Happy Christmas

Oh rubber duckie

Merry everything!!

Special delivery!

Not much news to report - but we did get a special delivery this week! Our bathtub has arrived :) It will be 'sleeping outside' for awhile, but it's here! :)

Sister those joists!

Points for creativity

And cleanliness

I spy...

Mantel

Tea time!

Our dear friend Erin is getting hitched (next weekend!), and we were thrilled to host a bridal tea in her honor the last weekend in July. The tea also gave us a nice firm deadline to get the main level ready for guests. And we managed to pull it off. The living and dining rooms, kitchen and guest bath were camera ready and glad to welcome our guests for the day - whew! We cut it close, but we made it. And that's what counts :) The only bad news is it's made us a bit lazy. Having the main level nice and comfy again means we've been spending too many days and nights enjoying our house again rather than working on finishing the upstairs part... oops. The exterior looks amazing, but the interior is just studs. Not even a floor. We'll get there. For now, we're taking a little breather and enjoying having our house back (for the most part;). 

Living room

Kitchen is back in commission!

I am delighted to report that the kitchen is back up and running after a 3 month hiatus due to 'the incident' back in April which left us without a ceiling or overhead lights. As you can see, we now have a brand new beautiful ceiling, and, like, so many lights. Canned lights, pendant lights, you  name it, we got it. 

Weekend clean-up

Exterior paint

The fun continues...

Good as new

A day in the life...

Here's a glimpse into a day in the life of our home renovation... super glamorous ;) Meals are eaten outside on the deck on nice days, or on the couch in the dining room on rainy days, where all the furniture from the dining room and living room is crammed/stacked. View is the taped off doorway to keep dust from the work in the living room from spreading all over the rest of the house.

The good news is we should be moving back in to the living room this weekend! Stay tuned...

Looking good!

The exterior is looking great, pretty much done. Just need gutters and brackets on the portico. Painters coming soon!

Moving it inside

Now that the exterior is mostly done, we've moved our efforts back to the interior. Working on getting the living room back together, including a new ceiling (with lights!) and fresh paint. Next up will be the kitchen. And then we'll start finishing out the interior of our new space upstairs. Whew! 

So close!

Check it out! The sunporch is finished. Just took three days and it's looking great! Now we just need to get brackets installed on the front portico and slap some paint on that guy! Whew. We also learned after the heavy rains this week, that with all the valleys on the roof, we'll definitely need to install gutters. We thought we might get away with another solution, but water was just pouring off the roof onto the porch. Stay tuned!

Metal roof - done!

The standing seam metal roof on the front dormer is in and looking great in musket brown. This is the view from up on the roof. The flashing around the chimney is a little awkward, but we'll revisit that later...

Sunporch update

Walls are framed and windows are going in!

Sunporch prep

The sunporch is prepped for its makeover and looking great! It will be getting new windows and a half-wall with panel accents. We're keeping it unconditioned since that's one of our favorite parts about the room now - it's warm just about year-round and a nice in-between the conditioned air or heat of indoors but not quite as severely warm or cold as being outdoors.

Exterior: almost done!

I'm trembling with excitement as I type those words... almost done. Just the exterior, mind you. But still. Whew! It's been just over a month, and we've gotten so much done!

What's left? As demonstrated in my very, um, 'rustic' photo here, we have selected the color for our standing seam metal roof which will cover the dormer there in the middle (color is musket brown for those interested), and it's being installed Thursday. 

All that's left is the sun room on the left - where you can see a super professional rendering. We're removing the louvred windows and doing a knee wall along the bottom, but keeping the sun room vibe with large windows on all sides. That should be done next week. 

And then it's paint time! And then we celebrate. 

We won't be moving upstairs anytime soon, but hopefully the hardest part is (nearly) over. 

Finishing the interior will take a good bit longer, since we'll be doing most of that work ourselves. But all in good time, right? 

In parallel, we're addressing our ceiling issues in the living room, dining room and kitchen and hope to have that all wrapped up by the end of this month. Whew!

Ceiling!

I was at a conference in savannah all week and came home to a lovely new ceiling in the living room! 

Living it up

We're taking advantage of our ceiling fail to revamp the living room a bit. Overhead lights are in, walls are prepped for paint and the new ceiling goes in this week. Yippee!

New view from the deck

This will take some getting used to!

Close-up view of the new roof

Here's a shot from Shannon's phone to give you a better idea of the coloring and layout of our gorgeous new roofing tiles!

Getting closer

The bad news is I hate 2/3 of the colors I loved on paper. Good news is I loooove one. And we found it by chance, flipping through the color wheel while we were waiting on our sample to be mixed up. It's the middle color above. 1 (granite) was too dark and too blue; 3 (gray owl) was too light; but 2 (Cape May cobblestone) was just riiiight. Yay. The white on the double freeze board is BM dove white, our trim color (as seen on the dirty window below). We're getting closer!

Find the dog

A glimpse into the much less glamorous side of home improvement (hint: none of its glamorous). Poor Riley...

One month in

Today marks one month since we began our upstairs renovation! Here are a couple pics to show you how things are looking. I snapped these tonight and as you can see, they were putting the finishing touches on the roof just as I pulled up! It looks amazing. I'm so glad we didn't go any darker. To think I was considering Georgetown gray! Yikes.

I don't think we've posted a shot from the back so crawled around back there to get one too. (As you can see, the yard is a WRECK. Poor Riley can't find the grass these days.

Can't wait to get some paint on all this tan looking wood! But we're getting closer... 

Swatches, swatches and they're all graaaayyyy

It's time to pick a color for our lovely afore-mentioned board-and-batten, and there is quite the assortment of grey to choose from. I've narrowed it down from 20 to 8, and just this morning after looking at them again, to six.

L-R we have here: mindful gray, collonade gray, sparrow, anonymous, medici grey, granite grey, driftwood, and elephant.

I've tossed out collonade (too beige) and medici (too blue). Comments on others welcome! 

Choices, choices. 

Board and batten install

Installation of our board and batten exterior (on both gables, though only one is visible in this picture) has begun! We were torn with what kind of front to put on these gables, because we didn't want to compete with the gorgeous granite on the rest of the house, but wanted to play up that cottage charm. We ultimately went with board-and-batten at the suggestion of the historic preservation council (we had originally proposed shake style shingles), and given the metal roof on the dormer and the roofing tile we've selected, we're so glad we did. We've always loved the style, and were thinking of doing this for our interior walls as well, so it should tie in nicely. We also love the fact that our house sits on old farmland, and this style kind of throws back to cottage farmhouse. If you love it as much as we do, you can find more inspiration here: http://www.houzz.com/board-and-batten . 

Doesn't it look FABULOUS already? Can't wait to share more pics! 

Sorry for the poor visibility in this pic. Ahh, the tarp. After the incident, we're being doubly sure we stay as dry as possible, thus the tarp. We had pop-up showers yesterday and expect more tomorrow, so better safe than sorry! We've been there once and don't want to go back!

From the windoooww...

We have windows!

We're almost waterproofed!

The roof

It's not on fire (thank goodness), but it's going to be a hot one for the roof crew today. They're pulling the tarp off and putting down our weatherproofing layer. Can't wait to see how everything looks when they're done. Or more importantly, how waterproof everything FEELS. :) The windows we ordered last month are scheduled to come in this week as well, so everything's starting to pick back up (hopefully). Fingers crossed everything goes smoothly the rest of this week. We're expecting rain all weekend. 

Progress continues

Even though we're still recovering / adjusting from 'the incident,' progress continues. We're hoping the addition will be dried in this week, with the first layer of roofing and the windows installed. Framing is done on the exterior and pretty much done on the interior (minus a few doorways we're debating), and even most of the detail work on the exterior is done (rafter tails installed, v groove under the awnings, soffits trimmed out, etc.). It's not the MOST fun living here while all this goes on, and coming home to what appears to be a very large tarped jellyfish every day, but we're holding out hope that it will all be completed soon (er, somewhat soon?) and we'll be enjoying our new space for years to come.

And then this happened...

