Monthly Archive

In the comments to the last entry, Ron over at The Bungalow Blog pointed out that by moving the closet back into the hallway, we took one step back towards the original Stickley floor plan.  Right there, see?  Mr. Stickley already thought about the too-small bedroom problem.

Which makes us wonder how many of the other changes that we made to the original Stickley plans were ill-advised.  Perhaps we’ll make this a regular event.  We’ll call it the "How We Tried To Improve Upon a Master But Ended Up Being Totally Wrong" feature.

In other news…

They-found-us-in-Google search of the week: "What animal goes the slowest"

Answer: Cherie when she’s hanging drywall. 

The first thing that people say when they hear that we are building a house is, “Oh, that must be so fun.” Unless those people have actually built a house.  Then they say, “Oh, no, really?  How are you holding up?”

But the second thing that people say is: “It must be so nice to be able to do things the way you want them.”  Well, yes.  But that assumes that we know what we want.  Or that once we get what we want, we will want to keep what we wanted the way we wanted it.  But sometimes we don’t know what we want until we get what we thought we wanted, only to see that it’s really not what we want at all.  Then we have to rethink things.

Got it?

Let’s look at an illustration of this principle in action.

This is what the floor plan around bedroom 3, the smallest bedroom on the north side of the house, used to look like (double-click to make it bigger):

In the original plan, we ran the chimney from the living room woodstove straight up through the floor and then on up through the attic.  We were just going to leave the metal chimney open and run a railing around it (illustrated by the red lines).  We were happy with the look of this, but it created a problem in the bedroom.  This bedroom is mostly intended as an office, but it was so tiny and such an odd shape that it was going to be cramped even for that purpose.  And forget about using it as a guest room, unless we were expecting a guest who liked to sleep leaning up against the wall.  We knew this was a problem on paper, and after we framed out the closet, we realized how serious the problem was.

So we started thinking.  Was there a reason why we couldn’t run the chimney under the stairs and then up the outside?  Did we have to run it right smack through the middle of the house?  We checked our local building codes and found that we could run a chimney through walls like that as long as there were no combustible materials around the chimney.  The only downside was that we would lose a little bit of our under-stairs storage.

Taking the chimney out of the equation meant that we could punch the closet out into the hallway instead of cramming it into the corner.  Once Michael and Mark (thanks, Mark!) dismantled the closet and rebuilt it in the hallway, we could see immediately how much bigger the room was.  Turns out that six square feet is a whole lotta space in a room that small. 

This is what we have now:

But now that the closet was in the hallway, the natural light was blocked from the stairwell.

So, while we were at it, we added a window.

Rather, we added the place for a window.  We don’t actually have a window yet.  But we built in the header and marked it out on the drywall.  Now when we are ready to go in the spring, when it warms up enough for us to want a giant hole cut in our wall, all we have to do it slice out the drywall, pull out the insulation, saw through the plywood, and pop in the window.  And we’re sure that it will go just that smoothly.

But we did make sure that we had a good view while we are waiting.

First and foremost, we fixed the camera crisis.  The memory card had gone kaput, which, since we download pictures very frequently, was not much of a crisis at all.  Cherie had to retake the three pictures of the bathroom sink (and that was so hard) but that’s about it. 

Internet, meet the bathroom faucet.  Bathroom faucet, meet the internet.

Faucet: How you doin’?

You’ll notice that the handles are considerably more widespread than your usual faucet.  This was intentional so that we could bring them further down the side of the sink, where they would be easier to reach. 

Here’s the total package:

And that’s probably how it will stay for a while.  Though we have managed to shop vac up all of the sawdust in the bottom there.  And, yes, there are Sharpie marks around the sink that were used for leveling purposes.  Knowing us, those will be sticking around for a while, too.

In addition to repeatedly washing our hands in the bathroom sink and marveling at the luxury of it all, this weekend we continued our drywalling extravaganza.  We have pretty much conceded defeat on the drywall taping-and-mudding front.  Actually, even worse than that, we are forfeiting the game.  We are actively seeking someone to do the taping and mudding.  Someone besides us.  Someone we will pay.  Because it is abundantly clear that we do not have the time nor the desire nor the talent to do this ourselves.  And we are okay with that.

But before we can hire someone to tape and mud, we need to hang the darn stuff.  So we’ve been trying to finish up the nagging missing pieces, including all of the smallest bedroom/office.  Some of you may remember this bedroom as The Room That Shall Not Be Named.  Last time we showed a picture of it, it looked something like this:

We most of Saturday morning moving all of those boxes and assorted doodah up to the attic.   Then the rest of that day and Sunday were spent turning that disgusting mess into this:

It’s a completely different kind of disgusting mess!  This is a disgusting mess that shows progress.

Looking at these pictures reminds us that there has been a whole series of things that we forgot to write about, including the Great Renovation Caper and our ongoing changes of heart about various parts of the house’s design.  One advantage of building a house this slowly is that you have lots of time to have second, third, or even fourth thoughts about how things are shaping up and what you can do to fix the problems.  Actually, we suppose that could be considered a disadvantage.  Either way, we should really get those changes down for the record.  And we will.  As long as the camera doesn’t eat the memory card again. 

They-found-us-in-Google search of the week: Like most bloggers, we get found by people searching some pretty funny things on Google.  We thought we’d highlight some of these for you periodically.  This week it was: "ingesting drywall dust."  Welcome to our lives, buddy.