in his closet, given that he is a male and therefore *ahem* obviously has less need for closet space. Putting a window in the closet would thus cut into the amount of space that I had intended to nab.

Jon then said, "Oh, you were, were you?"

At this point Wagner looked vaguely alarmed and said "Uh-oh. I shouldn't have asked about the window."

But, using the superior negotiating skills we have developed with great success throughout the 14 years of our marriage, we were able to arrive at a workable compromise, to wit: Jon got his way. I realized that the two new closets would be more than enough room for our clothes, even with a window, and because Jon has been exceedingly agreeable to every decision I've made so far (and there have been a ton of them), it only made sense to be agreeable on the rare occasions he voices an opinion. So, if it's a window in his closet he wants, a window he will get.

Besides, we'll still have that absolutely huge master closet in our current bedroom where I can leave stuff if I need more space. ;-)

Progress report --- Week 8

2008-11-02T20:01:00.005-05:00

Progress completed this week:

--Cement floor of garage poured
--Eaves on garage roof installed
--Brickwork begun on garage
--Framing of addition section completed
--Trusses put up on addition. I'm much happier with the angle of the new truss. It blocks a bit of the upstairs dormer but not too much.
--Dragged the kids with me and spent two hours at Lowe's collecting yet more paint chips; holding tile sample against various countertop options; and browsing floor options for the garage studio.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Wagner's not happy with the bricklaying work. Our brick pattern consists of bricks mostly of one color, with a few bricks of lighter and darker color interspersed throughout. The mason guy he has is not blending them adequately enough, in Wagner's opinion. He may end up getting somebody else to do it.
--I was too busy at work (getting my edited book manuscript finished and sent to the publisher by the deadline, which I made, barely). That meant I didn't have much time this past week to research and decide on toilets, paint chips, vanities, carpet, etc. That will be my mission for this upcoming week.

Reflections on kitchen renovation

2008-10-30T20:54:00.005-04:00

It occurred to me that I might want to say something useful in this blog, instead of blathering on about my limitations as a homeowner and housekeeper. So, while this blog is concerned mainly with our first floor master suite addition and new garage, I thought I'd offer my musings about our recent kitchen renovation, now that it's been some months since it has been completed and I've had the chance to reflect on what worked well, and what not so well, in the project.

Features of the New Cabinets that I Really, Really Like

I chose American Woodmark cabinets, marketed through Home Depot, simply because it was easy and convenient to browse through samples there, and the Woodmark cabinets were solid, middle of the road cabinets. Not cheap and flimsy, but not overly expensive, either. I got a little carried away, though, when I saw the brochure on all the extra features you could special order. In case you're planning a kitchen renovation of your own, here's the features I'd recommend strongly:

1.) Pull-out trash drawer. This is probably my favorite aspect of the new cabinets. The pull-out drawer looks just like an ordinary cabinet door, but it contains a nice deep plastic trash bin, and a second shallow bin behind it that I use for storing the box of trash bags. In my old cabinets, we had installed a rickety pull-out trash bag holder on our own, but like most of our home maintenance attempts, this didn't really work well (it kept coming off the tracks), and food/trash kept getting all over the floor of the cabinet and making a royal mess.

2.) Tilt-out drawer at sink. I *almost* didn't even order this, but it has turned out to be my second favorite feature. Before I just stashed my scrub brushes, scouring pads, and sink plugs behind the faucet, which would make my sink area look cluttered and messy. Now they all fit easily in the tilt-out drawer, readily accessible yet leaving my sink uncluttered. I love it. If you order one, get the plastic little containers (so you can pop them in the dishwasher), and make sure the installer doesn't screw them in tightly so you can put them in and out easily.

3.) Cookie sheet tray divider. This is a pull-out unit with little dividers where you can store all your baking sheets, cookie sheets, muffin trays, pizza pans, etc. standing on edge, without them being mashed together in a pile where it's impossible to extricate just one.

4.) Fancy glass panel on one cabinet drawer. As I attended various open houses, I noticed that a lot of upscale homes had fancy glass doors in their cupboards, with collections of priceless crystal and fine china on visible display behind them. We had very little of that stuff, but we did have one set of nice china (from Jonathan's grandmother). So I ordered one glass cabinet door, with a pretty embossed fern design on it, and used it on the cupboard with the china in it. All of our other cabinets, containing the mismatched Scooby-Doo plates and plastic cups we actually use every day, keep their contents hidden from view behind solid doors.

5.) Long tubular modern cabinet pulls. Our old cabinets had the basic round knobs on them. Any way you cut it, round knobs are boring. I liked the modern look of the long tubular pulls, and that's what I went with for the kitchen renovation, even though I had the sneaking suspicion that the peak of popularity for them had passed. I really like the knobs, though. They're easy to grab onto, and easy to clean.

Features of the New Cabinets I'm Not so Crazy About or Would Skip if I were Doing it Over

1.) Pull-out trays in the cabinets. I was tired of leaning way over and rummaging through cabinets to find various pots and pans. So for the renovation, I ordered pull-out trays for all the cabinets. What I didn't realize is that the trays and sliding mechanism take up a fair amount of space on each side. What this means is that I could not fit as much in the cupboards as I had before. So even though the renovation added at least one new cupboard, I had less net space after the renovation than before. That's not ideal. If I were doing it over again, I'd buy pull-out trays for the hardest to reach cupboards but use regular shelves on the others.

2.) Our old cabinets were intalled under soffitts in the ceiling. For the renovation, I decided to keep the soffitts to minimize costs. (Tearing them out would have entailed "significant ceiling repair," Wagner told me.) In hindsight I wish we had taken the soffitts out. The new cabinets hang down lower than the old ones, which gives me less clearance under them. The coffeemaker doesn't fit, for example, nor does the canister with all my big spoons and whisk.

In sum, there's a learning curve associated with doing any kind of renovation. I think I could do a kitchen renovation now faster, easier, and with better outcomes. The implication that I am currently making all sorts of mistakes with the master suite addition is one I don't like to think about much. ;)

Digression: Wagner's Halloween decorations

2008-10-28T08:44:00.007-04:00

Every year, Wagner decorates his house for Halloween. I don't mean the plastic skeleton on the door (which comprises MY sole Halloween decorating this year), or the fake tombstones in the yard, or the cobwebs on the bushes. I mean an all-out spectacular display. He kept urging us to bring the children by one evening. So Saturday night we went out to his house. We knew it was something special when we saw the dim glow of lights a block away, and crowds of people parking and walking up to the house.

Apparently we weren't the only ones who thought the decorations were pretty special, because somebody sent in a photo of Wagner's house to the Today Show's national contest for best Halloween decorations, and it was named one of the 3 finalists. If you stumble across this blog before Halloween, you can go to the website and vote:

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/27364818/

I wouldn't presume to tell people how to vote, but fyi, Wagner's house is House #1. ;-)

[UPDATE EDIT: I wrote last night that Wagner's house had lost by a hair, but it turns out that the web page I was looking at showing the vote tallies hadn't been updated. The show's producers called him last night and said that their house had won, and they announced it on the air Halloween morning. Wagner also said that the producers told him that the Today show didn't have a "big budget" and so the prize would be two "Today Show" coffee cups filled with candy. WOOT.]

The photo (copied above) doesn't really do the decorations justice. His yard was jam-packed full of skeletons in outlandish poses and costumes, both scary (emerging slowly out of coffin) and funny (a porta-potty opens to reveal a skeleton pulling up his boxers).

Wagner says he usually gets 450-500 children coming by for trick or treat. Now with all the publicity (once the local paper and news stations found out about the Today Show contest, they sent crews of their own to cover it, spying an opportunity to drum up good publicity for Lexington), he's worried he's going to have to go out and buy even more candy.

As for me, my plastic skeleton on the door is looking pretty lame. I think I'll go out and buy some cobwebs for the bushes.

Progress report --- Week 7

2008-10-26T21:43:00.006-04:00

Progress accomplished this week:

--Framing of top story of detached garage completed
--Roof of garage put on
--Brick for addition and garage has arrived
--Telephone "grid box" (where telephone line enters house) relocated
--Tile for master bath and laundry room selected
--Estimate for new fence along back of property obtained
--Neighbor's shed relocated, neighbor's plants dug up and reburied, so we're all clear for moving our fence. Wagner and his men took a full day and a half accomplishing all that, including laying down new grass seed and straw, and adding supports to the shed underneath because the new location wasn't level. Wagner says the neighbor carefully supervised all the work and seemed happy with how it turned out. We're glad the whole thing's resolved, and once again I am convinced of my husband's brilliance in handling that situation.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Another day of rain, which slowed outside work.
--Tree stump on property line discovered. We will either have to remove the stump, or (if we're lucky and the posts don't have to go down through it), just saw it off closer to the ground and put a section of the fence over it.
--Many paint chips collected from various stores. Massive disagreement among family members as to what color paint would (a) match the bathroom tile and (b) look good. This is complicated by the fact that paint chips lie through their teeth and don't look anything like they appear on the chip once the paint is up on the wall.

All in all, this week has seen the most dramatic visible progress. The detached garage is tall and HUGE. Maybe too huge. According to zoning requirements, garages cannot be taller than the house they accompany. Our new garage will be 8 inches shorter than our 1 1/2 story house. That's still pretty darned tall. Our neighbor, Jane (the poor woman who has had construction on all three sides of her house), remarked to our contractor that she now feels hemmed in. I guess I'm hoping that once it's built and all the construction equipment etc. is out of the way, it won't look so mammoth. I also hope that we end up using that room on the top often enough to make it worth it.

Warm tootsies, re-reconsidered

2008-10-24T09:15:00.004-04:00

Luckily for us, Louisville Tile is an authorized distributor of the SunTouch mats we were thinking about for the shower/bathroom floor. While we were there I asked about them, and Kathy told us that they actually had a sample system installed and turned on in one of their hallways. So I immediately ran over there, took off my shoes, and walked across it.

I will say this: You can definitely feel the difference, and it feels great. :) Heated floors are without question a nice luxury touch. But as I thought more about it, I finally decided against installing the system, for a couple of reasons. First, it simply wasn't giving off the blasts of heat that I had in mind for the drying-off portion of the shower. Second, Kathy said the system was designed to be left on all the time (at least during cold weather), because it took a while for the floor to heat up, whereas I was looking for something that could be used on a short-term basis (while we were showering) and was therefore immediate-acting.

So while it sure felt nice on my feet, and I could envision how wonderful it would be to tip-toe my way to the toilet on a warm floor in middle of a brutally cold winter night, we ultimately decided against the system. I had already gone way over budget in my choice of tile and that fancy medallion for the floor. I'll just have to wear warm, fuzzy socks on those brutal winter nights. ;-)

Tiling away the hours

2008-10-21T20:28:00.016-04:00

This morning, instead of working on a book chapter that is due October 31!!!!, I spent several hours choosing tile for the master bathroom. This was not time I minded spending, however, as the tile choices for the bathroom rank right up there in terms of being the most consequential and important. (To me, that is; I'm sure Wagner would regard the truss decision as being more important.)