I was out of town Friday and Saturday, and returned to see that Shannon and the crew had made a ton of progress. On Saturday evening, we did a walk-through with some curious neighbors and proudly showed off how far we'd gotten in such a short amount of time. On Sunday, progress continued and I worked on scheduling posts for the blog, uploading our latest photos and dreaming about our wonderful new space. 

The crew left around 5 on Sunday, and afterward, Shannon and I did a walk-through and snapped some new photos for the blog. We noticed it was getting dark, which was strange given the hour. We started to get a little nervous since we hadn't tarped the roof. We'd watched the weather all day and decided it was safe to leave it open until Monday. We were wrong. The sky opened up and a torrential downpour ensued. We couldn't see our hand in front of our face standing in the flood. Shannon had to go up by his lonesome and tarp the roof (using a 200 lb. tarp that usually takes 4-5 grown men). He was miraculously able to tarp the roof, but unfortunately some significant damage had already been done. 

The water poured through every seam of the newly framed roof and soaked the already heavy plaster ceiling on the main level, causing it to collapse in two rooms. we ran through the house, placing buckets, cutting the heavy chandelier in the dining room, mopping up water on the hardwoods, and moving furniture best we could. 

Our crew rushed back and helped us clean up all the fallen plaster, and reinforced the ceiling in all the rooms whose ceilings were intact, just in case. They drilled holes in the dining room ceiling to allow water to get out rather than spreading out and heavying the ceiling even more. 

It was a total nightmare. 

That being said, no one was hurt. Damage to the interior was minimal, and hey - I wanted overhead lighting in the living room. Bright side! That project will be much easier now :) 

Since then, Shannon has pulled down the remaining plaster fragments in the living room and most of the kitchen and sealed everything off with plastic. We have de-humidifiers going in every room to dry out the floors and remaining ceilings and keep conditioned air circulating through. (If you're a masochist, more photos here.)

While this will set us back significantly with respect to interior timeline, we're optimistic and the crew is moving forward with drying out the upstairs in the next week. 

We have full use of our bedroom, bathroom and kitchen and Riley is being such a trooper. We're really doing well, all things considered. Onward and upward! 

Your thoughts and prayers are appreciated. 

Library with front gable framed

The front gable (that extends from the front right corner of the house to just past the front door) is framed and looks gorgeous, tying into the ridgeline that runs the width of the house right in the middle of the library area. This room is shaping up to be so much bigger than I expected, and I can't wait to start finishing the interior.

Proposed and actual

Here's a side-by-side (er, top-over-bottom?) view of our proposed drawing and how our actual is shaping up, to give you a better idea of what's what. 

Front exterior

We're getting closer! Here's how things looked when I got home from Chicago on Saturday afternoon. You can really start to see our vision becoming a reality! You know my great love for pinterest, and in the spirit of sharing and pinning and liking and drooling, I thought it would be fun to share our original inspiration photo. Which I may have done already, but just in case, here it is. What do you think? We're getting close, right? So exciting!!

Chim chim churrah

Mrs. Peacock, in the library, with a wrench

This is the view as you come up the stairs, into what will be the library - an open common area. Shannon's grandmother Claire is making us a custom stained glass window for this window, and we're so excited! There was originally a wall here, and we didn't love the way it felt coming up the stairs only to be greeted by a wall in your face. We're excited to have this open area for reading, crafting, and working and just spending time together.

This gives whole new meaning to the term 'open concept.'

This is the view standing in the master, looking toward the gable above the sunroom. There won't be windows on this side, but there's one on the right just out of frame here. More to come soon!

Floor plan

Here's a snapshot of the floorplan for upstairs, to put some of the recent pictures in context. The scale is similar to the rest of our house (think cottage), but will make a huge difference for our daily lives!

Our new view

The crew already has the rear dormer base and walls framed out, as well as most of the interior walls. Here's the view from the 3 windows in the sitting area of our new master bedroom. Love it!!

Sunroof!

Framing, Day 2

We had pop-up thunderstorms today, so Mark and the crew reinforced the tarp to ensure coverage, and worked under it for most of the day. Weather is supposed to be perfect for the next 10 days, so they have their work cut out for them! Here's what I came home to last night: