I think we decided to basically just sheet rock below the rafters, too, rather than making it a horizontal ceiling. I’d usually prefer horizontal, but it’s already going to be a fairly low ceiling, and this helps on that.

This looked not-super-safe, but he seemed confident:

(That board he’s standing on really bowed…)

And some views of the work as finished:

We looked at some flooring options this afternoon and are coming closer to a decision on that. They still need to do the rafters above the pantry and then we should have a roof this week yet. I think I heard the contractor say the heating people will be putting in at least the sheaths (I think that’s the word he used) for the piping for the in-floor heating and the baseboard heater in the bathroom (which gets cold!).

The primary carpenter was out ill today, so less got done than usual. Still, the secondary guy started putting up some of the plywood on the outside of the walls, which starts to give an idea of what the views will be like out the windows, and what the overall feel of the addition will be from the outside.

Our kitchen skylights are still covered with the tarp, so we don’t have a great idea what the impact on the light in that room will be. We’ll see.

Out the side window (where the window seat will be):

Out the back windows (the armoir [TV] will be between these):

From the front of the house, seeing the bump-out:

…and from the back:

We also chose our lights. Inside, we’ll have mostly cans (recessed lights), plus two sconces:

Outside, we’ll have these:

I also ordered the wiring and wall plates for doing in-wall and in-ceiling speaker wiring. We’re all pretty excited about not having wires all over the place.

We have some:

Even at night:

Roof is still planned for next week, which will reduce the tarpiness.

(Bonus points if you know the song that’s a quote from.)

Lots of ripping stuff down today – roof, siding, etc. They’re hoping to get walls up soon and a roof next week. The roof will start just below the kitchen skylights and will replace the roof over the pantry.

Liam’s really enjoying watching and saying “Good morning” to the carpenters every morning.

(That title is a joke for about three people in the world.)

So we started the morning with what you see in yesterday’s post. Rapidly we went to this:

And a big dumpster arrived, as did our windows:

Then, when we got home from taking a little hike at the nature conservancy that Ella’s doing a day camp at, it was this view on the inside:

…which looks like this from the outside:

I assume the plastic is there to protect the plywood from any potential rain, etc. They were talking about the roofing people as soon as next week…!

The wood showed up today:

Liam in front of our new room (some assembly required):

(He picked out his own clothes.)

One job today was improving the support under the pantry:

In this one, you can see that we had an actual mason here today fixing up the bricks at the corner of the pantry (where it meets the addition):

Looks better, no?

We also have a support down the center of the room for the floor:

And wood in other places too:

Well, we went out of town over the weekend, and the builders don’t usually work on the weekend, so not that much actually happened since the last post.

But today…well, lots of stuff happened.

We started off with the carpenter coming and starting to strip off siding and such to get ready for improving (read: replacing) the support under the pantry:

We also learned that we actually do have some insulation, including some blown in. (Also, though you can’t see it in any of these, there is a second layer of siding under the main siding.)

And look! A concrete slab!

And wood! That will presumably be used to hold up the pantry!

And a big long piece of wood! I don’t know what it’s for yet!

This is what it looks like below our pantry presently. I’m glad we found this out now (i.e., before the whole thing collapsed). Happily, they are adding support to it.

They’re done with the backfill and have now put a bunch of the dirt into the crawlspace. They’re flattening it with a cool flattener thing (pictured below) and putting in a divot in the center (not visible).

This picture allows you to see a little better just how much emptiness there presently is below the pantry. Soon, they’ll use that concrete you can see to build it up.

It’s rainy today, so I’m guessing they won’t pour the concrete floor today. The contractor said he thought the carpenter might show up today to start on the below-the-pantry work. We’ll see.

Lots of activities today…

Started off with doing long-distance concrete pouring. You see how the last section is attached with a chain in these next pictures?

It fell. While they were working. Eek:

Happily, nobody was in the way, and so it just meant some extra concrete in the bottom of the space, which is fine.

It’s tricky getting concrete into these little corner areas:

In a bit of a surprise, they did the backfill today:

And the concrete up against the house is drying:

We still have some dirt (some of which will go into the big hole and some of which will go away). Not sure why there are two colors: