Second floor build and temporary shower- Friday Feburay 26th, 2009

Since eventually the second floor will be gutted and the upstairs bathrooms will be disassembled and new ones put in, a temporary one has been installed downstairs where the old laundry room is. The washer and dryer have been moved to the old office that once served as a downstairs bedroom.






What started out as a nice day turned cold and rainy. Jim's crew put up the studs of the interior walls in the exposed section over the garage. You can now walk into the last two bedrooms, closets and bathroom areas. The next week they will start standing up the trusses and enclose the space.

Second floor build Thursday Febuary 26th, 2009

Pulling up to the house you can already see the size is completely different.



If you flip down a previous day this week you can see the big change to this corner.



From this angle I am standing at the corner of the rear of the house. You can see the opening for the second floor laundry room that will have a window facing out over the drive way. The blue tarp on the right covers the only exposed room at this point: the first floor office. Mike (Jim's framer/lead guy for the build up) carefully had the tarp placed so that in the case of the expected rain this week, the water would shed nicely and keep the drywall in the office dry.


You can appreciate the bump out taken from the same spot as the above photo. The decking is dead on with the existing flooring that is exposed in the silhouette of the now bare gable. The rear windows of the bedrooms (shown on the right) look out onto our two acre property.

Garage build up Wednsday Feburary 25th

This is a shot from inside the garage facing to out to the front of the house




This is a shot looking into the third bay- note the microlam beam is positioned nicely to lift an engine




This is a shot looking into the two car bay. You can see a forth garage door on the end of the house (not the back of the house)

Garage build up Tuesday Feburary 24th

End of day

Garage tear down Monday Febuary 23th

Mid-day

End of day

Mid-day

End of day


Despite very cold conditions, Jim's guys were able to load a whole dumpster full of old garage.

Footing installed on Thursday and Friday Feburary 19th and 20th

Construction by Jim Albright started Wednesday Feb 18th 2009

Jim Albright's (http://www.albrightbuild.com/about.htm) crew was very careful not to tear down anymore than was needed to get the footings in. Note that they cut a hole into the garage to get the backhoe to the footings inside. I ws still able to use the garage that weekend and close the door.

Garage layout

As you can see from the layout, we can fit all of our cars in our garage and avoid the used car lot we endured for most of the fall. We purchased a very tall full size E350 Ford van this fall. We will be using seven and a half foot garage doors to accommodate this sizer of vehicle.

Garage addition.

In order to have the living space we needed upstairs, it was necessary to add an additional garage stall. While the original space was a two and a half car garage, we needed to pick up an additional 6 ft of space. Our challange was to add the space without going over an agreed distance with the town of 12 ft from the propety line. You can see the 12 ft line shown as the gray surface at the corner of the garage.
This point is where the garage is wide enough for a garage door, and is lined up with the front door of the existing house. This allows us to build straight across on the second floor and appear that the original design would allow this modification. It also allows us to have a three car garage in a neighborhood where everyone else has one too.

Second floor design

As you can see, the four kid's bedrooms are equal in size and each share a bathroom with another room. They each have walk in closets and will have an individual sink. All have windows on the west side and face our beautiful two acre back yard. This layout was designed by Diane. It was then used as the basis for the drawings for our Architect Thomas Doughty.
The linen closets are located in the front of the house nearest the hallway and are accessible from both the hallway and the bathroom.
A second floor washer and dryer is located in the front of the house at the gable end of the garage.
The Master has both a shower room (enclosed to keep it warm and a full size bath. The master also has a walk out second floor balcony that is located in the rear of the house to over look the rear of the property.

This is the proposed house

This is the proposed design from the outside. The intent here is to increase the second floor living space to get 5 bedrooms without looking like an addition from the outside. I designed this in CAD using Diane's layout to understand the space and get an idea of the overall feel of the house. The first designs had the center roof extending all the way to the right hand side of the house. This looked like an addition. Several more concepts were drawn by me using a photo in photo shop. I eventually add two gables and the dormer to break up the form and get the proportions acceptable.

This is the original house

This is a blog set up to update you all interested in our remodeling of our house. Here is the present house, front and rear.