Windows and Waiting

Well, we did indeed get our windows, so at least those came on schedule. Though that probably means the door and transom windows will arrive "on schedule" in mid-June. 

This week will be a stressful one while we go through inspections and learn whether or not we can proceed. We passed "water" last week and have electrical, plumbing, and framing this week. Framing requires that the unit be sealed, which, as you can imagine, requires a door and not a hole, covered with Tyvek...though it's possible that someone will have pity on us and divide that particular inspection into two parts that will allow us to proceed with a boarded up opening instead of an actual door.

Which is bad because we have a garage and basement full of the things we've been ordering that need to go INTO the house (sink, vanity, medicine cabinets, closet units) that we very much want out of our living space. Though I have to admit that besides the boxes, this addition has, as planned, had very little impact on our ability to live in our house. Besides through the crawl space, it really is just a thing that takes up a lot of room in our yard.

And so while we wait to learn the fate of our project, a few small details. We ordered our tile, which was what we decided on here with one exception. We'd already swapped out larger floor tiles for smaller ones in the shower thanks to your advice about smaller tiles being less slippery (thanks to grout lines). Our contractor and architect went one step further and advised that we stick to unglazed tile, to give it even more friction. So we opted for the penny tiles here, in Sapphire:

(If you can't read the miniscule writing, it's the very middle tile, second row up from the bottom.) We liked the hexes but they were backordered and we decided we did not want to risk it, so we stuck to the rounds in order to guarantee we could get them when we needed them. Which could be in a week or two or could be in June/July. SIGH.

The shower is looking a bit different, with some pretty intense waterproofing which we imagine is for the steam shower (because that needs even better sealing than an average shower).

Finally, we selected the Trex decking color from the three grays closest to our existing (very dingy) decking and similar to the stone on our patio:

We're going with the top one, called Pebble Grey (yes, they spell it the British way). We won't actually be getting the deck until among the last steps of this addition, but at least for once, it was an easy decision to make quickly--unlike our bathroom light fixtures, which we STILL haven't settled on after literally hours of searching.

Fingers crossed for good news this week!

A Pause

The pause in my posts is directly related to the fact that there simply has not been much to share. In late March, we had a slew of specialist contractors come to put in all the infrastructure that we need in the space. Plumbers came through and ran the pipes for our toilet...

...And sinks. Here's the shower room:

And the toilet room (which actually will need to be rerouted, since we failed to tell our contractor that we planned to have medicine cabinets, so the recessed box will have to go where the pipe currently is):

The HVAC team brought in our Mitsubishi Hyper-Heating mini-slit (I don't know about you, but that brand makes me think of cars and not HVAC units--but apparently they make quite good systems!) and loaded it into the encapsulated crawl space. Then the next two days consisted of running the ductwork after consulting us about where we'd like everything to go. Since the HVAC unit is under the floors, most of our vents are low to the ground (except the return, which is up high since hot air rises and it usually sucks out hot air, though this is a year round system that also provides heat). In the bedroom, our vents are on the floor. In the bathroom(s), they are on the walls just above the floor. In our closet area, one will be coming out of the bottom of our built-in closets. One vent (into the toilet room):

Floor vents in the bedroom:

Return, in the hallway:

After a long walk-through to confirm where we wanted switches and plugs based on both the blueprint and last minute preferences (like how high we want the ones in the bathroom shelving units, etc.), the electrician ran the wiring to all the things. Here's the wall our bed will be on:

One aspect I hadn't realized as we committed to a heated towel rack, steam shower, AND radiant flooring is how many control units we will need on the wall. Here's the wall of the toilet room, looking through the hallway to a similar set up on the wall of the shower room.

The electrician also started getting things set up for our recessed lighting and a box for mounting a ceiling fan:

And got the wiring set up for our outdoor lighting:

They also installed a subpanel in the basement (picture later when it looks more like a real working electrical box and less like an empty box with some random dangling wires). 

The framers also came back to put the hardware in for our panel doors (the metal bits):

That, all together, took us to the end of March. I'm including a lot of detail now but honestly was planning to just gloss over all that stuff. So why haven't we had any updates in April. Because WINDOWS.

