Finishing the basement

It's been a long time coming, but the basement is finally just about finished.  When we did the house renovation a few years ago, the foundation was fixed up and some basic framing was put into place down there, but we haven't managed to get the resources together to actually make it into a livable space until recently.  We had a little bit of work done on it last summer, putting in a window into the future bedroom space, but then things were on hold again until earlier this year.  We had originally thought we would try to do the work ourselves, but eventually realized that it would take forever and take up all of our free time and still might not end up the way we wanted.  So we brought Larry back in to start work on it part time while he was finishing up a different job.   He started at the end of May and progress was initially slow while the time was split with the other job.  Full time work started in September, and by the end of the month drywall was up, the bathroom was mostly assembled, and the cork floors and tile work were all done.  October covered trim and painting, and was the end of what we had contracted Larry to do.  Finally, at the end of November we had new carpeting installed in the bedroom and tv room, and it was all ready to use.

Looking south through the bedroom in Jan 2011 and in Nov 2014.

There are still a few things remaining to do, including putting tops on the half walls, finishing the wire terminations for the cable/internet/speakers, and eventually getting some cabinets and counters for the laundry room and furniture/electronics for the tv room.  But it's still all useable for now, and we're loving having all of this new living space in the house including a big tv room, bathroom, guest bedroom, laundry room, and little playroom. 

See photos from the past year and a half of work after the jump.

Night staining deserves a quiet night

I don't think we've put up a post that's not about Simon since construction on the house finished and we moved in last fall.  So to break up the baby monotony (I know you're all getting tired of it) I'll write about the house project I did yesterday.

When wood on the back porch/steps was put in at the end of October, it was too cold for Larry to coat it with anything.  That was fine all winter, but now that it's been getting direct sunlight for a few months the wood has faded from dark brown to light gray and was starting to warp and crack.  So it was time to put something on there to protect the wood.

Contractor Larry recommended Penofin oil finish to seal the deck rather than staining it.  The porch is made of some type of fancy rainforest wood (I can't remember the name of it at the moment) that looks really good on its own, so regular stain would just cover a lot of that up.  Penofin wasn't widely available in our area, but we found a store up in Evanston that would special order it for us.  We ordered one with a slight chestnut tint to it to help restore the color to the wood.  It was delivered earlier this week, so I took the afternoon off from work yesterday to get this done in time for Simon's birthday weekend.

More pics and details after the jump...

Garage is Done!

We are completely done!! Yay! The railings are in and the garage window came and siding is finished. Just in time for Chicago's first snow.

In the house!!

Almost there... stay on target...

There are still a few things left to do (a last coat of paint in a couple rooms, finishing the phone/cable/internet wiring, install the mirror and shower door in the master bath, move all the tools out of the first and second floors and clean up) but we're finally close enough to being finished that last night Emily and I were able to start unpacking a few boxes and putting things away into the kitchen.   We'll take a better set of pictures once it's all really complete, but for now here are some more shots of how things are looking now.

Looking from the living room over the peninsula into the kitchen and the back door.  On the left is the little "microwave closet" in the breakfast area.  We weren't sure what we were going to use for shelving in there, but Larry found a super inexpensive cabinet to install and used some of the leftover granite for the top

Kitchens, Bathrooms and more

The house is SO close to done I can taste it. Tiling and painting will finish in the next day or two. Then waiting for the glass and the plumber to finish up the faucets and we are in soon!! Goal move in date is next Friday, but this weekend we'll be doing some initial wiping down of the inside kitchen cabinets and getting furniture and bookshelves set up. Follow the jump for pictures.

We have Floors!

The house has drastically changed since the last house post. Alan will post to fill in the missing time, but somehow we always seem to run out of time lately!

So I'm going to jump to present and tell you that we now have all our roof, amazing blue siding with beautiful white trim, a lovely back deck with a spot for a grill, air conditioning, heating, wiring, and plumbing. You won't believe it, but we also have drywall and hard wood floors!! Here's a picture from the basement door looking back through the den and kitchen.

Next week we will be banned from the house while they sand and stain the floors. Then installing cabinets, tile in the bathroom, counters, painting and trim and then we move in! Date we are shooting for right now is October 28. Just around the corner!!

More pictures after the jump.

August House Progress

We've been pretty busy throughout August and haven't been great about taking progress pictures.  The main work over the past few weeks has been mainly on HVAC, plumbing and electrical.  These are obviously pretty important things to have in the house but don't make for as dramatic a picture.  So to inject a little excitement into these progress pictures I tried using a new app on my iPhone that takes 360 panoramic pictures.  They're not the most clear pictures in the world since I'm still getting used to the app, but they give a pretty good view of how things are looking as of August 22.  As always, click on each one for a larger version.

Standing in the middle of the kitchen, with the center of the picture looking at the window over the kitchen sink

July House Progress Part 2 (July 14 - July 31)

Lots more constructions pictures here, including nearly-complete framing on the first floor and partially done framing on the second floor.

Standing by the front door looking all the way back to the kitchen window

July House Progress Part 1 (July 1 - July 7)

After the discouraging sight of our house basically completely gutted at the end of June, we were happy to see things really start coming together quickly in July.  It was a very tough month for construction due to the weather, which was the rainiest July in Chicago on record.  At least we weren't living there at the time, but having to deal with the aftermath of a mini-hurricane a couple of times a week for most of the month definitely slowed things down a bit.  Despite that, we were happy with the progress. We went from a house with practically no floors or walls to one with plenty of both in just a few weeks.

