Windows and Doors, oh my!

No time has been wasted after the framing was substantially complete - the windows and doors are nearly done (even with our "hmm, those windows seem too low; and let's move these windows around").

The front view

Right side view (my office and the stairs)

Rear view
Porch on the right, dining nook directly in front of you, master bedroom above,
Heather's office and the guest bedroom in the loft

Back right
mudroom exterior door on the far left, kitchen front and center, dining nook between kitchen and porch
you can also see the steps (with lots of lighting) down to the basement from what will hopefully be the back patio

Shingles, exterior trim and siding come next, I believe, but I think we're moving back into a phase where there will not be a lot of visible progress, at least from the exterior.  It is my understanding that wiring, plumbing, insulation, etc. will be up next.  Fun stuff.

By the way, any input regarding whole-house generators hooked up to the natural gas line would be welcome - good/bad experiences, brands, maintenance, etc.

Framing (the sprint begins)

Up until the last couple of weeks, the progress on the new house seemed to be nonexistent much of the time, and when there was visible progress it seemed to occur in very brief spurts.  There was obviously progress with a ludicrous amount of research and decisions being made in the background (I had no idea that there were so many different lights, faucets, granites, etc.), but not of it was visible on the forlorn field that used to be my home.

The times, they are a changin'!

As a reminder, on April 5, our new home looked like this:

Since then, we have seen major transformations every day as the house has been framed.


This process resulted in:

Visualizing

As many of you know, Heather likes visual examples over simply visualizing or describing things.  This is a great help in her career as a teacher of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), as examples often help overcome language acquisition challenges.

This can be challenging, however, when discussing room sizes and layouts, since we don't necessarily always have good examples available to us.  It also means that we have a LARGE duffel-type bag we bring with us to EVERY granite/tile/plumbing/lighting/etc. visit.  This duffel contains doors, chips, mini granite slabs, and even a drawer in our colors and finishes.  Although awkward and heavy, this duffel has allowed Heather to become more comfortable that our choices work, because she can see all of them together, rather than one at a time.

When it comes to room layouts and sizes, however, this gets challenging, since we don't have rooms or spaces that are necessarily dimensioned the same as the alternatives under discussion.  Fortunately, Heather is not just a total hottie - she's also pragmatic.  When she got stuck trying to visualize the mirror and cabinet alternatives in the master bathroom, for example, she used sidewalk chalk to sketch out the various alternatives in our driveway so we could stand "in" the space and see how it would feel with both of use using our sinks at the same time.

 Although I was initially skeptical of the usefulness of the sketches, they did help us to immediately decide what we wanted to do.  Of course, as you'll see in the next post, the framing is now done, so we can do our "visulizing" in the actual space.  Woooo!

The slab and basement steps

After the French drains were installed, the under-slab plumbing was laid and the slabs were poured.

Although it looked even more like a swimming pool, particularly when it rained, we could also see the beginnings of our new home starting to take shape.

A tradition was born

As many of you know, I've enjoyed the odd game of poker over the years.   We've played in dorm rooms, hotel rooms, at many of our bachelor parties, at a few of the weddings, on porches, in basements, and even in the car on road trips.  With a nice screened in porch at version 1.0 of the 907, I ended up hosting my share of games over the years, although sometimes when the weather failed to cooperate, we would move in to the kitchen or basement.

Accordingly, after Team Norton had moved down the street into the rental, and after the utilities had been disconnected, but before the deconstruction process began, it seemed only fitting to have one final lantern-lit bundled-up poker game in the basement, with a fire in our newly reopened fireplace. 

So one freezing evening in late December a bunch of the neighborhood poker players and spectators gathered for one final game in the old 907.

We had so much fun, the plan is that for subsequent Shady homes going through "iteration," we have a final poker game after utilities but before demo/decon. 

Good times.

The basement walls and French drains

After the Olympic-sized hole was dug, the footers were poured, then the walls, the plumbing was laid, the French drains were laid, and finally the slab was poured (next post).

Woohoo.  I have a garage. And yes, I know these are out of order, but I'm just trying to keep up.

Digging

So after the deconstruction a/k/a "razing my home,"  we had The Field.  The next step to the creation of our new home was digging the hole in which to put the new home.  Although intellectually we knew that the hole had to be bigger than our basement, to allow construction, waterproofing, and the French drains, it still looks crazy big.

