week 2: november 14-20, 2011

demolition continued in earnest this week.  the house is starting to feel a bit crazy and i know it's only just begun.  even though the work is contained to the garden level and rear parlor for now, all of the items (furniture, dishes, appliances (!), boxes, etc.) that were previously stored in those rooms had to be temporarily relocated into areas that are not undergoing construction.  in a word - chaos!


on the parlor floor, the previous owner's master bathroom came tumbling down!  the windows in this room face west, and it is unbelievable how much light there is now!  unfortunately, when the tile was removed from this area, it revealed that the original parquet floor had been damaged and would need to be replaced throughout the room.  the pattern is quite intricate with inlaid mahogany pieces, so we will have to evaluate whether we use the contractor or another wood floor vendor we've worked with in the past when the time comes.

the walls and some of the tile came out of the first floor bathroom:

before and after pictures of the northeast corner of the cellar where the oil tank and gas/electrical panels are located after the structural walls and the ceiling start to come down:

before and after shots of the storage area in the northeast corner of the cellar.  the drywall and door seen in the picture on the left were parallel to/encasing the arches seen in the picture on the right:

the new double window for the family room was ordered this week, and we made an easy decision to flip the fixtures in the first floor bathroom to the south wall in order to clean up the low plumbing connections in the basement and have all of the waste lines run more tightly along the cellar's south wall.  also, since we expected the crew would start in the kitchen soon, making it impossible to cook or eat in it, hubby and i began the process of transferring the refrigerator's contents and select dishes, pots/pans, utensils to the kitchen on the fourth floor.  no need for the gym that week -- i lost track of how many times i walked back and forth from the top to the bottom!


side note - it's freezing in the extension on the garden level and in the rear parlor upstairs because these areas of the house are not heated by the furnace in the cellar.  the vents that had been installed along the floorboards have now all been discarded by mike's crew, so hopefully it won't get too bad as we get deeper into winter!


at the end of this week, we went away for the thanksgiving holiday.....unsure of what state the house would be in upon our return 7 days later!