We called one tile store and said we'd like to stop by, and the lady who answered told us to come on down. [Warning: Mini-rant follows.] When we got there, though, we were met by a sales associate who immediately informed us that "we are very short-handed today" and "it is better if you schedule an appointment." Of course, I'm thinking that we had in fact called in advance and done exactly that. The saleslady waved a hand toward walls of tile samples and told us to look around while she made a few phone calls. Twenty minutes pass, and then she comes out, apologizes again for being so short-handed, and then assures us of all the personal attention she could give us if only we scheduled an appointment... the earliest of which she had available being a week from now. We made the appointment and left, disgruntled, or at least I was disgruntled. I don't mind being told that appointments are necessary. But I mind very much being told over the phone that it is okay to come right over, only to be sent on our way after dangling in the wind for half an hour. Harrumph. [/end mini-rant]

...But the laugh will be on them, because I will be cancelling that appointment and buying our tile from a different store. We drove straight to Louisville Tile (actually, their branch office located in Lexington), where we met for several hours with an extremely helpful woman named Kathy, with the end result being that I have identified all the tile and decorative border choices for the master bathroom and laundry room.

It is a minor miracle I arrived at these decisions so quickly, because there are few places more intimidating and perplexing than a tile store. Walls and display stands are jam-packed with hundreds, maybe thousands, of tile samples in all sorts of materials, textures, and colors. And that's just the basic tile. Also crammed in there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of options for borders (tile mosaics, premanufactured patterned strips, etc. etc.).

Fortunately, Kathy also immediately realized I was feeling way overwhelmed, so she asked a few questions to narrow down the options. Did I want a stone floor or porcelain tile? Or maybe marble? That was easy, actually. Marble was too expensive and too slick; I wanted a tile with a texture where we would be less inclined to slip and fall. Stone floors are dramatic and beautiful, but they require regular sealing, and y'all know my position on sealing: It ain't gonna happen in my household.

So porcelain tile it was. Kathy then guided me to one of the display stands with textured porcelain tiles and asked, without much hope in her heart, if I had any idea as to a basic color scheme. "Yes!" I triumphantly announced. I wanted something that would be compatible with the biscuit colored undermount sinks and whirlpool that we had already ordered. More important, I wanted something the color of soap scum.

You think I jest, but I am deathly serious. While I love the dark, slate-colored tiles that are popular these days, even I recognize that they would be a nightmare to keep clean of water spots and soap scum. And in doing research for this renovation, I came across more than one expert who warned against dark tiles, as they require "considerable maintenance" to maintain a "pristine appearance." So I wanted something in a pale beige-ish color, possibly with pinkish overtones. And, again, something textured, ideally with a mottled appearance to hide spots etc.

As I flipped through the display panels, I paused at one particular choice and said, "This one looks rather nice." Kathy then pointed out that they had a sample shower across the room in that precise tile pattern. Being able to see what it looked like over a large area in a naturalistic context was very helpful, and I liked it even more. It is the Cortesia line produced by American Orlean:

So that's the tile that we'll use for the shower walls and the bathroom floor. For the shower, we'll use 10" x 20" tiles, stacked vertically. That's what was in the shower mockup and it looked elegant, a little different than the ordinary square tile motif. For the floor we'll use 13" x 13" squares. (For the shower floor itself, we're using 2" x 2" squares of a matching color.)

So then Kathy asked "What about a border?" I really liked the looks of those tiny tile mosaics that have geometric patterns in them. But when I asked about it, she told me that all those little mosaics involve stone, which require regular sealing. "Nope!" I said. She then hesitatingly pointed out that it would only require sealing maybe every couple of years, and surely that wouldn't be too big of an effort for me? I assured her that it most definitely would.

At that point I noticed the brochure for the Cortesia line showed a decorative border that was designed for this particular tile. And it was a border that was pleasing, consisting of irregularly sized small rectangles and squares with a fossil motif:

Even better is that I saw that this particular line of tile had a 40" x 40" medallion that could be ordered. They had a sample one installed on the showroom floor, and it was gorgeous:

I fell in love with the idea of having that on the floor of our bathroom, and after a few anxious moments of fiddling with the scale on the floor plan, we determined that the medallion would fit easily in the large open space on the floor between the whirlpool, shower entry, and toilet. Wagner had planned that space there to have a five-foot turning radius to meet ADA accessibility standards. If all goes well, we'll never need to use that space for maneuvering a wheelchair, but I'm happy to have it if it lets me have my pretty mosaic in the floor.

At this point, I knew I had already gone well over budget, but I thought we needed some kind of narrow trim or molding to set off the decorative border in the shower. I spied a few examples that I liked, but Kathy explained that they were stone and steered me to the resin samples. There I picked a wider one for the top of the border that included a leaf design, and a simple, thinner half-round for the bottom of the trim.

By that point, I was tired and hungry and ready to go home. But then Kathy said "Now it's time to pick out the grout!" Turns out that grout comes in about 4,683 colors, most of which are shades of grey or beige. We held up a dozen of them against the tile, and they all looked perfectly fine, so I went with the one Kathy suggested.

It probably goes without saying that I picked the brand of grout that comes with a sealer already blended in. ;-)

Having lost all capacity for decision making at that time, I was ready to leave, when Wagner said "Don't forget you need to pick out a tile for the laundry room." Because I basically did not care what the laundry room floor looked like, he suggested we look at the close-out sale they were having, and I picked a porcelain tile that was going for 99 cents per square foot. It's sort of off-white with greyish streaks running through it. Cheap. And perfect. :)

How we chose our contractor

2008-10-19T20:56:00.005-04:00

Of all the decisions we had to make for this renovation, the choice of contractor was the easiest and the quickest. Home building and remodeling books and websites will all say that this should not be the case and that one should interview several prospective contractors and research them thoroughly, check with the Better Business Bureau, call references, check with state licensing and bonding agencies, etc. etc. Then you should solicit multiple bids, bearing in mind that the lowest bid isn't necessarily the best choice.

We didn't do any of that for this renovation.

Instead, we chose the Wagner Company because we have used John Wagner for several construction/renovation projects, dating back to 1992, I think it was. When my husband bought a new building for his rare coin business, he hired Wagner on the recommendation of his banker. That job was fairly complicated, involving adding on a second story to the building where Jon put a small apartment, as well as adding on a large concrete-lined vault room in the back with a banker's vault door and extensive security features throughout. Jonathan's office turned out absolutely beautiful, and it has held up well over the years.

Then when we bought our last house out on the Kentucky River, it needed a lot of work. It was a rather unique building, a contemporary house built largely underground. We bought it as a bankruptcy foreclosure, and it had been vacant and neglected for some years. We had Wagner come in and fix everything that was broken, as well as add a fireplace to the bedroom and convert the sunroom to an all-season room with heat and AC.

And then, of course, there were the two renovations we did in the current house--the master bath a few years ago and the kitchen this summer.

The bottom line is that no matter how big or small the job was, we have never had anything but a positive and successful experience working with Wagner. Many people have horror stories of contractors who start jobs and then disappear for days, weeks, or (gulp) months at a time. That just doesn't happen with Wagner, and we have first-hand knowledge that the work he does is of excellent quality. Better yet, he is terrific on call-backs and follow-through.

So when we decided to pursue this renovation, we didn't even bother calling around any other contractors. There's probably people out there who would've done this job for less money. But we'd rather pay more to work with somebody reliable and whom we can trust to do a terrific job.

Progress report --- Week 6

2008-10-19T20:22:00.005-04:00

Progress accomplished this week:

--Framing and walls for first floor of detached garage finished
--Large steel support beam installed in detached garage
--Ceiling/floor put on detached garage
--Plumbing for addition finished
--Gas line for addition (new furnace unit) installed
--Freon line for new AC unit installed
--Old intact bricks that had been removed from garage wall had mortar painstakingly chipped off, in preparation for being merged in with new brick
--Met with lighting specialist and have worked out a plan for most of the lighting in the master bath and laundry room

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Downpour of rain lasting an entire day, which slowed framing work on garage. I can't complain because we're in a moderate drought situation and really need the rain.
--We're re-thinking the truss for the addition. A "truss" is yet another construction term I wasn't completely familiar with, but my online dictionary quickly tells me that it is "a supportive device, usually a pad with a belt, worn to prevent enlargement of a hernia or the return of a reduced hernia." ...oops... that's the medical definition. Never mind. A "truss" in the building context is "a static structure consisting of straight slender members interconnected at joints into triangular units used for spanning or bracing structural elements." In short, it's the triangular unit of wood that goes on the top of buildings and holds the roof up. Wagner had his carpenter nail up a mock-up of the truss that was originally planned so that we could see how it would affect the view outside our (current) bedroom window on the second floor. Turns out that it would block the window a lot more than we had initially envisioned. And it doesn't look too good. So we're now going with a different truss that will not have as steep of a slope and not block the upstairs window as much. This is going to set us back some $$ as we had already ordered and paid for the first truss, but it's worth the last-minute change to have it look nicer.

Warm tootsies, reconsidered

2008-10-18T20:41:00.003-04:00

I've been doing a lot of research in the past couple of days, trying to resolve our dilemma of having a doorless shower yet still feeling warm while we shower and dry off. One of my Piano Forum buddies, Monster M&H, sent me the URL for a wonderful website called "Fine Homebuilding," which has tons of resources and articles for all aspects of residential construction and renovation. I signed up for a 14-day free trial and have spent hours browsing all the articles there.

What I learned from that site is that my impressions of heated bathroom floors was not correct. I had assumed that all it would do is warm the tile, which would do no good at all in terms of warming the rest of our bodies as we showered and dried off. However, it appears that these radiant floor heating devices could actually waft a bunch of warm air upwards, and--in fact--many people use radiant heating as their sole source of heat. And then I was talking with my buddy, Rich, about the heated floors, and he assured me that an acquaintance of his had just put them in his new home, and he, quote, absolutely loved it, unquote.

So now I am leaning toward adding in some heated floors in the bathroom. Wagner has in the mean time added a furnace vent in the drying off portion of the shower. While that will help somewhat, there will only be heat coming through that vent when we have the furnace for the addition blowing, and there are lots of time we take showers when we don't necessarily want the furnace going. I'd rather have some limited heat source that could be turned on for the duration of the shower and that would affect only the bathroom area.

What I wasn't sure of is whether the radiant floor heating devices could be used in our shower proper. After a bunch of googling I found one manufacturer, SunTouch, who explicitly states that their mats can be used in the shower as well as outside. I have emailed them and asked if the heat radiates upward or simply warms the tile. I'm a little nervous about the thought of electrical wires running underneath a (very wet) shower floor, but I really do want to have plenty of warmth as we take our showers.

Grapple grapple.

A chill in the air

2008-10-15T23:10:00.004-04:00

So I spent two hours this afternoon at Brock-McVey (a fixture supply warehouse in town) talking with their lighting specialist, Nancy. My mission was to decide on all lights for the master bathroom, including obtaining their cut sheets so that Wagner could start the wiring process. (Again, more terminology I wasn't familiar with: A "cut sheet" is a printout showing a product description and, most important for Wagner, including detailed enough specifications, e.g. measurements, amp requirements, etc., that one can use it for building purposes.)

I went into my meeting with Nancy with a clear idea of what I wanted. I left with a vague feeling of disappointment, frustration, and not at all sure of how to proceed.

