Hey y’all,
I haven’t given you an update for a while so I’m going to use photos to remind me what’s happened over the past few weeks. Progress has definitely slowed down. We used to take up to 30 pictures a day and now it’s often only 10 per week. It’s not that they’re not working, it’s just that apparently construction requires a little more precision and attention to detail than destruction does.
We want to preserve as much of the original exterior as possible, but with some of it, it’s just not possible. We can probably salvage a few of the porch floorboards but much like most of the wood on the interior of the house, it is quite rotten and damaged, with several holes in the porch at this point. So new boards were purchased and painted in the backyard, creating an interesting black and white landscape.
Most of the detail work in the porch railing was in good condition and could have been restored with a little sanding and new paint, but the tops and bottoms of all the rails were quite rotted so the contractor spent some time hand drawing and cutting replacements. I’ll admit that I freaked out when I saw the railing pieces tossed in the dumpster but I’m pretty impressed with how the new ones turned out.
Floor vents, air return vents, and ceiling fans were installed. I don’t think they’re connected to any sort of duct system yet though, so that’s useful.
We met with the plumber a couple weeks ago to talk about exactly what we wanted and where. Which resulted in a scramble to choose all of our bathroom fixtures which I’ll share with you in another post. But since I don’t want you to die of suspense, here is the bathtub that will be installed in the guest bathroom, (assuming it’s not damaged like all of the internet reviews lead me to believe all bathtubs are.)
We also met with the electrician this week. Somehow I thought that deciding where light switches and electrical outlets should be placed would be simple. It’s not. I’m actually still trying to decide if we should have wall mounted or ceiling mounted bedside lamps since I hate lamps taking up precious bedside table space. I have two days to decide!
Look! No more wood shims holding up the house! The foundation is finally complete.
Lastly, we’ve been working on windows. We discovered that the current windows aren’t actually original windows so we looked into getting all new windows that reflect the historical look just as well as the current ones (but would be much more energy efficient) but the cost was too high so we’re restoring the current windows. They’re actually coming out much better than expected.
So I think that gets you pretty much caught up. Stay tuned and I’ll clue you into some of the design decisions we’ve made.
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