Remodeling Catch Up

It's been a while since I wrote about our big remodeling project — or about anything. In this post I'll do a catch up on the house.

When we last left the project, The Merry Men were beginning demolition. They finished that in short order, and began framing the new walls for the new space. At that point, the project came to a crashing halt.

Our architect had applied for the building permit, and we anticipated it would take about a week to go through town hall, gathering the required signatures along the way. Well, it took over a month! The Merry MEn had done everything they could do without a permit, so we were in Limbo (not for the last time).

Eventually the permit came through, and we were back in building mode. In about a week, we had the hole for the new foundation dug, the footings poured, the forms for the foundation set, and the foundation poured. The forms were stripped, the outside of the foundation waterproofed, and we were waiting for the building inspector to sign off on the foundation.

And waiting ... we were out of town, Tom Framer came out several times to check for the inspector's signature on the permit ... nothing. Finally, on Monday he called the town hall — the inspector had come by and approved the foundation, but forgot to sign the permit!

From there, the work proceeded quickly again. At least a lot went on during each work day — but there was so much rain that some days, more time was spent taking down tarps in the morning then replacing them when the mid-afternoon storms rolled in. Eventually, by mid-July, the framing was completed, with Tyvek on the walls and ice shield on the roof. It's a fantastic space, I've been taking a chair out there and reading, enjoying the view.

After putting on lots of bug spray ... we have huge holes where the windows and doors will be. Our architect took his time ordering the windows, and they are slow in arriving. We've been told "they'll be here by the end of the week 3 times now.

So here we sit, waiting for windows. Theoretically, we could begin the rough plumbing, but the plumber is on another job. This is a true-life example of the famous triangle principle: in building, you have 3 elements driving the process: (low) money, (high) quality, and (fast) time, and you may have any two, never all three. We don't have the money, so we decided to sacrifice time ...