We're at a standstill until our windows arrive and they are supposed to be ready this coming week. I know this is a huge improvement over the multi-month waits during the pandemic, but I'm still impatient to get moving, since construction stopped 3 weeks ago while we just...wait. The next step is dry wall and that can't happen until windows (and an inspection, apparently). There's an additional complication--the patio door and transom windows above it won't be ready until June. Usually that's also required to pass this inspection. Our contractor is keeping his fingers crossed that we can get an "all but the doors" inspection to keep going with the construction. Because otherwise we're on hold until June. So...yeah, that's fun.

An update to our last post on metals - we took the safer route and returned to our preferred brushed nickel. After our contractor scared us away with a comment of "no one is asking for gold anymore" (something we don't think is true but was enough to spook us), we realizing we did not want to play into a fad. We know we like silvers and were struggling to match everything anyway, so brushed nickel it is. At least it will match the rest of the house.

Meddling with Metals

The next few days will be some invisible goodness - the HVAC system is in place and the plumbing and electric are coming next week. So while that happens more-or-less behind the scenes, I can agonize over our choice of metal finish in the bathroom.

Our default metal choice since we've lived in our house has been brushed nickel, with the only exceptions being things we inherited from the previous owners, like our rubbed bronze curtain rod and sunroom double doors, and the polished chrome faucets in the main bathroom (that we then used to match with other things we added, like light switch plates and vanity lamps). But since for this bathroom we're starting from scratch, we can choose what we want. Brushed gold and black are clearly having a moment. And while black is too dark for the look we want, we're very drawn to the matte gold that is so *in* right now. In fact, it comes with the vanity we're planning to get, whether we want it or not:

So what's the problem? Well, there are a LOT of fixtures in our future bathroom, which means a lot (too much?) gold. In addition to the vanity faucets and drawer pulls, we plan to have our recessed mirrors framed in our metal of choice (not blue like in the above picture). Something like this:

We are DEFINITELY not doing the skull-busting unframed beveled edge mirror like we have in our upstairs bathroom. I regret that choice daily as we all struggle not to literally cut our heads open. There's also all the hardware that will go into our shower, which will have a similar set-up to our upstairs bathroom--a handheld shower head on a slide-rail with a metal hose (the shower being a choice that I loved, and I'm bummed that the links I posted in 2012 only lead to Kohler now, and not to specific products because I would definitely just buy them again). And then we have...the towel warmer.

Yes, we're going European style with a towel warmer, a feature I love in every airbnb or hotel that has one. And here's the biggest problem. Do we want what would essentially look like giant gold stripes on our wall, when our default preference is for silver? That's a LOT of gold, and it's hardwired in and not something we would want to replace in a few years if we get bored with gold. And finally--turns out gold (technically brass) is hard to find. We'd pay a much higher premium, assuming we could find it at all. I can't even find a good stock photo, so here is what we're getting, in brushed nickel:

Then we have to decide how much everything needs to match. What about door pulls for our pocket doors? What about the powder room across the hallway, since we're trying to keep all design elements the same to make sure that they feel like one space? That would mean the toilet paper holder, the flusher, and the faucets to the small sink in there. 

Or do we mix and match? How do we make this feel like a coherent whole? The "easy" button is to just ignore the included gold hardware for the vanity and stick with brushed nickel. It would look something like this (ignore the "out of stock" sign, since this isn't the exact one we're getting). Not as much pop, but certainly safer all around:

Or we could do gold for the vanity wall (vanity, faucets, mirrors, and vanity lights) and brushed nickel elsewhere? That feels like it could look accidental and haphazard. As always, my fashionable friends have lots of great ideas, so please share yours!

Edited to add - now that we're seeing how truly hard it is to find the right color gold in a towel rack and how some other things are odd in other ways (some mirrors are edged in black but not gold, etc.) AND having found this article, we're thinking that a blend of black and gold (maybe even with a light fixture that blends both) might be the best approach here, so we can stick to gold where we want to and use black when we can't. Thoughts?

While we're on the topic of metal, the roof brand we'll be using changed to PAC-CLAD and we have a new selection of colors to choose from. We were surprised that our slates, which look so consistent on our roof, are quite variegated, leaving us a lot of choices. Still, we're nothing if not a cool gray family, so we went with charcoal (third row down, second from left) rather than some of the warmer grays like the one next to it and the one diagonally down to the right). I'm excited to see what it will look like once it's in place.

