Looking Like A Room

The walls have been sanded and mostly primed, the new windows are installed, some of the light fixtures are working, and today the floor installation began.

 

 

The flooring is oak shorts to match the floors in the rest of the house.  It may not show well here, but the joints are very tight.  I'm impressed with the floor installers so far.  Eventually it will be stained a darker color, and not look so "vanilla" as Jennifer puts it.

 

Drywall

The drywall has been coming along this week.  The wood for the floors was delivered this week, as you can see, and should be going in next week.
 

 

 We have finally settled on counters as well.  These are representative slabs of the stone we chose.
 

 

Insulating

To get water to the new second floor laundry, we had to run some plumbing in the exterior wall.  Due to concern for those lines freezing during our 8 month Michigan winters, we decided to put in spray foam insulation.  

 

Definitely looks more open with the wall gone and now the plastic barrier down.  Electrical and plumbing are done and inspections were passed.  Drywall this coming week and hopefully flooring the next.  HVAC still needs to be wrapped up.  Slow and steady wins the race (or so they say).

Open Space

This week, the new supporting beams were installed and all of the temporary walls were removed.  The space is finally emerging.  For comparison, a before photo and a current photo are below.  These pictures were taken from the same spot in the kitchen, so the change in the space is apparent.  Once the plastic comes down the change will be even more obvious.

 

 

Here's a picture of the beams (two parallel and one perpendicular).  The post in the basement (pictured previously) is directly below the right hand end of the doorway opening beam.  Kudos to Dan Bollman (East Arbor Architecture) and Palmer Construction for quickly working out a solution to our load-bearing wall problem.  It just set us back about a week.  If only it were free.

 

 

Looking forward to completing mechanicals and insulation this week.  Possibly even getting started on drywall if all of the inspections are done. 

Excavation

During the initial stages of HVAC work this week, the installer found a surprise in one of the existing ducts. 

We think it may have been there for many years because there haven't been young children in this house for quite some time.

Yesterday the hole was cut in the basement floor and the footing was excavated (24 x 24 x 18).  The crew had to use a hammer drill with a 2 inch blade to cut through the dense clay under the basement floor.  By morning about 3 inches of water had seeped into the hole, gotta love Michigan's high water table.

Today the footing was poured (960 lbs of concrete), and the post placed.

On target for support beams to be in place in 4-5 days which is remarkably on schedule considering the engineering that had to be done to support the second story load.

Early Stages of Reconstruction

Today the bar side of the island was framed.  Nice to see the scale of the island finally when we've been looking at it on paper for months.

The seemingly random studs are temporarily holding the beam while we wait for an engineer approved solution to permanently support the load.

Deconstruction

The contractor was kind enough to set up plastic zip walls to protect other areas of the house. 

Having a toilet in the middle of the kitchen is the newest design trend.

Demolition a little further along.  The ducts in the middle will be re positioned out of the center of the room.  Unfortunately the beam on either side of the ducts shows that space is load bearing, so we have to do some re-engineering to remove it and achieve a flat ceiling between the two spaces.