Breezeway 2: framing and walls

A lot of progress in 3 days - I'm sure at some point, the big work will cease and small adjustments and behind the walls things will make the changes seem much less dramatic. But for now, huge strides.

On Wednesday, I came home from work to find our front breezeway wall and door gone and a whole new wall with windows up:

Here's the inside, partially framed. They took off the garage door and doorframe as well (and inadvertently blocked us off from the contents of the garage, since we have never had the key to the garage door):

Hi doors! Fortunately our builder works with a local salvage company that resells used house and construction supplies for charity, so this pile of stuff all has a potential second life, rather than being destined for the dump:

By Thursday, the floor was framed and the wall was framed a bit more (and we got into the garage):

Then on Friday, our missing back wall was put back up, raised to the right level, but were not fully fastened into place yet (they posted a sign telling us not to actually use them yet):

They jackhammered some of the concrete away from the entrance of the kitchen, also to get set for adding flooring:

This week we also made some decisions - we're going with baseboard heating, to match the rest of the house. It will be a separate zone, but the baseboard will look identical to the newer ones upstairs. We chose this over a few other options. Radiant heat sounded nice but was the most expensive, plus there were issues about what kind of flooring we could use. Electric radiant heat was out for anything except engineered wood (which looked pretty fake) because real wood cannot handle the temperatures. Hydronic radiant heat (i.e. using our hot water running through the rest of the house) was compatible with real wood (only custom slats that are quarter sawn, not prefinished flooring). It made me nervous though to think that the wood had to be very specific or else risked curling. What if it was fine at the beginning and started curling in a few years. Wood and temperature changes are not exactly mutually exclusive, but they are not best buddies either. Plus if something did go wrong with it, we would only be able to access it by pulling up floor boards. That plus the fact that it was the most money made me decide to pass.

The cheapest choice also wasn't to our liking. It just reminded us too much of an afterthought and too much like a hotel. It was cost effective and efficient, but did not go with the house.

We opted to spend more money on the baseboards as a system that blended better into our 1950s house. That also necessitates doing some work on the AC ducts to bring AC to the room as well. Not cheap, but cheaper than the radiant heat and something we already understand.

We also chose our floors. Though by taking radiant heat off the table we could choose from anything, we learned that in the end the difference between using Home Depot prefinished wood flooring (with some pretty negative reviews online), fancier prefinished wood flooring, and custom sanded and stained slat floors was only about $300. For yet a tiny bit more, we could get the fancier quarter sawn wood. We decided to splurge, at our builders recommendation.  Hopefully we like what we get.