Here's the issue: I mentioned in an early installment of this blog that our current master bath shower has glass doors, which is quite fashionable and looks terrific but exacts a high price in maintenance: Because our local water system has extremely hard water, it is important that we squeegee down the shower doors each and every time we use the shower; otherwise, unsightly water deposit spots can form on the glass doors that are impossible to clean off.

I don't mind the squeegeeing duties that much, or at least I think the hassle is worth having a terrific looking shower. I truly despise the floppy shower curtain look and the mildew that inevitably ensues. But my hubby, Jonathan, hates squeegeeing. He'll do it, but only under duress, and he's been vocal about not wanting glass doors in our new bathroom.

Since I don't want a floppy shower curtain, and Jon doesn't want glass doors, that doesn't leave us a whole lot of options. Then one day I attended an open house where the master bath had a serpentine-shaped shower that didn't have a door at all. It was like nothing I had ever seen before, and my jaw dropped open over the sheer ingeniousness of such a design. I knew, at that point, that I wanted a shower like that--one that would not require a shower door.

So when we were drafting the initial plans, I sketched it out for Wagner and shared our desire for a shower design that would have no doors, and hence no squeegee responsibilities. Quite gratifyingly, he bought into our vision and pointed out that such a design was compatible with our broader goal of designing the renovation to be universally accessible and wheelchair compatible if and when that became necessary in our old age.

There was only one teeny-tiny snag. The winters in Kentucky can get darned cold, down to zero degrees F (or lower), and we are the miserly kind of people who turn the thermostat way down (62 degrees) at night. This means in the morning it can be positively chilly when we wake up to shower. We were both worried that, without a shower door to trap in all the nice hot steam, we could be freezing our fannies off in our new shower.

We mulled this over for a while, and then I had the brilliant (to me) idea of installing one of those bathroom fan/heaters you find in hotels where you can turn it on for a short while and keep toasty warm as you're showering and/or drying off. I even found a nice Panasonic "whisper warm" fan that seemed to accomplish all that, PLUS being very quiet to boot.

The only snag is that when I printed out the specs, I noticed the fine print which said "not listed for shower tub/enclosures." I didn't want the heater to be in the shower part per se, near or under the water stream, but I was hoping to put it in the drying-off portion of the shower so that when we turned the water off we would still be warm.

So that was the main question on my mind when I went to talk with the lighting specialist. She seemed a little out of her depth when I asked her about it (I got the impression that very few people asked for a "walk-behind" or "doorless" shower, and even fewer asked for a shower fan/heater), but she called several of the shower fan/light companies while I was there and asked them about it. All of them said the same thing: There are no bathroom shower fan/heater combinations that are approved for use in the shower. I can get fans; I can get shower lights; but I can't get anything that includes a heating element. I'm not exactly sure why, but it has something to do with the danger posed by moisture getting into the heating elements. If I want a heater, it has to be outside the shower enclosure.

Shucks.

So now I'm a bit at a loss of what to do. Nancy suggested that we go ahead and put a fan/heater combo outside the shower, where it could do double-duty with the toilet. But I'm worried that won't get the heat where we need it, which is right when we turn the shower off and are drying off and freezing our fannies off. Wagner says we should revisit the idea of installing a heated floor. I'm not wild about THAT idea, as it's my fanny that gets cold, not my tootsies.

Worst case scenario, I suppose, is that we try the heater fan right outside the shower, and if it turns out to be too cold, we go ahead and put in a shower door and drag out our squeegee. Sigh.

Taking nothing for granite

2008-10-14T20:56:00.005-04:00

Wagner tells me that it is time to "start thinking about" the remaining details of the master bathroom. I already know that choosing a toilet will be a major issue. The last time I was in Ferguson's picking out the whirlpool tub, I sat on every toilet they had there and wasn't crazy about any of them. (If you want to feel silly, try sitting on a toilet fully dressed while other people are walking around looking at faucets and the like.) And picking a toilet will be a cakewalk compared to selecting a tile pattern and decorative trim for the shower.

But today I'm talking about the vanity top. Wagner wrote up his bid assuming we'd go with granite, as that's the fashion these days and we chose granite for our master bath remodel a couple of years ago, as well as for our kitchen renovation this summer.

But I'm having cold feet about granite for the new master bath. While I love how it looks, if you've been following this blog you know that we are not exactly the home maintenance handy type of couple. (Remember the toilet flapper incident involving the twist ties from a bread wrapper?) The problem with granite is that it is very porous and has to be sealed on a regular basis (ideally every 6 months) to prevent liquids from seeping into it and staining it.

When we remodeled our master bath a while back, I wasn't planning on granite for that very reason. I know my limitations. But when I was picking out the tile with Wagner, we spied a special sale on a granite vanity top that, according to Wagner, had a very good price. The salesperson similarly assured us that this was "an unbelievable price." I'm a sucker for a bargain and was secretly tickled at the prospect of buying a fashionable counter material, so we went ahead and got it for our bathroom, with me uttering (at that time) sincere vows to seal the granite religiously. And when we got the granite countertop installed, the very first thing I did was seal the sucker.

That was, I hate to confess, the last time I sealed the sucker. Months would go by and I would tell myself, "I really need to reseal the granite countertop," but I never seemed to find the right time to do it. (To seal it properly, you need to clean the countertop thoroughly and let it dry for 24 hours, then seal it, then let it dry for another 24 hours. Who has 48 hours where they don't need to brush their teeth?) After a couple of years of that kind of neglect, the countertop now absorbs like a sponge and has a few stains. Oops.

For the kitchen, I realized there was absolutely ZERO chance of us being diligent enough to seal the countertop regularly, so I was initially leaning toward quartz instead. But when I was looking at Home Depot, I came across a special kind of granite called Stonemark that allegedly had received a special PermaSeal process and was guaranteed--guaranteed!!--never to need sealing for 15 years. I had a hard time believing it, so I pressed the saleslady repeatedly, and she repeatedly assured me that if I bought that granite counter, I would never, ever, EVER have to seal it.

Well, that clinched it for me. And even though it cost about 20% more than a normal granite counter, I bought it for the kitchen. Then we got the counter installed. I'll skip the story about how the installer measured it wrong so we had to replace the counter for half of the kitchen (shudder!). But after we got the counter installed, correctly, the second time, I noticed that it wasn't acting like its counterpart across the kitchen or the first top they installed (the one with the wrong measurements). When I placed wet dishes down on it, the stone would turn dark below it, almost immediately--almost as if, in fact, it weren't sealed at all.

This concerned me a little. Okay, it concerned me a LOT. Because, after all, I had paid a 20% premium to get this special PermaSeal granite and here it was acting like it wasn't sealed.

I'll spare you the long drawn-out negotiation with the granite people. Suffice to say they admitted that the sealing was not as good as it was supposed to be, and they are sending out their "reactivation specialist" who will do some sort of special process that is supposed to "reactivate" the seal and make it water- and fluid-repellent the way it should be. Assuming that happens (this specialist handles the entire Midwest U.S., so he can't get to my home for a couple of weeks), I'll be happy. The counters are absolutely beautiful, and nothing else has the same kind of shimmery depth as granite. I want to keep the counters. I just don't want to seal them.

So this experience has kind of dampened my enthusiasm for granite counters. I don't really want to take another chance with the Stonemark granite, and I *really* don't want to be sealing any countertops. So while I don't know what color scheme I'm going to go for with the new master bath countertop, I do know this: It won't be granite. We'll go with quartz or Corian or something solid instead.

Judging distances

2008-10-13T09:11:00.005-04:00

The other deficit this renovation project has highlighted in my skill set is my almost complete lack of visual spatialization abilities. As much as I hate to confirm sex role stereotypes, I've always had a problem with estimating distances or amounts. When I try to guess what size Tupperware container I need to store leftovers in, I always guess wrong, and I end up with food slopping over the sides or huge amounts of empty space in the container.

When we were planning the renovation, my (lack of) spatial skills became a thorn in my side. I'd look at the floor plans and try to get a good image of what the finished addition would look like. Then I'd go outside and stare at the ground where it was going, which Wagner had conveniently staked out with markers, and I couldn't reconcile the two. The floor plans showed the master bedroom (the bedroom part only, not counting the closets or bathroom) as being bigger than our current family room. Our family room is plenty big, so I thought, okay, the bedroom will be nice and big, and certainly big enough. Then I'd go outside and look at the part of the driveway that would be dedicated to the bedroom, and my confidence would waver. It sure didn't look that big. And the last thing I wanted was to disrupt our lives for 6 months and spend a huge amount of money for a bedroom that would be too small.

Before we made the final decision to go ahead, I knew I had to feel confident that the proposed space of the addition would be sufficient. So I went up to our bedroom, tape measure in hand, and measured out the dimensions of all our bedroom furniture (bed, nightstands, dresser, couch, bookcases). Then I went outside, armed with the kids' sidewalk chark and the tape measure again, and started sketching in all the furniture in outline on the ground.

Something was wrong. When I drew in where the bed would go, instead of crowding the outline of the bedroom floor, it looked scarcely bigger than a shoebox in relation to the outline of the walls. I must have measured the bed wrong. So I went back upstairs and remeasured the bed. Nope, I had the right dimensions. So then I went back outside and double-checked to make sure I had drawn it right. Yup; it was drawn correctly... but it still looked impossibly small. I sat there, flummoxed and scratching my head, when my daughter, Athena, came up and asked what I was doing. "I'm sketching out where the furniture will go in the new bedroom," I replied. "Well, you did it wrong, " she said, "the bed is way too small." She refused to believe me when I told her I had checked it and that the dimensions were in fact correct. So we went back upstairs a third time and remeasured again.

The outline still seemed way too small. So finally I told Athena to lie down on the "bed" on the ground. (The one benefit to being a parent is that you can order your children to do things you'd feel too silly to do yourself.) When she did so, the "bed" suddenly and magically became normal bed-sized, and it was clear that we had drawn it correctly. And it was also crystal-clear that our new bedroom would have way more than enough space to fit all our furniture and not feel crowded. Phew.

I think this is a good example of a paradox of Euclidean geometry, which is that filled space looks bigger than empty space. That's why real estate agents hate to be in the position of selling a vacant house, so I think I will call this the "Realtor's Paradox."

Progress report --- Week 5

2008-10-12T20:58:00.006-04:00

Progress completed this week:

--Framing of garage (first floor) completed
--Plywood walls put up on garage
--HVAC ductwork installed in addition
--HVAC exhaust vents drilled/installed
--Plumbing pipes laid down for addition
--HVAC inspection carried out
--Termite spot treatment conducted in garage
--Floor joists put down in garage and addition part
--Holes drilled through concrete wall in our basement where freon pipes will have to run through
--And probably a lot more other stuff I can't tell what it is from the various pipes etc. lying around
--Had fence people come over to give us an estimate on moving/rebuilding the fence

On the whole, it seems to me that a lot has been done, and the area certainly looks quite different. Wagner, though, said grimly, "I consider myself to be a week behind schedule."

