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.