Thursday, July 28, 2005

Adventures in Home Improvement
Things are inching along. We went by Harrison Street tonight. There is a large framed hole in the floor where the new basement stairs will go. Unfortunately the engineer required that we put beams in a ceiling we were not planning on demolishing. Now it turns out that we'll have to take out a corner of the second floor to insert micro-lams to accommodate the weight of two dormers on the third floor.

They're hiring a demo company to come in and take that apart tomorrow, and judging by the speed in which everything else got framed after the demo, they'll probably have the new beams in place early next week and we'll be back on track. There's a couple of good things about this. One is that we can get rid of our ugly hollow doors. It's not much more money to put in new doors than it is to hang the old ones. That requires more labor, so we can get real doors in there.

I think we'll end up a few grand over budget, but I'm waiting to get the final budget numbers from the contractor on this latest change. There's been other stuff too, like we have to re-line the chimney with stainless steel to meet code, and we voluntarily decided to split the house up into two heating zones.

We've come up with a plan for moving into the house at the end of August. I think we can pretty easily seal off the back of the house where most of the work will take place and we'll have a temporary kitchen in the living room. When they're ready to do the floors we will take off for a couple of days and hopefully they'll be finished by the end of September.

It's a little discouraging to go another week without much visible progress, but the house is level probably for the first time since it was built. The basement is full of steel lally columns that weren't there before. There is progress, it's just hard to see.

But at the end, we get to live in our dreamhouse. It will be beyond fabulous.