Standing in the first floor family room and looking out through the second floor master bedroom window.  Wait, what?

Post-Simon June House Progress (June 20 - June 29)

After Simon was born we couldn't bring him back to the house which was still so far from being liveable.  Emily and I could deal with the construction noise and dust but we didn't want to subject Simon to that.  So we ended up renting a tiny studio apartment just down the street from the house.  No longer restricted by needing to make sure that we had a place to live inside the house while it was being built, Contractor Larry took full advantage of his new freedom by basically gutting the inside of the house.  We knew all of this had to happen in order for the construction to proceed but seeing it all at once like that was pretty jarring for us.  Here we were with a brand new baby and our house looked further than ever from being complete.

Looking past the stacked chairs you can see the old back wall of the living room has been removed, leaving it open to the temp laundry room.  Off to the right you can see the initial framing for the new doorway between the future dining room and the future family room

Pre-Simon June House Progress (June 1 - June 14)

For the first two weeks of June we continued living in the house while the construction continued and more and more of our house became unusable.  By the time we headed to the hospital on the 14th for the beginning of labor we were pretty much reduced to just our bedroom and the bathroom.

On June 8 they built out the frame for a big window in the temp kitchen (which will eventually be a small family room off of the kitchen)

Basement Floor (May 19 - June 1)

I just realized I hadn't posted any house pics since May, which means it's time for a ton of house construction posts to catch up.

First up, let's jump back to the end of May for the basement floor.  It had been just wet sand since they tore up the old concrete earlier in the year, but now that the foundation was finished and the sewer and water pipes were in place they could pour the new floor.

Our basement in May 2011: wet sand and the occasional pit

Raise the Roof (May 3 - May 23)

I knew I was behind on posting pictures, but I just realized that even though I've posted some disaster shots from inside the house I haven't posted anything about the progress on the outside of the house since mid-April. 

By the end of the last post, we had the basement and kitchen framed out but nothing much done on the second floor yet.  The focus for the next couple of weeks was on the inside of the house so by May 3 they had only really finished up the sub-floor for the master bedroom but still no walls or roof.

More after the jump...

Stuffy Nose (Be Prepared for Complaints)

I'm finally getting over the first illness I've had during the pregnancy. On the surface it appeared to be a simple cold - but it was much more malevolent than that. My nose was so stuffy! I am not usually one to take anything when I am sick, but man I really wanted some NyQuil or Sudafed or _something_. Sleeping is hard enough with our huge baby wiggling around in my belly, but not being able to breathe adds a really not fun dimension to that.

I am certain that I got sick from standing in cold, dirty water all night Wednesday night and Saturday night. As a side note - Alan's post and pictures about Wednesday night's flood didn't quite convey the magnitude of water that was pouring from our ceiling. It was more water than the quantity of four showers and coming in anywhere within a 2 to 3 foot radius. We filled buckets in a minute and the sink couldn't keep up with the water we were dumping into it. Finally we just threw in the towel (forgive me) and made the levee in that picture Alan took.

These are the worst things about being sick this past week:

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...

Fixing a hole where the rain gets in

This has been the toughest couple of days of the house renovation process for us so far .  When the work on the new roof started the forecast was for a day of light rain and then a warm weekend.  As soon as things were opened up that changed to something much wetter and colder.  It's been 10-15 degrees colder than normal for this time of year and we had almost constant heavy rain.  The worst part was Friday night, when it rained steadily from early evening until late Saturday morning.  Larry set up a drainage system in the kitchen to funnel the water from the leak back outside, and that caught most of it.  But there was just too much water so it spread out into more areas than the drain could handle.  So we ended up with buckets all over the kitchen to catch the drips, and had to keep adding new containers and emptying the old ones throughout the night.  This is what we ended up with around 3am:

The biggest leak was dripping off the vent pipe over the stove, but fortunately that space was exactly the right size to fit our trash barrel which you can see wedged in there in this pic

When the levee breaks

Sorry this post took so long to go up... Blogger has been down for the past day or two. 

We had a bit of excitement last night in our normally uneventful life thanks to a large amount of rain and a small amount of roof.  Heavy rain was expected yesterday but the roof over the new back of the house isn't complete yet.  And in order to build the new roof shape they needed to tear off the back side of the original attic and the ceiling of the upstairs bathroom.  Larry told us yesterday morning that if they started on the roof that day it was likely that they wouldn't be able to finish so there was a chance we'd get some water in the house.  Figuring we could handle a little dripping here and there, we told him to go ahead with the roof so we could keep things moving.  And he was right... we did get some water:

More details and pictures after the fold...

Here comes the rain again

The night that a huge thunderstorm rolled through was a really bad time to not have a roof on the back of the house... more details (and pictures) tomorrow after we dry off and clean up a bit.

UPDATE: I had hoped to post more about the storm this morning but haven't had a chance yet and I'll be away from my desk for a few more hours.  I should be able to have a new post up by around 3pm Chicago time though.

Laundry Room Cathedral

Lucky people that we are, we now have the luxury of impressive cathedral ceilings in our temporary laundry room.  Technically that's just because they've torn out the old master bedroom floor to prepare for tying in the second floor of the new addition, but for now we can pretend we requested this.

The water heater on the left there has been moved to the right about six times now, which is making it increasingly difficult to make it over to the washer/dryer while holding a full laundry basket.  Then again, at least we still have access to free laundry for now so we don't mind a little navigational inconvenience.

 Follow the link for 2 more pics...