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Wagner's having second thoughts about the depth of the new garage. He's measured our cars and uttered dire warnings that we'll "never get a big truck in there." Our reassurances that we have no current or future plans to buy a big truck do not quell his concerns. We do, however, want to be able to fit our bicycles and lawn mower around the cars. He fiddles with the floor plans, decides to make the stairway skinnier (from 40" wide to 36" wide); shift the stairway over 2 feet; and move the furnace up into the garage attic space to free up some shelf/workbench space in the back of the garage. He also decides to add 8" to the depth. I was initially reluctant because I thought it would mean repouring one wall of the foundation, but it turns out the foundation was deliberately made bigger to begin with so it won't be any problem to make the garage deeper.

Pipe dreams

2008-10-09T09:05:00.007-04:00

One thing this renovation has made crystal clear to me is how little I actually know about construction and how houses are built. My respect for architects, building engineers, and contractors has skyrocketed now that I have seen just what is involved in putting up a building, even something as relatively minor as our project. It's not just a matter of nailing some 2 x 4's together and slapping on drywall.

A good example of my naivete is the water pipe issue. Wagner was going over the day's progress with me one evening when he casually mentioned that they had put in the water pipe for the garage apartment. Prior to this renovation, when I heard the words "water pipe" I had a mental image of one of those big concrete culverts you sometimes see sitting at the edge of highways, or at the very least a heavy duty cast iron pipe a foot in diameter. So I peered into the foundation area of the garage and, not seeing anything that looked remotely what I thought a water pipe should look like, asked Wagner "where's the pipe?" I was gobsmacked when he pointed to a teeny tiny blue hose poking up out of the ground. I told him it was too tiny and flexible to be a water pipe, and he laughed and said it was 3/4" diameter. Who'dve ever thunk all the water coming into your house would be going through something so tiny.

The saga of the neighbor's shed: The end, maybe

2008-10-07T20:11:00.008-04:00

In my last report on the conflict with our Neighbor From Hell behind us, the one who refused to let us move his shed off our property so that we could reclaim our 46" strip of land, I announced that we were having our lawyer draft a letter announcing our intent to file suit if he did not move his shed.

When we finally saw a draft of the letter, we were not happy with it, for a couple of reasons: First, it gave the neighbor until December 1 to move the shed. We didn't see any point in giving him that long, as he was either going to let us move it or not. If we didn't file suit until December 1, who knows how long the whole case would take to be resolved. Second, there was the teeny-tiny problem that the lawyer's draft was addressed to MY name at the NEIGHBOR FROM HELL'S address. Yikes!! Lucky for us, our mailman caught the mistake and delivered it to us at our address. Otherwise it could've been a bit embarrassing. Or--who knows?--maybe a shrewd tactical move. But I'm glad I didn't have to find out if it backfired.

So Jonathan was none too pleased with our lawyer (sending drafts of documents in a lawsuit mistakenly to the defendant doesn't seem like a smart strategy). He spoke with him the next day and told him that we wanted to change the letter to give the neighbor a much shorter deadline. Jon then asked, innocently, "what if we just go ahead and move the shed right now and wait for HIM to sue US?" This caused no small amount of agitation on our lawyer's part. He is normally the perfect stereotype of a proper, staid, and subdued lawyer. But at Jonathan's question he started sputtering and squawking and told us under no uncertain terms that such a stunt would be A Very Stupid Thing to Do, as there would be an excellent chance that the Neighbor From Hell could claim we had caused all sorts of damage to his property and win significant monetary damages. (We didn't even tell our lawyer that our Plan B was the excellent suggestion made by one of my Piano World buddies, who wrote me an email that said simply, "Two words: Shed fire." Good thing, too; I think it would've given him a stroke.) Our lawyer then begged us to come in for a meeting with him and the real estate law expert from the firm.

At this point, Jonathan lost what limited patience he has for the legal profession. He could see the future, and it was one long grim year--or more--of meetings with lawyers billed at $250 an hour and endless legal wrangling. And he just didn't have the stomach for it.

So then, on his own initiative, Jonathan called the Neighbor From Hell up, told him point blank that if we sued, we would win, but that we wanted to avoid the time and hassle of a long legal fight. He also said that we would much prefer not to have an adversarial relationship with our neighbors.

Then he offered the N.F.H. $1000 if he let us move his shed and relocate his hydrangea bushes for him, as compensation for the inconvenience.

Yeah, I know. It sticks in my craw, too, to reinforce jerkish behavior. But after getting over my strong initial revulsion at the prospect of paying the N.F.H. off, I have to concede that I think my hubby is an extremely wise person. Assuming the N.F.H. does not weasel out of this bargain, this is probably the quickest, least expensive, and best all-around solution we could've hoped for given his initial refusal to do the right thing. Yes, we would've won a lawsuit. But it would be a long, drawn-out process that would end up costing a heckuva lot more than $1000 (and our lawyer was not at all optimistic that we would be awarded legal fees if we won). And I really wasn't relishing the idea of living right next to a guy whom we had to sue and would no doubt henceforth hate our guts and become bent on revenge. Peaceful relations with one's neighbors is worth holding one's nose and making the best of a bad situation, I think.

But when Jonathan told me that he was thinking about simply removing the fence and moving the shed, but NOT putting up a new fence--maybe planting tall grasses as border instead--I drew a line in the sand and said No Frigging Way. If we're going to all this trouble, by God we're going to move the fence, and we're going to put it half an inch away from our property line.

Return of our six-legged little friends

2008-10-06T22:53:00.004-04:00

Recall that a week or so ago, when the crew removed the drywall from the garage, we discovered signs of an old termite infestation. We knew the house had been treated before we bought it for termites, so we weren't particularly worried about it. We also had a termite person come out and look the garage over. She said it looked like old damage but recommended treating the entire house "just to be sure." We didn't see any reason to treat based on the evidence so just filed the estimate away.

Then today the crew was back in the garage removing some more stuff, and this time they found not just signs of more termite damage but a few of the little critters themselves, wiggling and squirming away.

Uh-oh.

So now we'll need to bring the pest control company back out again and retreat the entire house. There's also a couple of spots where the wood will need to be replaced and/or patched up somehow. Wagner took me out to the garage to show me the damaged areas. He must have seen the look of horror on my face when I saw the temporary wooden supports they had set up, because he quickly assured me that our bedroom (which is currently above the garage) was in no imminent danger of falling through the ceiling of the garage.

But I have to say it makes me wonder what OTHER damage could be lurking in other places of the house that we don't see right now because it's covered up with drywall. Then again, maybe I don't want to know. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Progress report -- Week 4

2008-10-04T21:15:00.011-04:00

Progress made this week:

--Concrete blocks put in for foundation of addition and garage
--Old bricks removed from exterior of garage and side of kitchen
--Garage doors removed
--Conduits for plumbing/utilities to be rerouted put in place
--Termite pretreatment of addition and garage
--Lots of decisions made. In addition to the critical fake tiny window panes style, I also chose:
(a) the style of brick to use on the addition and garage. We could not find an exact match to the existing brick, as the house was built over 30 years ago, but we found a set that comes pretty darned close. Wagner also managed to save a fair number of bricks from the portion that had to be removed, so he can mingle the old brick with the new to make it blend better;
(b) the whirlpool tub for the master bath;
(c) faucets for the tub and bathroom vanities; I chose the Lahara line from Delta, which I like for the sleek modern look and ease of cleaning/repairs:

(d) undermount sinks for the vanity; and
(e) shower head, faucet, and diverter for the master bath shower. I stayed with the Lahara line for this, too:

(f) hand-held shower on bar for master bath shower. I didn't care for the look of the Lahara hand-held shower, so I chose another more contemporary Delta version:

(g) finish for all faucets. I knew I didn't want polished brass or chrome, but it was harder to pick from all the other remaining choices. After 15 minutes of wandering around Ferguson's (the plumbing supply company we're ordering from), holding up various faucets against whirlpool tubs in biscuit (the color I had chosen to go with for our sinks/toilet/tub), I narrowed it down to "aged pewter" or "brilliance stainless" (which is what Delta calls a finish that other people call "brushed nickel") and finally decided on "brilliance stainless" for everything.

Obstacles encountered this week:

--When looking at front windows during the window pane decision process, we noticed a large crack running diagonally from the gutter. Wagner said, "that doesn't look good," and checked it out the next day, whereupon he discovered that whoever had replaced the roof last (this occurred before we bought the house five years ago) had not installed flashing properly at one point, and water had gotten in and damaged the wood. I'm a bit disgruntled, as it seems to me that the home inspector we hired before we bought the house should've noticed that, as well as the gutter company we had hired a year before to install fancy new "ever clean" gutters. Wagner says it is not a major problem, but we will have to replace the damaged wood and flashing and fix the crack.

Darkness descends

2008-10-03T11:45:00.004-04:00

One of the downsides of the renovation plans is that it meant losing two of our kitchen windows. The current layout of the house has the kitchen and family room extending out in the back, so that the kitchen has windows on two sides and is nice and airy with lots of natural light. The renovation would basically extend the garage area and line up with the edge of the kitchen/family room, making the footprint of the house a perfect rectangle. So that meant one of the (current) exterior walls of the kitchen, which has two windows (one over the sink, one over in the eat-in kitchen area) would become the bedroom wall, with the windows taken out and dry-walled over.

This is probably the part of the design that I am least thrilled with, but there really wasn't any other option. So what we are doing to cope with losing the windows is increasing the natural light in other ways. We are going to enlarge the remaining window in the eat-in kitchen area, making it a double-width window rather than a single window. That should help quite a bit. Second, we are going to install a large skylight in the roof directly above the kitchen proper, which should make things quite a bit lighter, if the experience we had with our master bathroom is any guide. The skylight there helped immensely to brighten up that room.

Wagner warned us about a couple of things when I told him that we wanted the skylight. First, it would add noticeably to the expense of the project. More important, he said that installing the skylight would actually be the most disruptive and intrusive part of the entire renovation in terms of interfering with our lifestyle. There will be a period of about a week where kitchen activities will be disturbed, and we'll have a huge hole in our roof with plastic sheeting covering it. We'll have to repaint the kitchen ceiling, etc. But I kept remembering how I had concluded that the skylight in our master bath was a huge success and I was really glad we had gone for it... so I told Wagner that the hassle and expense were worth it and we wanted a kitchen skylight.

Now I am extremely happy we made that decision. The crew recently placed plywood boards over the two kitchen windows (to prevent glass breakage as they remove the brick from the exterior of that wall). Soon they will be covered over permanently. And so my nice bright pretty kitchen for now has now been transformed into a still pretty but dim kitchen. I'm looking forward to getting more sunlight back.

Window pains

2008-10-01T20:40:00.010-04:00

One of the most humbling and at times overwhelming aspects of any renovation is all the decisions that have to be made, at all steps along the way. I went into our kitchen renovation, for example, naively thinking that all I had to do was pick out cabinets, countertop, the lighting fixture, and paint color. Ha! I could not believe how many little decisions went into each of those components, and how many more decisions had to be made in addition to the major ones. For example, what style of quarter rounds did we want? (Quarter rounds, I learned, are those skinny curved pieces of wood that make the junction between the wall and the floor look pretty.) In what stain? Did we want sliding drawers in the cabinets? In all cabinets or just a few, and if just a few, which ones? etc. etc. ad infinitum.

(Incidentally, one of the features of the cabinets that I have ended up liking the most is that I decided to spring for a tilt-out drawer at the sink. It is incredibly handy for stowing away scrub brushes and the like and is WELL worth the money.)

Having recently gone through a whole bunch of agonizing over countless aspects of the kitchen renovation, I felt prepared to face the even larger number of decisions that would surely confront us in this renovation. In fact, one of the reasons we decided to go ahead with the renovation at this point in time (besides feeling that it was better to sink our money into the house rather than leave it in the stock market, yikes!) is that I am on sabbatical from my university position. While I still need to work on my research, my time is completely flexible, and I am in a better position to consult with Wagner and go look at paint chips, tile, bathroom fixtures, lamps, etc.

It was also decided early on that I would be the point person for these decisions. Jonathan does not have the same kind of patience as I do for making fine discriminations among Eggshell, Sand Dollar, and Navajo White paint chips, and he is even less concerned about the ramifications of making the wrong decision. So when debating the pros and cons of renovating, Jonathan made me an offer I couldn't refuse: He'd write the checks if I would handle the day-to-day details of the project.

Which is why I spent 45 minutes today trying to decide between various styles of window panes that, at first blush, looked virtually identical. Our house is rather traditional in appearance, and most windows in Kentucky have the grids that make it look like there are tiny panes of glass in a larger window. What I didn't realize is that nowadays those are just *fake* tiny panes, and most windows instead merely have a gridwork superimposed on top of a larger sheet, or between two sheets, of glass to make it LOOK like there are separate tiny panes.

Okay, so I can deal with fake tiny panes. What I *couldn't* decide was how best to accomplish this fakery. One style (the "Simulated Divided Lines") puts fake grids on BOTH sides of the window, and I suppose it looks the most convincing. But it also costs 15% more, which we would have to pay for additionally because the more expensive option wasn't considered in the bid. The second style (the "Grilles Between the Glass" option) actually puts the fake gridwork in between the dual panes of glass in the window. Apparently this style is a bit easier to clean because it's just one smooth sheet of glass inside and out. The downside is that you have to pick from a limited number of colors, which you are then stuck with for all eternity because it will be embedded inside the window. The third style (the "Wood Interior Grilles") has the fake gridwork snapped on the interior of the window. It is slightly harder to clean (you have to remove the gridwork to get at the window pane efficiently), but it has the advantage of being able to paint the gridwork after the fact and change colors.

So I stared at the brochure and kept asking Wagner questions like "what's the downside of picking this style?" and "why does this style cost 15% more?", which he kept answering patiently. I was able to rule out the more expensive option quickly enough on the grounds that they all basically looked alike to me so I didn't see any sense in paying another 15% for it. Then I wavered between the other two and almost decided to boycott them entirely because of the pretentious spelling of "Grilles". Then it occurred to me that if we went with the Grilles between the Glass option, we would have to decide our bedroom paint color RIGHT NOW so that we could order the right color for the gridwork. There was no way I was capable of making THAT decision so hastily, so it's the "Wood Interior Grilles" for us.

Phew.

Raise high the roof beam, carpenter

2008-09-30T13:02:00.005-04:00

The thorniest design issue was not where to put the detached garage but, instead, where to put the roof and floor of the addition. (Wisecracks of "over your head" and "under your feet", respectively, will not be appreciated.) Turns out that the floor of the existing garage is quite a bit lower, 21" to be exact, than the floor of the house. We have a couple of wooden steps leading from the garage to the kitchen hall. These steps gave Wagner a major headache. We could, of course, just leave the floor of the addition sunken the way it was and keep the steps. But that wasn't an optimal solution given our long-term goal of designing the renovation to last our lifetimes and wanting everything to be wheelchair accessible.

So then Wagner contemplated putting in a ramp. The only problem with THAT solution is that the drop was so large that a VERRRRYYY long ramp would be required, and that would eat significantly into our addition space. Not to mention that the prospect of a long ramp didn't push my buttons from an aesthetic viewpoint.

Option 3 was to keep the steps and install a motorized lift. My son, Isaac, was advocating heartily for this option, as he loves elevators. Nobody else was thrilled by the lift option, though, due to the expense and space involved and, again, the aesthetics of having an ugly (to me) hunk of machinery sitting around that we weren't sure we would ever need.

Option 4 was to keep the steps and just leave a space to install the lift later, if needed. This was better than Option 3 in my view, but Wagner didn't like it. He pointed out we probably wouldn't install it until AFTER a few nasty falls had occurred and it would be Too Late. He's probably right on that, given our history of home (non)maintenance.

Option 5 was to raise the level of the addition floor (existing garage plus new part) the necessary 21" to be even with the rest of the house. The only snag with THAT plan, though, is that the roof of the existing garage was firmly held in place by a large steel support beam running across the garage. So if we kept the current ceiling of the garage (which is actually our current master bedroom floor), AND raised the floor, we'd be stuck with somewhat lower ceilings in the renovation than we had hoped for. Maybe too low. And did we really want to go through all that time, effort, and money to have an addition where the ceilings were not as high as we wanted?

So for several weeks Wagner pondered the options and worked with the architect to come up with possibilities. He finally came up with a proposal that solves the step problem as well as preserving, as best as possible, high ceilings. Here's what we're doing: We're going ahead and raising the floor of the existing garage the 21" to be level with the rest of the house. The addition portion will also have a floor raised that high so that everything is all on the same level. That just makes the most sense from a livability and safety perspective and has to be a high priority in the renovation.

This means that the ceiling in the garage portion of the renovation will only be 8 feet high. However, that portion is going to be devoted to the master closet, master bathroom, and laundry room, and we decided that 8 foot ceilings are plenty high for those rooms and those purposes.

The only snag is that the big steel support beam running across the garage had to stay in place. Well, it could theoretically be removed, but that would make the job exponentially more expensive and complicated, so for all practical purposes it had to stay. Most of the time that beam was going to be hidden by interior walls, but there would have to a particular section of the master bath where the beam would be concealed by a soffitt and would have only a 7-foot ceiling. Neither Jon nor I are especially tall, so we could live with that. And then Wagner had the good idea of placing the whirlpool tub under the part of the ceiling with the soffitt. Since we are unlikely to spend a lot of time standing up in the bathtub, I think it will work out well.

So this left the question of the ceiling of the addition portion of the project, which is where the bedroom proper would be located. With the roofline being extended as originally planned, we could only have a 9-foot ceiling, and we were hoping for something higher to seem more spacious and to enable bigger windows. Wagner solved THAT problem by deciding to create a gable situation where the roof would angle up perpendicular to the rest of the house. (Hope that's not too confusing. I am learning a lot of architectural terms through this renovation process but clearly have a long, long way to go.)

The only remaining complication is that doing the gable this way would interfere with the upstairs dormer in our current bedroom. Wagner initially proposed just removing the dormer and window and plastering it up. That's clearly the easiest way to deal with the issue and would present the smoothest look from outside, but he met with heavy resistance on our side, as we enjoy the natural light and being able to open up those windows upstairs. And even if we were relocating to the new bedroom, we figured our daughter (who has dibs on moving into our old bedroom) would also want to keep the window. So this made things complicated for Wagner, but he ultimately figured out a way of doing a cut-out of the gable, in combination with making the edges of the new master bedroom ceilings a little lower than he originally planned, that should be workable. It may not have the cleanest architectural look on the exterior (and I think that bothers Wagner), but we don't care, and it's the Neighbor From Hell behind us who will have to look at it the most. Ha ha.

What this amounts to is that we will now have a multi-levelled bedroom ceiling that is 12-feet high in the middle with the edges being 8-feet high, which I think will look nice. AND all of our floors will be at the same level as the rest of the house, which I think is very important.

Adopting this design layout by necessity solved one further dilemma we were facing, which was whether to have a bank of windows or a sliding glass door to the outside in the new master bedroom. The advantage of a sliding glass door is that we could make a little patio area outside and walk out the bedroom in the mornings to drink coffee on the patio. And, of course, it would give us an easy exit in case of a fire or some other disaster. The disadvantage is that I'm guessing our cat would quickly learn that the door was there and would be scratching at the door constantly in middle of the night to be let in and out. (We let her go outside at will.) I'm a light sleeper and that would definitely wake me up. So during the initial planning stages I waffled back and forth as to what the best option would be. Fortunately the final design made it a moot question, as it didn't make much sense to have a sliding glass door with the ground so far below. And I don't think it is much of a loss not to have the door, as the back door to the house is really not that far away and we can just carry our coffee to the gazebo instead.

Progress report -- Week 3

2008-09-27T21:34:00.006-04:00

Progress made this week:

--excavation completed for garage
--concrete footers for addition and garage poured
--dumpster moved in
--scaffolding erected, portion of bricks on existing garage wall underneath gutter removed
--dry wall and old insulation inside existing garage removed
--our lawyer has prepared draft of letter politely asking neighbor to move his shed and informing him that we will press suit if he does not

Obstacles encountered this week:

--power line damaged during excavation; work delayed one day while problem fixed
--removal of garage wall drywall reveals termite damage. Uh-oh. It does not appear to be an active infestation, and the house was treated before we bought it for termites, so we're hoping it's just old damage from the previous infestation. We have scheduled a service call for Monday to have somebody come look at it and tell us whether we need to drill and treat for termites before proceeding.

Let there be light...

2008-09-25T15:14:00.008-04:00

Well, we had a little excitement on the job. My father and step-mom were coming in from Seattle for their first visit in over five years. (Too bad the timing was off by a few months and they have to stay in our basement, in the midst of a construction zone, rather than a nice guest apartment of their own, but we can't have everything.) The second evening after they arrived we noticed that the electricity was acting funny. The lights were fluctuating every few minutes, with most wavering between normal and quite dim, but our dining room fixture was inexplicably about 3 times as bright as normal. Lights would turn themselves on and off. The microwave was making a funny noise, and the toaster was barely toasting. When we tried to run the clothes washer at the same time as the dishwasher, it groaned and wouldn't spin. Our cable and internet were also down (hence no updates for the past couple of days).

There were only two possible explanations: (a) our house was on the site of an ancient Indian burial ground, and the construction had disturbed the spirits who were bent on wreaking revenge, or (b) something had gone awry when they poured the concrete the day before and our power lines had been damaged.

So we informed Wagner as soon as he showed up the next morning, who said "you should've called me last night!" and immediately got an electrician on site. We also got the cable and internet guy out. They're not sure what exactly happened or why, but apparently a "grading spike" (whatever that is) damaged the power line. The mystery is why it didn't simply knock the power out completely. So then they called out the KU (Kentucky Utilities) people. According to Wagner, we lucked out in getting the *only* KU crew left in Lexington today (the rest were still helping to repair downed service from Hurricane Ike in Louisville). We lucked out further in that they had the *only* machine in Lexington that could "listen" to a buried power line and figure out where the damage occurred. Our whole neighborhood lucked out even further, because during their trouble-shooting they discovered that the transformer on the utility pole behind our house was badly deteriorated (a problem that apparently was unrelated to our current difficulty), and they said it was "good we got called out" because "the whole neighborhood probably would've lost power soon."