Well - I guess I've always wanted an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

The Field

After a flurry of activity with the deconstruction, the demolition and the removal of some of our trees, we ended up with a field and a lull in the action.

When it snowed one day, you couldn't see the mud and sawdust - just a field of snow.  It was a peaceful sight, but a jarring one when we realized that this empty field is where the home in which we lived for ten years once stood.

I get my revenge on the tulip poplars . . .

Ever since we first moved onto the Shady back in 2002, Heather has had the use of the garage (usually for parking, sometimes as a staging area for projects) and I have parked on the street in front of the house.

Along with the joys of having snowplows essentially bury my car, various balls, balls, bikes, and scooters bouncing off the car, burning seats in the summer and inches of ice and snow fused to the car in winter, my poor beleaguered "Spencer" (for those of you not in the know, Spencer was the fastest train on Sodor, the land of Thomas the Tank Engine - and yes, Heather's van is "Lady," the pretty girl train with whom all of the boy trains are in love)  was the victim of the tulip poplars in my yard, particularly the poplar in the front yard.

Oaks drop acorns, and other species of trees drop various nuts and seeds, but most trees only drop stuff other than leaves once per year.  Tulip poplars, on the other hand, drop stuff continuously.  Helicopters, flowers, pods, and other random bits that I can't identify, along with enough pollen to turn my car yellow for a few months every spring.  At one service appointment, the technician commented that he had never seen an air filter more clogged than Spencer's.  Nearly every day, as I got into Spencer to head to work, I would pull a handful of that night's poplar droppings out of the air intake.

With that as background, you will understand my sheer joy in watching my tormenter over the years come down.

Sadly, however, after consulting with a few arborists and evaluating the health of the trees in our back corner, Heather and I decided to take the huge triple trunk tree in the back corner of our lot down to 15 feet.  It was an incredible tree, but had been dropping ever-larger pieces during the recent major storms over the last few years (sorry Stan), and had the potential to take out the regional transmission power lines behind the house, one of the neighbors houses, or even our new house.  The other trees around it were both stunted and twisted away from this monster as well, since it pretty much monopolized the sunlight in a decent area.  We are hoping that these smaller trees will now be able to grow more naturally and fill in the hole in our forest canopy.


We're also hoping to be able to use the three remaining 15 foot trunks as the base for an awesome tree house, but we'll hold off on that for the time being.

Demolition

Unfortunately, deconstruction can't take everything, so once Second Chance was done taking everything they could possibly salvage, the wrecking crew came in to demolish the rest.

Despite Rick's impressive efforts, however, and my attempt to get a little free labor out of Matt and Erich . . . 

  . . . we eventually had to bring the dude with arguably one of the coolest jobs out there - the job every little boys imagines himself doing when he is playing with his Tonka trucks in the sandbox:

The 907 - Deconstruction

Being the environmentally-conscious family that we are, what with composting pretty much everything coming out of the kitchen and my shredder, and using it in the garden,

we didn't want to just throw all of our old house into the landfill.  Plus, there was a lot of really good stuff that could easily be reused.  After some research, we chose to donate our old house to Second Chance, a charity out of Baltimore that gets as much leverage as possible out of each donation.  They use the deconstruction process itself to provide job training, they reuse an amazing amount of materials from the donated houses, and they then sell the reclaimed materials in their store in Baltimore.  The amount of material that ends up being sent to the landfill is a fraction of what would otherwise be landfilled.  Great benefits all around.

The 907 is iterating.

As most of you know by this time, after living for over ten years in the three bedroom 1,200 square-foot split-foyer that was our first home, Team Norton has determined that we need a bit more space for the boys and Jeff's growing law practice.

Since we never plan to leave Shady Drive (a/k/a "The Shady"), we're tearing down the old house:

The 907 v1
(after the shrubs were removed)

. . . and building a new one on basically the same footprint, slightly expanded.

To enable our friends and family to follow along on this adventure, we'll be posting pictures, video, and updates here on a regular basis throughout the process.

Over the next few days, I'll be catching up to today with some pictures and video of the deconstruction process, site preparation, digging the basement, and pouring the footers and the basement walls.

Fun times.

Jeff