Framed and Waterproofed

 

Some rain in the forecast last week and this meant it was time to take this party inside. Last Friday, the crew was here late to transform this (1pm):

To this (7pm):

The addition now has plywood walls and is now mostly water tight (we saw a couple drippy spots where the roof waterproofing sheets met, but have been assured that will be fully sealed up before insulations and roofing). Here's a fun game--can you see the different between the picture above and this one? Besides the "door," which got added on Monday.

Do you give up? The roof overhang on the right and left shrunk about six inches. D has been very particular about our trim line and wanted minimal overhangs, to match our existing house, which has almost none. The plans call for no trim but the builders added it. We honestly didn't notice until the architects came for a site visit. It was apparently an easy adjustment to make so the crew pulled it back according to the plans.

Now we have an enclosed space that we can (awkwardly) access from our office window. Of course we had to explore. The wall between the bathroom/hallways and the bedroom and the extra wide lintel (because it's a pocket door, so half the doorway will be covered by drywall to contain the door when it's open) has been framed. Still, it was hard to visualize exactly what would go where:

The next time they came to work, visualizing because a whole lot easier. All the internal structures appear to have been framed out. We have a clear hallway and doorway, and the wall behind our bed has been constructed.

On this side, you can see where the shower will go (or maybe you just see a lot of vertical boards, and that's ok too):

Outside the house, the team is working on pouring concrete for our deck footing. Here's a giant cylinder of concrete, drying in a cardboard mold. Obviously there's more hardware that goes in there, since it's still about a foot away from the deck frame:

Here's another view of the footing, from the side:

The site has been quiet for a couple of days, and we're not sure if that's weather related or due to the fact that we're moving on to subcontractors (maybe it's time for plumbing and electric?). We're excited for whatever is coming next.

It looks like a room!

We're 3.5 weeks in and things are really starting to take shape, quite literally. Last week held a few inspections and floor framing. And while it was still progress, it wasn't particularly exciting, visually. The crawl space was encapsulated (it's going to be a conditioned space where our HVAC will live, so it has to be protected like it's inside the house) and we got floor joists (decking was what the crew seemed to call it, though it only partially related to the deck itself). One day, no deck:

Next day, deck:

Fun story about the deck. We really wanted it to be as small as possible while still being a place we could step out onto in order to exit into the backyard. Maybe have room for a couple of chairs. This deck feels TOO BIG. It is also too late. We did actually ask this week if they could shave it back a bit, but no--it would require starting the deck frame from scratch. So it is what it is. 

Then last Friday, this dramatic change happened. Suddenly we can see the outlines of walls, doors, and windows as the framing began to go up. Now I can start visualizing the future space and how big it is (it is starting to feel sufficiently big).

On Monday, the yard was silent while the project awaited the roofing team and, indeed, yesterday, we got a framed roof! 

I am thrilled with our decision to vault the ceiling and make it asymmetrical, especially now that we see how much of our upstairs sightline is impaired. The bathroom has a restricted view and the kids' bedroom really just looks out onto roof (but there are two more windows in that room):

Part of the roofing team's job was to carefully remove the slate since the new roof sits on part of the existing roof. Then they'll re-cover the exposed part with slate again once the new roof is done. This is a (very close-up) picture from the kids' bedroom:

Here is a picture from about where our bed will be. I think the view will be a bit less drafty when it's done, though:

And here's the view from the upstairs bathroom, of the roof peak. I can't even tell we have monkey bars back there anymore.

In all, it's definitely starting to look like a real structure now, even if it doesn't yet have actual walls or a roof.

A Solid Foundation, Continued

There wasn't much to report this week due to rain that kept the work crews away some days and hid any progress under a tarp on other days. On Tuesday, I got a small peek at the newly parged foundation when the tarp blew off, plus there was a hint at the middle pillar sticking up in the middle. And that was really all until yesterday.

Uncovered for the weekend, here's the finished foundation, with gravel French drains (and crawl space) and black waterproofing coating: 

This week they also broke through to our crawl space (the big boarded up square on our house) after--the previous week--drilling a small hole to our office to make sure the floor level was lined up (the tiny square under the office window that I though had been filled in with cement but was actually a sponge--yes, a sponge).

So of course we had to remove the sponge and take a look. This hole goes all the way through the expanding spray foam that D sprayed under the baseboards years ago, with a small glimpse of our floor board. We can't really see this hole from the inside, but clearly it's just past the part of the wall/floor that we can see.