The fancy power-outage-divining machine was able to locate pretty much the exact spot where the buried power line had been damaged, and fortunately it did not involve having to dig up the concrete footers that had been poured the day before. Phew. Even *more* fortunate, it turns out that the excavator had hit the neutral line (there are 3 lines buried, two that carry 120 amps? volts? something? each, and one that is neutral). Had it hit one of the two charged lines instead, we would've lost all power completely and the worker could have easily been killed. I don't want any deaths on my conscience as a result of this job, so that was a HUGE relief.

So as it was, we were only without power for about 5 hours while they identified and fixed the source of the problem. Then when they got the power back on I had to call the cable guy back to fix the cable/internet. Apparently the power line problem fried the cable splitter, something which the cable guy said "I've never seen it do THAT before." Always nice to be first at something.

The good news is that the power problem so distracted Wagner that he did not notice that Jon and the kids had snuck out onto the construction site (without my knowledge, because I would've put my foot down and not allowed it) and written their initials in the concrete before it hardened.

Garage detachment, Part 5

2008-09-22T22:13:00.005-04:00

Once we settled on a location for the garage, the final decision we had to make was the design. Did we want one or two doors for the cars? How many other normal sized doors and windows? What did we want on top-- pull down stairs or walk-up? Unfinished storage space or full-fledged living quarters? The door issue was easy; we thought a two-car-door style looked nicer, and we sprinkled a couple of windows around the sides and a door leading to the walkway to the gazebo. But the height/top issue was trickier. Mindful of our neighbor Jane's objections to the massive garage being built on the other side of her, as well as the exponentially growing cost of this project, I advocated a bare bones garage, as short as possible, with minimal or even no storage space on top. I figured we had enough storage with our unfinished basement.

Jonathan, though, had other ideas. He argued that if we were going to spend this much money on the renovation, we might as well "do it right" and have "everything we need for the future." He pointed out that if we finished the space above the garage we could use it as another guest room for some hoped-for future day when the kids were coming back to visit with hoped-for lots of grandkids in tow. He also pointed out that a garage apartment could serve as a useful transition space for our son, Isaac, who has Asperger's syndrome (mild autism). Isaac is doing very well in school, and we are optimistic about his future, but it could well be that he decides to stay at home for college, and a place of his own above the garage could be a good way of helping him gradually achieve independence. And looking very far down the road into our old age, Jon and I have every intention of remaining in this house for the rest of our lives, and a garage apartment could be helpful if and when we need live-in help.

So of course I couldn't argue with that reasoning, so we told Wagner to change the plans once again (the man has been *very* patient with us throughout the entire planning process, and whenever we apologize for changing our minds he merely smiles patiently, if somewhat wearily, and says "it's better to make the changes on paper than after the concrete has been poured."). There was one little snag, though, which is that our city zoning requirements don't allow for garage apartments. Instead, there is a "one appliance" rule. You can have a bathroom and shower, and a place for a bed, but you can only have one appliance: a dishwasher, say, but not a stove; or a refrigerator but no dishwasher. We figure that whoever ends up using this space (guests, Isaac, or whoever) could probably get by using a microwave and washing dishes by hand, so we're opting for a refrigerator as our single appliance.

But because of the zoning rules, we can't call it an "apartment." Let's just say it's a "study" or "extra guest quarters" instead. ;-)

Why our neighbor Jane probably hates our guts

2008-09-22T09:06:00.007-04:00

I mentioned earlier having some trepidation regarding how our next door neighbor, Jane, would regard our project. (This is our good neighbor, not our Neighbor From Hell behind us.) There were a couple of reasons for this. The first is that our two houses share a driveway. I'm sure this was originally designed so as to maximize lawn space for both houses, but there are certain drawbacks to shared driveways, e.g., guests who park smack dab in the middle and don't realize they're blocking the other person's way, etc. We knew we would be having all sorts of construction trucks and equipment going in and out to the back garage area, and I stressed repeatedly to Wagner that he had to be careful not to block her car.

But the main reason I was worried about her reaction is that some months ago, the neighbor on her other side (i.e., two doors down from us) bought a tear-down and started a huge rebuilding project even more involved than ours. They left only one wall standing (to qualify as a "renovation" rather than "new construction" for tax purposes), and even that wall conveniently fell over in the middle of one night. This job was loud and dirty. Mud was everywhere, and the crew did things like urinate openly in the yard right in front of Jane. So she was often complaining to us about the inconvenience and mess and noise, and we would commiserate while guiltily aware that we were considering doing a construction of our own to add to her distress.

The aspect of the other job that got her most upset, though, was that it became clear that these neighbors were building a detached garage that was huge, with a full-size apartment on top, AND that would butt up right against Jane's fence, literally within inches. One day Jane flagged us down, said "Did you SEE that huge garage they're building right next to my fence?! I'm calling downtown to see if there's anything I can do about it!" We still hadn't told her that we were considering a detached garage of our own, because we didn't want to get her upset unless or until we knew we were renovating for sure. Uh-oh.

So Jane did some investigating, and she discovered that the neighbors had commenced building the garage WITHOUT obtaining a permit. However, when she spoke with the building inspector, she was told that the garage was technically within code, and the neighbors scampered off to obtain a building permit, albeit belatedly.

To top things off, about a month ago the house BEHIND hers was torn down, and construction began on a new very big house, complete with a detached garage that was going to be positioned--you guessed it--right up against her (rear) fence. This prompted a fresh round of complaints and despair on Jane's part, and the poor woman did not even know at this point that she would soon be surrounded on ALL sides by construction.

In drawing up plans with Wagner, I told him that Jane would not be happy about our renovation, and he assured me that all the proper steps would be taken and that we would not do anything we were not legally entitled to do. He also promised to keep the construction area as clean as possible and to consult with her prior to scheduling anything major that would block her driveway, like pouring concrete.

In the meantime, Jane could not help but notice that something was in the works, as we had staked out the area where the garage would be positioned and had the surveyor come do the survey. So after a bit of curious questioning on her part, I invited her over and told her that we had bad news for her. I showed her the tentative plans and explained what we were going to do. She took the news quite graciously, especially after I walked her out and showed her where the boundaries of the addition and new garage would be, and she could see for herself that she would still be able to get in and out of her garage easily. She also repeatedly said that one of the things that upset her the most about the other neighbor's construction is that they had not once come over to talk with her about it. I had Wagner exchange business cards with her, and he told her to call any time she had questions or concerns. So I'm hoping that open communication will make this a better experience for her.

But under the circumstances, I'm glad I got overruled on the position of the detached garage, as my initial preference would've put it right next to the OTHER side of her yard, which I am sure would have contributed greatly to her distress level. She was quite relieved to see the outline of the garage over by the gazebo and farther away from her property.

And, Wagner is going out of his way to make things nicer for her. When we had to take down part of the fence that separated our properties, he had his crew relocate her wood pile that was leaning against it for her. At the end of each day, he puts his tools and equipment away in our garage and has his crew wash all the dirt off the driveway. He goes over to talk to her every time he sees her and constantly asks if everything is okay with her. So I am confident our job will not be as annoying as the job on the other side of her, but there is a certain amount of noise and inconvenience that is inevitable.

Given that one of our main reasons for renovating rather than moving is that we love this street and our neighbors, it will sure be ironic and disheartening if we end up alienating everybody on the block. :(

The saga of the neighbor's shed, cont.

2008-09-19T20:41:00.004-04:00

My last blog entry on the problem with our neighbor's shed, the one that was sitting on our property, ended with his immortal words "I'll see you in court." We didn't do anything for a couple of days, because--quite frankly--we were hoping that once he got over the shock of our intention to move the fence, he would realize that we were being fair about the situation and come to his senses.

Well, that didn't happen.

So Jonathan started making some phone calls to various city offices and Kentucky Utilities. We were hoping the electric company would enforce moving the shed, as it was also on top of the utility easement. No luck there; turns out they only care about easement violations if they interfere with access to the power lines. Shucks.

As for the Fayette County Urban Government offices, they mostly told us to call some other department, but after a total of nine phone calls, Jonathan realized they were all saying the same thing: This was a civil matter, and we would have to file suit.

So then Jonathan called the previous owners of our house to see if they knew of any relevant history. Turns out that they have tangled with this neighbor over the property lines before. Same ol' story: they did a survey, realized the property line went 46 inches back, and the shed was in the way. So they asked the neighbor nicely to move the shed, and he refused, just like this time. But the previous owners let the matter drop, which may be why the neighbor figures he can stonewall us this time, too. Apparently the neighbor ALSO ripped the survey stakes out and threw them away the last time this happened. So far, he hasn't touched the new stakes we had put in with our recent survey... but Jon and I poked around and took lots of photographs showing them (and the shed) just in case.

So.... it doesn't look like this neighbor is going to be reasonable, darn it. So we called our lawyer, who recommended that we start off by writing a polite letter and informing the neighbor that we will indeed file suit if he does not let us move his shed off our property. Our lawyer also said that if we had to go to court, it's not clear that we would be awarded legal fees. Jon and I are both pretty stubborn, though, especially when we know we're in the right.

Garage detachment, Part 4

2008-09-19T20:24:00.004-04:00

The next decision was where to place the detached garage in the back yard. I thought there was only one obvious choice--the far left-hand corner--that would involve the least loss of yard space. When I voiced that opinion to Wagner, though, he got that disconcerted look he gets on his face whenever I suggest something that ends up not being practical, and he started mumbling about easement restrictions, fire breaks, and concerns about the turning radius and getting the cars in and out of the garage. The latter concern was no doubt exacerbated by my confessing to him that reverse was not my best gear. (Years ago I memorably put a gouge all the way down the side of my father's mid-life crisis Datsun 240Z while attempting to back out of a garage. Oops.) Wagner then said "we don't have to decide right now" and that he would "work up a few sample layouts."

When he brought back drawings of the various options, I still liked the far left-hand corner placement the best, turning radius be damned. But Jonathan opted for another option which would plop the garage (with doors facing sideways) essentially right next to the gazebo we have located outside our back door. There is a covered walkway leading from the house to the gazebo, and Wagner proposed putting a covered walkway from the gazebo to the new garage. While we would not be sheltered from the cold with such a design, at least we would not get wet or have to trudge through snow/mud.

So I was overruled, but the more I think about it, the more I agree this is the best layout. Yeah, we'll lose more of our yard, but the kids spent virtually all their play time in the front yard rather than the back yard anyway. And, yeah, when we look out our (new) bedroom windows, the side of the garage won't be that far away. But we'll landscape the patch of land in between and put in climbing vines or tall grasses to make it look better. And we'll have a shorter distance to carry groceries in, and we won't get wet. Last but not least, this layout would probably prove more palatable to our next-door neighbor, Jane, whom we feared was not overjoyed about this project to begin with-- more on which later.

Garage detachment, Part 3

2008-09-18T21:37:00.008-04:00

The prospect of changing the proposed plan radically and putting a new detached garage in the background solved a lot of potential problems, but I was still a bit uneasy. When we lived in the country, we had a detached garage some distance from the house, and I grew tired of the long walk carrying in groceries. After we bought this house, I got spoiled by the convenience of the attached garage. It was literally no more than 10 or 12 steps from the car to the kitchen counter. We never got wet or cold going to or from the car.

