The Aerie
Well the remodel begins next Monday with the arrival of the cabinets. At the same time, the fellow who is going to paint the boy's bedroom arrives. Thus a merry week of interior crap relocation begins almost immediately.
The contents of the hodgepodge of shelves and cabinets that are currently acting as our "pantry" in the kitchen will need to be unloaded and moved. The boys bedroom will need to be mucked out and whatever does not stink too badly will need to be stored somewhere. So a busy week ahead all around.
But all this is just a warmup for the next part of the process - remodeling the upstairs master bedroom so that we're no longer living in squalor.
When we bought this house nearly fifteen years ago, it was as perfect a "starter home" as I could have wanted ( little did I know that I would be living in it for the rest of my life). The ground floor was very nice, if cozy, but the basement had been beautifully refinished. That was a big plus, because I'm not a basement guy - I know I would never, ever have finished it as nicely as it was done. Something about the dampness and the creepy-crawlys in basements, I don't think I could have ever pictured as nicely a finished set of rooms as were there.
So that was a very nice plus. Then there was the attic. It was NOT finished, although it was sizeable - 30 feet long, with a six-foot-wide strip of seven-foot ceiling down the middle, and a little alcove on the front. For reasons I'm not clear on, I knew that I COULD and WOULD finish the attic. Maybe it was the smaller number of bugs, maybe it was bright dry heat instead of damp coldness, but it was easy to picture myself refinishing the attic.
When our youngest was born circumstances forced me to undertake the project. My wife and I were living in what is now our daughter's room (and looking back I have no idea how we managed), and our twins were sleeping in the smaller 'bedroom' adjacent. We've learned since that it WASN'T a bedroom, since it didn't have a closet, but that was the danger of purchasing by owner.
With one more on the way, we had no idea where we were going to put him, so shortly after his birth I undertook to finish the attic.
I did a passable job for an amateur. I botched the insulation quite thoroughly - I tried putting up this newfangled 'reflectix' insulation. Basically it is bubble wrap with a mirrored surface on one side. It was supposed to proved R19 insulation when properly installed in the 3-1/2" gap provided by stud walls. This was very tempting, compared to getting R21 by using itchy fiberglass, and having to put furring strips up everywhere.
Unfortunately, you really need to know what you're doing with this stuff, and I didn't. You need to make it air- and vapor-tight, and I botched it up real good. The result is probably about R5, making for a cold attic.
Nevertheless the rest of it went well. I had to replace the knee-walls holding up the roof, which were pieced together out of scrapwood. And I ran the electrical and the heating, even installing sail-switch booster fans. Installed inside the venting, the sail-switches were exactly that - little switches with triangular plastic wings attached. As soon as any pressure mounted in the vents, from the furnace turning on, the fans activated to boost the flow of air into the attic. It all worked quite well, except for the time I got in the shower downstairs and my hand adhered to the tap because of electricity grounding into the plumbing. Aside from that, I did an almost competent job.
To wrap the project, we brought in a crew of incompetent women to drywall and mud the space - something I previously considered beyond my meager abilities. After they finished I realized that if I had one of those lift-the-wallboard-into-place racks, I probably could have done at least as incompetent a job as they did. Every join between the wallboard looks like the skeletal remains of a second degree broken bone - big lumpy junctures that make it easy to count the number of sheets of drywall used in the ceiling. I could have done that much.
Anyway it got done and we moved in. No flooring, only subfloor. No trim around the windows, no molding, no wainscoting. Just the bare minimum needed to live in the space, and some neat bookshelves built into the railing around the staircase (here's the trick, kids: just wall up the back, then put in the shelves for three rows of paperback storage).
That was fine for a couple of years, then we expanded the back of the house. by 12 feet. That created a new 20-foot-long wing off the back of the attic, accessable through a doorway cut in the middle, beside the bed. That space is even MORE unfinished - no electricity, no drywall, nothing. I put up a set of bicycle hooks and dowling rods and turned it into a giant closet. With the normal pink insulation puffing out the moisture seal, it's kind of like getting dressed inside the large intestine of an immense beast.
That space is now going to be turned into a master bath and small office. The joists holding up the old roof on either side of the entry are going to be removed, and those spaces turned into linen and clothes closets. Flooring will be put down throughout the attic, and the trim, moldings and wainscoting will be installed. In short, fifteen years after moving in, ten years after fininshing the attic, and five years after expanding the house, we'll finally have actual, livable space in the attic.
And a second bathroom. Oh heavens, a second bathroom. With two teenagers and a pre-teen in the house, a second bathroom is almost a completely necessity. It's never gotten quite that bad, but there have been times I've looked at the sump hole in the basement and wondered if anyone would notice... but no! No, I've resisted that awful urge.
Hopefully a couple of months from now we'll have a totally habitable house... just in time for the Germans to come stay in it for a month. That timing is, of course, totally coincidental. I mean, it's not like we would live in squalor until such time as shame over what strangers would think of our house drove us to drastic action! No, no, not at all...
Posted by Albatross at February 28, 2006 2:20 PM | TrackBack