The Pressure Is On!

This should be the last posting for a while that I start with excuses, but I've got a good one this time. Looking back at the date of the last posting, I realized that it was the next day that we added a new laborer to the Zeller House crew and have been busy teaching her the tricks of the trade for the last month. Her name is Maci and she's an almost nine month old Vizsla/Bull Terrier mix who we adopted on April 4th. She has spent most of her first month with us working and playing hard over at the house with Ryan. Ok, well, she really hasn't lifted a paw when it comes to actually doing work on the house, but she has kept herself and Ryan well entertained.

As I may have mentioned Ryan has also started a job for a family in the neighborhood that is of similar scope to ours, so he is now juggling both major efforts at once. Work on the second project has slowed the progress on our house, but with the addition of Maci into our lives we now have an actual deadline for getting out of our apartment and into the house. Thus, we are about to begin a summer of long days, nights and weekends in order to get even a portion of the house to a livable standard by August 1st, our move-in date. With a lighter work schedule in June, July, and the beginning of August, I will be able to spend quite a bit of time doing as much unskilled work as I can stand and more. Once the other project is complete, Ryan will recommit full-time to the Zeller house, so that we can be in a finished house as soon as possible.

As far as progress on the house goes, things continue to come along at a rapid pace. The doors that had arrived when I last wrote, are now in. This is the back door with an offset one-light and the door from the sun-room out to the the eventual deck that is full-light with a sidelight panel that opens. These new doors have really started to further the contemporary look of the back of the house. The vertical light in the back door complements the vertical window that sits above it in the second floor laundry room.

Much of the last month was spent finishing the framing on the second floor. The framing is the one part of the project so far that has taken much longer than Ryan anticipated. Our design schemes changed and deepened as the project developed and since there was virtually no change in cost for these additions and aesthetic modifications, we decided that since Ryan's labor is free, he would take the extra time and do some more elaborate framing on the second floor. Probably the most major change from our original plan is the vaulting of the entire second floor ceiling. As you start to frame up the inside of a house again, spaces that were big, start to close in a bit, which is what happened with the two front bedrooms on the second floor. In order to open up these spaces a bit, we decided to raise the ceilings. Now the entire second floor has vaulted ceilings save for a small storage or mechanical space over one part of the master bedroom. The ceilings will be higher now and give the effect of more space, but we are maintaining the beams at the original ceiling height so there will be exposed structural supports throughout.

the rest of the way up to the second floor. We got an estimate from a steel manufacturer in the area for a full metal frame, but the cost was way out of our budget, so they will be wooden, on a The other big framing piece that has been accomplished is the stairway. The stairs were definitely the biggest point of contention between Ryan and I. Not because we disagreed, but because for the longest time we could not figure out how exactly we wanted them. We finally settled on a design that Ryan has constructed the frame for. The stairway is now in a location in the house that it has never been before, against the wall in the center of the back of the front room. The stairs go halfway up, have a landing and then turn 180 degrees and proceed to the second floor landing. As single- beam stringer with cantilevered treads that are reinforced with steel angle brackets create a staircase with a "floating" look. We are definitely going for a contemporary look, minimal with clean lines. The stairway does take up quite a bit of space in the front room, which is our main concern, but I think we are happy with the design, so once they are fully in, we will work with the remaining space to figure out how to best use the front room, whether it makes sense to divide it at all or leave it as one large room. When we realized what a large cut-out of the second floor the staircase would require, we realized that it would be a great opportunity to add light to the first floor, which stays pretty dark during the second half of the day once the sun rises over the roof onto the west side of the house. Ryan added two side-by-side skylights to the roof right above the staircase, which adds an incredible amount of light to the area.

In the "green" department, we continue to learn more secrets of the area, some that we wish we had known earlier in the process. Ryan remembered driving past a property nearby that had lawnmowers for sale on the front lawn. Well, spring has finally sprung and the grass in the backyard needed a trim, but he didn't want an expensive new mower. Long story short, this guy rebuilds old lawnmowers, so we bought one for less than one hundred dollars that does the job, but even more interesting, he runs an organic farm and burns almost all construction waste for fuel on his farm. So, quite a bit of what we had to dumpster could have gone to him. It's too bad we didn't know about this great recycling opportunity then, but it is great to know about for the future. We were also able to get rid of all the brick we removed from the house without dumping it. Ryan put an ad in the local paper and the response was insane. People continued to show up weeks after the ad ran to collect their free brick. Ryan estimates that all together, people picked up about two tons of brick!

Well, Ryan's Dad Mike returns this week to help get the plumbing started and he'll be bringing Rudy the lab to meet Maci, so we're keeping our fingers crossed that the two hit it off!

Ryan has been holding up his end of the bargain and updating pictures on our photosite, so check those out with our link on the side of the blog.