Would I/we miss that convenience? Did the convenience of having a first-floor master bedroom and laundry room outweigh the inconvenience of a detached garage? I think it does, but I will confess that this is the one part of the project I feel the least confident about.

...okay, I had written a whole lot more, but Blogger is acting weird and not saving stuff right. I'll sign off for now and finish this post tomorrow.

Progress report -- Week 2

2008-09-18T16:41:00.007-04:00

Progress completed this week:

--Portions of concrete floor in existing garage removed in preparation for footers and installation of floor
--Excavation for footers completed for addition area (i.e., adjoining area outside existing garage)
--Excavation begun for detached garage but not completed (see "obstacles")
--Landscaping removed and gravel put down in area for dumpster (which will later be paved over to provide backing-out space when we exit the new garage)
--Rebar put in footer area in addition space to prepare for concrete pouring.
--Sump pump for addition installed
--Cable company replaced TV/internet cable with one that has lots of extra line so we can route it around new garage
--New refrigerator brought in for crew. Morale restored.
--Negotiations begun with neighbor regarding relocating fence. (How's THAT for a positive spin? See "obstacles")

Obstacles encountered this week:

--Dump truck too big; we got a smaller one.
--Job foreman no longer on job. Wagner described it delicately as a "personality conflict" when I asked about it. He is currently looking for a new foreman and in the meantime doing all supervision himself. This is okay because right now our house is the only job he's got active. But in November he starts another job for the VA, so we need to get another foreman before then.
--Because of Hurricane Ike, Kentucky Utilities (the electric company) is busy restoring power to the homes that (still!) don't have power, so they can't come out and mark the power line for us. This means we can't excavate everywhere we need for the detached garage portion of the job.
--This means we can't get the building inspector to approve the footers of that section of the job, which will delay us a couple of days.
--Any way you cut it, the prospect of having to initiate legal action in the second week of a home renovation is Not A Good Omen (re: our discovery that our neighbor's shed sits on our property but he refuses to move it; see the "good fences" and "bad fences" blog entries for detail).

Summary: All in all, I feel like a lot was accomplished this week. Wagner is not as happy and said "home construction operates on a different time scale than commercial construction." But we don't have control over delays like those caused by hurricanes, and if I start getting stressed out over things like that, it's going to be a LONG six (or eight... or ten...) months.

The Big Dig

2008-09-17T21:32:00.003-04:00

Today a new (smaller) dump truck was moved in, and the bulldozer had a busy day digging out the foundation for the new garage and smoothing out the construction area. Gravel was also laid down on a section where the dumpster will stored.

We also scheduled the cable guys to come out tomorrow. During the excavation, the crew had discovered that our TV/internet cable had only been buried a few inches deep, and there was not enough slack to either bury it deeper down or route it around the new garage. So we need to get either a new longer cable or an extension spliced on. I had a very difficult time trying to explain this to the cable company. First, there was no button to press on their automated menu to correspond to "press here if you need a longer cable," so I went with "repair" as the better alternative than "pay bill" or "sign up for new service." But the real live technician I eventually got to talk with kept asking what was wrong with our internet and seemed flummoxed when I told him that it was working perfectly; we just needed a longer cable. He eventually decided to send a technician out, just to get me off the phone, I think.

Bad fences make bad neighbors

2008-09-16T20:11:00.005-04:00

Well, Jonathan went to talk to the neighbor behind us this evening (the one whose shed is on our property). I urged him to wait for a time when Wagner could go over with him, but he thought it would be hard to catch the neighbor at home during the day when Wagner was around.

Jon was gone about 15 minutes, a time span Athena and I spent nervously listening for loud shouts or, worse, gunfire.

He came back with a wry look on his face, and the first thing he said was "I didn't yell at him." Apparently all proceeded calmly at first, with the neighbor conceding that the property line ran through his shed--at which point Jonathan offered to shoulder the entire cost of moving the shed and rebuilding the fence. From our point of view, that was an exceptionally fair and generous offer made in a spirit of neighborly compromise, and the conversation should have ended then with a group hug and singing of "Kumbaya." Instead, the neighbor said flatly, "I ain't moving my shed." Jonathan pointed out that the shed was in fact on our property and the law was on our side. The neighbor then said, "I'll see you in court."

Uh-oh.

Temporary (I hope) setback

2008-09-16T10:12:00.002-04:00

This morning we were harkened bright and early with the sight of a bulldozer and enormous dump truck pulling up to the house, to my son Isaac's great delight, to begin the serious excavation of the addition and garage area now that the laborious hand-excavating part has been completed.

I drove off to take the kids to school, but when I returned the bulldozer and dump truck were... gone! Turns out that the truck was too big to safely navigate the driveway and turn around the garage, and we will need to bring in a smaller truck. It also turns out that several of our (and the neighbor's) trees have branches hanging too low over the driveway, and we will need to get those trimmed before bringing the truck in.

Ah well. Fortunately it hasn't slowed work any, as there is plenty they can do in the meantime. Right now they're taking a jackhammer to the concrete floor of the garage to make the holes they need to install the supports for the new floor.

Progress report -- Week 1

2008-09-13T22:55:00.006-04:00

Progress completed this week:

--Fence and landscaping removed as necessary
--Command center established (okay, so that really just means a table and some chairs set up, along with the mini-refrigerator and porta-potty. "Command center" sounds better.)
--Lines drawn all over the garage showing where to put the footers
--Excavation begun. "This," Darryl (one of the workers) said to me as he mopped sweat off his brow, "is the fun part." It involves the laborious shoveling of dirt right around where the master closet is going to be. They have to do it by hand because that's where all the power, telephone, and cable lines enter the house, so they have to dig very slowly and carefully until they hit a line and then ever so gently pull it up without damaging it.

Obstacles confronted this week:

--Steady downpour of rain and thunderstorms one day (wouldn't you know? we haven't had any rain for the past month), which halted all work.
--Refrigerator for "command center" broke. Morale of crew threatened.
--Part of crew has to attend day-long OSHA training. Work slows. I don't mind because Safety Is Important. They don't mind because they get paid to sit in an air-conditioned seminar room rather than digging for our cables in 90 degree heat.

Garage detachment, Part 2

2008-09-12T08:29:00.006-04:00

Around the same time I started feeling discouraged about getting a variance for the problem with the addition jutting too far in front and back, other issues popped up that were even more discouraging. The rough plan the previous owner had given us was just a line drawing and didn't show how the front of the house would be affected. As Wagner was drawing up his more detailed plans, however, it became obvious that extending the garage into the front yard would create some logistical and aesthetic difficulties.

Our house currently has beautiful curb appeal, in my opinion; it's one of the reasons we bought it:

The circular driveway that loops across the yard has proven to be an unexpected delight. I love having a convenient place for guests to park, as well as being able to get close to the front door when unloading heavy packages. The kids also use it extensively, riding their bikes or scooters round and round in circles. Also not shown in the photograph are two enormous trees in the front yard (the photograph was shot level with and standing between the trees). These trees are some of the few on our block that survived the bad ice storm about 5 years ago, and they're two of the tallest and prettiest trees on the street.

If we went with the original plan, we would have to close off half of the circular driveway and reroute it. If we had the garage door facing sideways, we'd lose most of our front walk area and landscaping, and the house would look lopsided. If we had the garage door facing the street, we'd have to shave off a large portion of the semi-circle front lawn and pave perilously close to one of the trees, possibly damaging it. In either case, it became rapidly evident to us, the nice balance and attractive facade of the house would be negatively affected.

This, along with the variance issues, was creating all sorts of misgivings in us. Then one day Wagner asked, "How important is it to you that the garage be attached? We could solve all these problems and leave the front of the house unchanged if you simply put the garage in the back yard."

And with that simple suggestion, things began falling into place.

Good fences make good neighbors, we hope

2008-09-11T20:36:00.004-04:00

As part of the renovation project, Wagner recommended that we pay for a survey of the property to settle where the property lines were once and for all.

So we did. And what we discovered, much to our surprise, is that the property line along the back of the yard actually ran 46" beyond the fence. (And the surveyor discovered the pins from a past survey buried exactly where he expected them to be, so we know that our measurements are correct.) Forty-six inches is a lot! And we were concerned by this, for a couple of reasons. First, our vague understanding of real estate law is that if you let a neighbor encroach on your property long enough, he de facto owns it. Second, our renovation was going to use up a lot of the back yard for the new garage, so we needed all the inches of lawn we were entitled to.

So Jonathan decided we should move the fence back 40 inches to reflect more correctly the actual property lines. This would no doubt prove unsettling to our neighbors, who would presumably be dismayed to discover that a nearly four foot ribbon of what they thought was their back yard was actually our back yard. And the news would no doubt be even more unsettling because that particular stretch of their (really our) back yard contained a neatly groomed flower garden and a big chunk of a garden shed.

Uh-oh.

We haven't dealt with the problem just quite yet, and neither of us is looking forward to telling the neighbors that they're going to have to move the shed and lose a chunk of their flower garden. (Erm, I really hope they haven't stumbled across this blog...)

Since we're both chicken, we're going to make Wagner tell them. There's gotta be some fringe benefit to hiring a contractor, right? ;-)

Garage detachment, Part 1

2008-09-11T14:51:00.005-04:00

In an earlier post I mentioned that the previous owners had drafted a plan for a master bedroom/laundry room addition but had decided instead to move. Their plan consisted of adding onto the front of the garage, creating a new attached garage in that space (so that cars would enter and leave from the front of the property rather than driving around to the back, the way it currently is), and extending the current garage in the back and converting that area to the bedroom space. And this was the rough plan we first handed to our contractor, John Wagner.

When he saw the plan, he had a few concerns, the first being that the proposed addition would jut into the front yard quite a bit. Apparently there are zoning restrictions that govern where the front line of a house can extend on a piece of property. "No problem!" I replied, as I had a distinct memory of the previous owner explaining something to that effect and assuring us that they had in fact already obtained a zoning variance for their plan.

So Wagner went to work adapting and polishing up the rough sketch. He needed a copy of the platte for the house, so I went downtown to obtain it from City Hall. While there, I decided to pop into the building inspection office and see if I could verify that a variance had indeed been granted and was still valid. The clerk searched the computer archives, and then she searched the hard copy files, but they could find absolutely nothing on our property. Not only had a variance never been granted, one apparently had never even been applied for.

This confused me, because my memory was very clear that the previous owner explicitly stated the variance existed. But if there was no variance on record, there was no variance, so I soldiered on. Plopping the rough plan down in front of the clerk, I asked if a variance was required and whether it would be likely to be granted. The answer to the first question was a quick and definite "yes." The answer to the second question was not so definite. The clerk then pointed out a second problem with the proposed plan, which is that it involved creating a long wall on the left-hand side of the house (where the new garage and bedroom would extend). Apparently there is a limit as to how long of a stretch of wall you can have on a home, and the proposed plan exceeded that by quite a ways. If we wanted to go with this idea, we'd have to submit a formal application for a variance, letters would be sent to all our neighbors describing the proposal, and it could get hairy if there were any objections to the plan. At the very least it would take a fair amount of time and hassle.

Why not do the work ourselves?

