Rewind 4 years, to this day. It was the 21st of September, my 28th birthday, and we had just received the keys to our new house. It was the best birthday present ever. I was so excited, I wanted to spend my birthday sleeping on a blow up mattress on the floor in our new master, because it was so much better than sleeping in the noisy apartment we had been renting for the 4 previous months, plus it was our new house. Our furniture wouldn't arrive for another week and a half because we had planned to repaint and replace all the carpet before we moved in.
That winter we had discovered some cold spots on the floors in our new house. We were paying $400 a month to heat our house and yet we were still cold. Out of curiosity, Brennan went down into the crawl space to discover that the insulation had been removed from under our bathroom and kitchen areas during a previous remodel done by the former tenants and that the 20 year plus insulation that was everywhere else was quite sad looking and depleted. So we decided to give our insulation a little upgrade and out went thousands of dollars to keep our feet warm in the winter.
We replaced all of the insulation below and above our house. After the insulation crew had finished their work, they asked my husband if he would like to go up into the attic to inspect the finished product. A little hesitant due to shear lack of interest, he decided to climb up into the attic anyway through the small hole in the ceiling above our closet. Once he found his footing and turned on his flashlight, he found himself to be quite elated. To his astonishment, he discovered that we had quite a gem of space above our one story home. Our roof lines are so high, that the attic has ceilings as tall as 12 feet and enough space to fill out a thousand square foot room! In Brennan's words, we had enough room to throw a football. This sparked an idea that would later take 4 years to fulfill.
After 2 years of getting our finances in order and saving quite a bit of money, we were able to start the project of our dreams. We started by asking a good friend of ours in the Portland area, who happens to be in the drafting business, to draw up some plans for our house. That process took us about three months, which we later realized is a very quick turnaround for that kind of work. Once we had our drafts for the extension, we went to the engineer. Unlike our nice drafting friend, the engineers we hired took forever. We hired one engineer who took 3 months to tell us that he was not interested in our project, even though he agreed to do it. That was frustrating, but thankfully we hadn't paid him anything. Then we found another engineer, who at least was interested in our project, but was so busy that it took him about 5 months to complete.
Finally it was August, 11 months from when we first started with draft work and we were now ready to sit down with a contractor. We interviewed 3 contractors whose work we had seen in the home of three of our friends.
The first contractor came to our home and started the bidding process, but after a few weeks, we never heard from him again. Not really sure why he wouldn't respond to our emails.
The second contractor came out and seemed very excited to get our business, he was very professional and the work he had done in my friend's home was top of the line. Unfortunately, he was ridiculously expensive. He wanted to charge us 100k more than the third contractor. I was sticker shocked. The third contractor's quote, which I will get to in a second, wasn't even 100k. We were definitely not going with contractor number two.
Then there was the third contractor. He had worked on my neighbor's house and he did an incredibly beautiful job. The trim work around the windows and doors and everywhere was perfectly cut, installed and painted. I had been told that he did most of the work himself. Before we started interviewing the contractors, I had a feeling this contractor was going to be the one. Thankfully his bid was the right price and we were ready to go. Unfortunately, it was too late in the year to start the project. Since we live in the Pacific North West and the rainiest city in the country, we were unable to cut an enormous hole in our roof while the rains were poring. So we waited another year until summer.
So here we are, 4 years to the day from when we closed on this house and got our keys. Now we are building on to it. By the way, this is the second best birthday present ever.
Below is a drawing of the addition that we are building onto our home. The plan is to add an enormous dormer above the living room windows to allow light into the upstairs space. This is located in the back of our house. We will also need to add stairs in the inside, since it's only a one story home.
This is the hole in the roof I was talking about and it's no joke. It is a massive undertaking. This is after just two days of demo. There will also be lots of demo going on inside the house once they finish framing the outside and re-roofing the entire house. Right now it's a race against time since it's close to the end of September and the heavy rains are on their way. Last weekend we got about a half inch of rain and winds up to 12 mph. In November, and possibly even October, we could be looking at inches of rain and winds up to 25 mph. We do not want to be dealing with that kind of weather while the roof is off of our house.
Thankfully my contractor has a huge tarp that will cover the entire hole, but it still makes me nervous. If a fair amount of rain gets inside the house, my living room could turn into a swimming pool. I'm so glad they work fast!
Construction sites are heaven for little kids. As you can see, James was enthralled as he watched wood being delivered to our house. It has been nice to have a distraction for James, who has been spending some time staying entertained by just watching everything going on.
Oh the mess! And they haven't even started inside the house yet!
Our beams also arrived today. Our plan is to have the beams exposed and stained a walnut color. These days they use beams called a Glulam Beam. They're not made out of just one piece of wood anymore and the ones you can find that are, are a fortune. I'm excited to see these finished and stained, it's going to be a neat feature in the space.
Here is a picture I'm using as inspiration for my stairs on the inside. The plan is to use white "chamfered" balusters like the ones in the photo, as well as the post. The railing will be a walnut color and each stair will be exposed on the sides, but I will have carpet running up the stairs. Stay tuned for more posts to come on the progress of the addition.