So while the addition chills out for the weekend and awaits framing, let's talk about wallpaper. We made some significant progress this week, and I think we've decided on what we want in our bedroom. First we narrowed it down to two similar designs, neither of which are ones I posted about last time. Both are metallic this time, which was a priority, and both are in neutral tones which do not actually help me pick a paint color.

The first is A-Street Prints Arian. If it's not clear from the picture, the vaguely dandelion-looking things are silver and the rest is a watercolor/speckled background of a beige-gray (but more gray than beige, so I like it).

Here's the "in-use" photo, and I love that they're using birch furniture, because we're planning to as well.

The second wallpaper is York Wall Coverings Luminous Branches, which looks a little more like spring blooms on branches instead of dandelions and the background is a little more solid, but otherwise is remarkably the same:

You can see from this "in-use" photo that it's a bit more vertical and a little less random feeling. This picture below also makes it look significantly more beige, but that could be the white balance or surrounding walls too.

Compared to each other, Arian is a little more gray and scattered, and Luminous Branches is a bit more beige and consistent. D liked the consistency of the background but finally came around to Arian as our number one choice. And while it doesn't help us decide on a wall color at all, the watercolor effect will solve another problem we were trying to figure out: what color to paint the ceiling. Neither of us wanted a bright optic white and we went back and forth on color drenching (matching the ceiling--AND the trim AND the decor together) or using a lighter version of the wall color. Now I think we'll opt for the lightest greige of the wallpaper.

So we solved one problem, though the other three walls are a different story. Still leaning towards a bold blue or plum though.

Excited for the framing next week!

A Solid Foundation (Days 1 and 2)

The start of a project is always so dramatic compared to the finishing touches later in the process. This giant one is no exception. 

The day started off with a lot of spray paint and some panic on my part that "it's so small" followed by "it's using up so much of the yard" (which is, therefore, probably the right footprint for this addition):

(Excuse the screen outline--I was trying to take the photo without being too noticeable to avoid being creepy.)

By the end of yesterday (day 1), we had what one of my children referred to as A MOAT!

A team of at least 8 people dug this trench and the footer holes, both of which are about 3-feet deep, by hand all day yesterday, which is pretty incredible. They had to take out a couple of small trees too. Busy day! They disconnected our downspouts and cut the underground connections too. A lot of work for day 1.

Today made less progress but looked equally grueling. Our trenches got rebar pieces and the crew manually carried in a ton (possibly literally) of concrete and cinderblock:

We also got a porta-potty delivery, which I think you probably do not need a picture of.

Next is...wait--just until tomorrow thank goodness--for what is apparently the first inspection. The crew covered everything up in a rather dramatic GIGANTIC tarp to keep it all dry and called it quits early.

While the crew is doing manual labor, D and I continue to work on aesthetics. Your comments were so helpful on deciding house color that I think we'll opt to match the gray (paired with the charcoal roof), though we're probably going to opt for a darker gray on the parged concrete base. We've also been hard at work on interior decor. We have started to look at wallpaper...

I was raised in a time when wallpaper was discolored tiny flowers that you couldn't wait to remove from the wall, but really wanted to explore some of the bolder designs that are now available, and we have found so many that we like. Since we haven't decided on paint/accent colors yet, picking a wallpaper seems like a good next step to deciding what complimenting colors to use for paint. Here are a few of the patterns we're considering for the wall behind our bed:

Floral Dreams

Ginko Toss

Gatsby Damask

Sprigs

Cabaret

Since it's hard to see the pattern on the wall, here's a close up. Do I really want a wallpaper called "cabaret" in the bedroom? Probably not in theory. But we are leaning towards painting the walls a bold color and are seriously considering deep greenish blue, so this would certainly make a great accent for it:

Clearly I have a blue thing going, even though I didn't start out with that goal in mind (though most of our house is painted in blues, greens, and grays, so this isn't surprising). I'm drawn to paper that has a metallic or textured feel, probably because that helps distinguish it from just a painted mural, but in the end, only one of these is actually metallic. So I might opt for these or I might just keep looking. It does seem like finding just one will be the bigger problem.

(Bathroom wallpaper inspiration coming in a future post.)

Feel free to share your thoughts on any of these or on wallpaper in general. Your opinions have all been really helpful!