2008-09-11T12:22:00.002-04:00

Well, *this* will be a short entry. ;-) With shows like "This old house" and mega-stores like Home Depot around, one might ask why we didn't consider doing the renovation ourselves. On the Piano Forum (where I spend huge amounts of time hanging out), mr_super-hunky (don't ask) had several long posts showing us these absolutely gorgeous homes he and his wife built from scratch and explaining in detail how you could do the work yourself and how much money you could save.

Alas, neither Jon nor I are particularly handy when it comes to home maintenance or carpentry-type stuff. Jon is better than I am at such things, but that's not saying a whole lot. It took us several weeks and multiple attempts and tools (including safety pins, twist-ties borrowed from a bread wrapper, 3 pairs of needle-nose pliers, and eventually a set of bolt cutters) to fix a flapper in our toilet. Seriously. Multiply the toilet flapper adventure by an entire house addition and garage, and it will be immediately obvious why we wouldn't even consider tackling the renovation ourselves.

Photos, After 1st day

2008-09-11T09:10:00.005-04:00

Okay, so basically we just got the fence taken out.

And they did some other stuff that's not clearly visible in these photos, including blocking off the windows in the garage with plywood, prying up and removing the concrete steps in the grassy area, and setting up much of the equipment and tools they'll be needing for the job. Athena was much impressed (as was I) with the tool box they shipped in, which is the biggest tool box I've ever seen. (We initially thought it was a dumpster!):

Photos, Before

2008-09-11T08:48:00.005-04:00

Before we broke ground, I had a brainstorm: What if--in an inspired burst of sheer internet plagiarism--I took a photo of the renovation site every day and, when the job was done, created a photo montage video that I could upload to YouTube, just like Noah Kalina did in his famous "Everyday" video that showed nothing but himself, a photo a day over the course of six years? (If you haven't seen that video yet, you definitely should. Here's the URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B26asyGKDo )

So I will try to do that over the course of the renovation, and I'll post of few of the photos here as they come in.

The pictures above show what the site looked like before construction started.

Why not move?

2008-09-10T15:56:00.001-04:00

A logical question many people asked us (especially our realtor) was why go through all this hassle of renovating? Why not find a house that already has everything you want and move?

The answer is that we found ourselves becoming increasingly picky. We loved our neighborhood and we loved much about our house. We weren't willing to go through the expense and hassle of moving unless we were certain it would be a meaningful improvement. This meant finding a house that (a) had every single one of the desirable features we liked about our current house, and (b) none of the undesirable features.

This was not easy to do.

So we kept our eye on the house ads, browsed the multiple listing website for possibilities, and went to open houses whenever something popped up on the market in our neighborhood. The snag is that every house we encountered had some significant flaw. The street was too busy. The driveway was sloped. (Jonathan had an anathema for sloping driveways. He was sure the kids would lose control of their bikes, rush into traffic, and be killed.) The kitchen lacked a walk-in pantry. (Our current house has a large walk-in pantry, which I absolutely love and refuse to be without again.) The house next door had a loud barking dog. It didn't have a good room for my piano. (Pianos need to be located away from direct sunlight, fireplaces, kitchens, or heating/ac vents.)

I realized the odds of us finding a house on the market that we would want enough to move into were very small when we attended a few open houses of some extremely expensive homes ($1.5-$1.8 million!) and found ourselves concluding that we still liked our current house better, flaws and all.

The closest we came was a house we found for sale just a few weeks ago, right when we were approaching the final decision to proceed with the renovation and I started having some cold feet about all the hassle involved. This other house was hugely expensive ($1.5 million) and farther away, maybe no longer in walking distance for Jon. It had a contemporary, open floor-plan look, with wood beams and stone walls. Gorgeous kitchen and first floor master. We actually went to look at it twice, raising our realtor's hopes cruelly, but ultimately decided against it for a variety of reasons. (On my part, because the garage was on the basement level, and I did not like the idea of having to carry groceries upstairs the rest of my life; on Jon's part, because it "just didn't grab" him enough to be worth the cost.) The realtor, and our children (who were excited by the fact that it had an inground pool), were quite disappointed, but we decided to pass on it.

So then the question became, why not just build from scratch? An obvious reason is that we were determined to stay in our general neighborhood, where there are simply no empty building lots. (Well, there is one, but it is overpriced and not desirable... it wasn't level, so we would run into the sloping driveway problem again, and it was on a stretch of road that got a lot more traffic than we currently get.) That would leave us only with the tear-down option. Which is, actually, a feasible option. The houses in our neighborhood are somewhat mixed, consisting of smaller homes built in the 1950s-1970s with small bedrooms etc., and larger, very expensive homes either renovated or built later on.

So whenever a small, (relatively) cheaper house in our area would go on the market, I'd run to Jonathan and say "there's a tear-down for sale on XX street! Let's go buy it!" Invariably what would happen is that we would go look at it, conclude that $350,000 or whatever they were asking for it was Way Too Much for a tear-down, and decide to wait for them to come down on the price. And invariably the house would sell within a week and some other lucky folks with a big mortgage would get to do the tear-down. Or, we would go look at it and conclude that the lot was too small, the driveway area too sloping, or neighboring houses occupied by too many yipping dogs.

Why renovate? Why now?

2008-09-10T12:23:00.002-04:00

We moved into our current home nearly five years ago. Prior to that, we lived on a 111-acre property on the Palisades of the Kentucky River. It was beautiful, secluded (our nearest neighbor was over a mile away), and wildlife abounded, but after we had the children, the inconvenience of the long commute and worries about arranging playdates and (in the far-off future) having the children drive narrow and curvy country roads led us, somewhat reluctantly, to decide to move into town.

Once we made up our mind to move, we knew there was only a couple of neighborhoods we wanted to live in with the desired proximity to hubby Jonathan's business and being in the good school district in town. After a few weeks of unsuccessful house-hunting, our realtor found our current house. It's a 1 1/2 story brick building with two large bay windows in front, 3400 square feet, and three bedrooms.

There was a lot we liked about the house. The lot was nice and large, one of the largest lots you can find in this part of town. The street was very quiet and tree-lined. The neighbors are terrific. Not a yipping dog on the street. It was in walking distance of Jon's office and biking distance of mine. A Kroger is a couple of blocks away. The master bedroom is simply HUGE, and I have yet to see a master closet that is bigger than ours. So we bought the house for $435,000 (below its appraisal value of $465,000) and moved.

After we moved in and had lived there for a while, we started to notice some of the downsides of the house. First, while three bedrooms seemed adequate when we were searching, the lack of a guest room is disconcerting for our visitors, whom we resign to the (finished) basement on an air mattress. Second, while in theory it seems like there should be no problem for our two children to share a bathroom, the reality is a different matter, and complaints of "Athena stinks!" and "Isaac left his clothes in the bathroom again!" quickly wear thin. Third, we have no laundry room. The washer and dryer are located in a closet in the hallway connecting the kitchen with the garage. I did not initially think this was a problem and in fact was happy that I didn't have to trudge down to the basement to wash our clothes. But it has turned out to be a royal pain in the butt. The doors to the laundry closet are the fold-out kind, and if I have the laundry closet open, the door from the garage bangs into it and cannot be opened. I cannot tell you how many times my family waits until the precise second I'm loading the dryer to decide to come into the house from the garage, with much banging and disgruntled feelings on both sides. Not to mention that the washer and dryer are very noisy when running.

So while we still loved the house and loved the street/neighborhood even more, we also had dissatisfactions with our current layout and were pretty much continually seriously or semi-seriously thinking about either moving again or renovating.

Since we moved in, we have in fact already done two smaller renovations. Our master bath (in surprising contrast to the bedroom and closet) was very cramped, dark, and had only a bathtub/shower combo with floppy shower curtains. I am a shower person and hate floppy shower curtains. So I made it a condition of buying the house that we would almost immediately renovate the master bath, which we did. We put in a skylight that made it much nicer and less cramped seeming, and we tore out the bathtub and replaced it with a large tile shower with glass doors, which also made it seem bigger. I was thrilled with how it turned out, Jonathan less so, because he wasn't prepared for the maintenance involved with glass doors. Turns out you have to squeegee them down each and every time you use the shower to prevent water spots and hard water deposits from forming. I do not cut Jon any slack in squeegee duties, so he was very much interested in getting a new shower that does not involve glass doors. (We're opting for what's called a "walk behind shower" that doesn't have a door at all... more on that, later.)

The second renovation we did was the kitchen, finished recently. The previous owners had installed rather hideous looking wallpaper with huge blotchy maroon, gold, and green flowers on it, and a no-doubt-about-it hideous light fixture with about a dozen tiny maroon pleated lampshades. The cabinets were okay but nothing special, and the Corian countertop had multiple stains and scratches. We had already bought new stainless steel appliances when we moved, so for this renovation we got new cabinets, new granite countertops, a really fancy big sink and stylish faucet, replaced the hideous wallpaper with nice, simple pale green paint, and got a new light fixture. That renovation had its own problems, which I may or may not get into later, but the kitchen looks glorious now (see pics below), and that's all that matters.

When we bought the house, the previous owners casually mentioned at the closing that they had in fact contemplated remodeling to add a first floor master/laundry suite, and they left a floor plan they had come up with but then abandoned, opting instead to move. (I refuse to think very long or hard about WHY they decided to move instead of renovating.) During the process of the kitchen renovation, we mentioned our desire for a first-floor master and laundry room to John Wagner, our contractor, showed him the rough plan the previous owner had come up with and asked him, somewhat idly, how feasible something like that would be. In classic foot-in-the-door style, he said, "Why don't you let me take this and see what would I can do with it? It won't cost much to draft a few plans." So we thought, why the heck not?, and started the process that would lead us to this mammoth undertaking.

Today we break ground

2008-09-10T11:43:00.001-04:00

Hi all,

I'm new to blogging, but the prospect of starting a six month massive home renovation project was too tempting an opportunity to let pass without sharing all the gory details with, well, the entire world.

Today construction officially and formally started on our project. We are doing an addition that will include a first floor master bedroom and laundry room. This will involve taking over and enlarging our current garage space, so we will also be building a new detached garage in the back yard. And since we were spending THAT much money, hubby Jonathan decided we might as well go whole hog and build a mini-apartment (wait, we can't call it an apartment--more on that later), that is, guest quarters or study on top of the new garage.

What I hope to do with this blog is keep y'all updated on how it's going, as well as post photos of the progress, assuming I can figure out how to upload photos here.

Although this project has been in the works for several months, including designing and drawing up plans, obtaining bids, etc., I'm calling today the official First Day of Renovation, for the pure and simple reason that this is the day I wrote the check for $48,000 to our contractor, John Wagner.

That's not the total paid in advance, in case you're wondering. It's actually just the down payment. *gulp*

So the crew showed up at 9:00. The first step was to unload a case of water and a mini-refrigerator for the crew. This is potentially problematic because the porta-potty isn't due to be delivered until Friday, two days from now.

When I left them around 10:30 am they had already set up headquarters in the existing garage (which I had devoted the last two weekends to emptying out and cleaning completely--Not Fun) and made a good head start on tearing down the portion of our fence that will have to go to make room for the new garage.

In future posts I'll backtrack a bit and explain why we wanted the renovation, why we're doing it now, and give more detail on what the job will actually entail.