Breaking the fourth wall (5/3 - 5/12)

The reason the temperature and weather affected us so much this past week is because we're now getting to the point where they're tying in the new construction parts of the house into the existing original sections.  This means that areas that so far have been safe and untouched (the upstairs bathroom and the 1st floor living room in particular) are now starting to suffer some of the same violations that the master bedroom and kitchen already went through.

The start of the new second floor above the temp laundry room

Lots more pictures and details after the jump...


The temporary laundry room lost its cathedral ceilings early the following week (5/3/11) as the new floor upstairs was put in.  Before that could happen the chimney needed to be removed.  We though that would be a huge project but it actually took them less than a day. 

That pile of rubble in the middle of the picture is all that was left of our once-proud chimney

East wall of the temp laundry room, now chimney-free.  The next day this wall was torn down as well

I guess Santa will have to find another way into the house to leave presents for baby Basque this December

The wall between the temporary laundry room and the current living room (and future dining room) is being rebuilt in a slightly different spot to help support the new master bathroom that will be going above it.  So the existing wall was torn down and a temporary barrier was put up.  This shrunk our living room way down, but at least we now have much more room in our temp laundry room!

View from the doorway in the kitchen... you can see the new plastic sheeting wall in the back

Standing in the back corner by the temp wall, looking back towards the doorway to the kitchen.  So much more room in here now!  Too bad it's also *much* dirtier.

We lost a couple of feet of living room... the barrier wall ends right at the edge of the doorway to the kitchen.  This is not where the real wall will be going, it's just to help protect the living room from the construction going on back there.

Plastic walls are so futuristic!

The best part about our new translucent plastic wall is that if you turn on the lights in the temp laundry room and turn off the lights in the living room you get this cool diffuse glow from the entire wall.  It's almost enough to help a person forget that the rest of their house is in pieces.

The other big internal change over the past few weeks has been to the upstairs bathroom.  We came home on 5/10/11 to find that part of the north wall of the bathroom was removed to allow for the dormer-ed wall and new roof-line that is going in there.  The next day the changes were even more drastic: the entire ceiling of the bathroom was removed, opening it up to the attic.  And since the back wall of the attic was removed to tie it in with the new roof over the back half of the house, the bathroom was completely open to the outside.  This was nice when the nights were hot since we got a great crossbreeze through the upstairs hallway.  But once things turned cold the next day it was pretty brutal (it's tough to take a good shower when it's 35 degrees and windy in your bathroom.)

Fortunately the toilet and power outlet are still functional

The angled ceiling from the old roof line is why this wall section had to go

This is why we're cold.  You can't really see it from the picture, but just to the left is the big open space of the back of the new attic.

The other half of the missing bathroom ceiling, looking up into the old attic space over the rest of the house