Tubs and tub chairs

Last week was pretty much all about interior framing.  This is when the interior spaces start to take shape so I've been at the house a couple of times a day to make sure walls are being built exactly where I want them.   For the most part, we are building to the plans, but I've had to make a couple of minor changes.  I had every intention of blogging the interior framing a bit more, but it is next to impossible to get a decent picture of it!  Without drywall, the wood framing seems to be a complete hodge podge in the photos.  

This is a view of what will be our walk in closet (more on that later!) and the ensuite bathroom. 

The time is approaching when we'll be ready to put the house we're living in on the market.  For the most part, it is in good shape, but we want to get a good price for it so I'm trying to fix up the little stuff that makes a big difference in a sale.  

They say that kitchens and baths sell a house...

And although I think our kitchen looks pretty good, our main bathroom is a little blah.

Mostly it was the grout and the caulking around the tub that looked a little yucky to me so I decided to fix it up.

I even got our youngest to help me scrape off the old caulk.  She thought it felt neat.

After some new caulk and grout repair, the tub now looks like this.  Way better, I think.  At least it looks clean.

And here's another little project I've been working on.  While we were out for a jog, a friend and I stumbled upon 2 of these retro beauties waiting for the garbage truck!  Being the friend she is, she said, "I'll guard them while you go get your van!"    

So this week-end I started refinishing the wood bases.

First I scraped off all the floor protectors -- like gum on the bottom of a school desk!

Then I stripped the old finish.

Sanded them.

And gave them a coat of polyurethane -- a few more coats still to be put on.  I picked up some heavy, dark grey fabric in the cheap section of Designer Fabrics and will send them off to a local upholsterer in The Junction who will re-upholster the chairs themselves.  I have high hopes for these chairs.  I hope they don't disappoint!

A week in Florida

Just got home from a week in Florida!  It was a wonderful rest, even though I did manage to get heat exhaustion while at Universal Studios.  That was not a good day, but the peeps at Universal were fabulous and let us come back to finish our visit 2 days later at no extra charge.  So nice!  The Harry Potter section was by far the family favourite!  Our kids are like Trekkies, but for Harry Potter.  And I have to admit to being a bit of a fan myself.  

It looked a bit dodgy at first, but that butterbeer is delicious!

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

We ate lunch at the Three Broomsticks

Loved Olivander's!  Pretty much a re-enactment of the wand scene from the first Harry Potter.

Our 5 year old, although pretty well versed in everything Harry Potter due to having 2 older sisters, loved Dr. Seuss land.  

Love this picture.  But I also just love The Lorax!

While we were gone, the new roof went up!  Kind of hard to get a good picture of it because it is so high up, but it is now a nice charcoal grey (instead of hunter green).  We also put in two skylights and two sun tunnels (both by Velux).  I didn't love not being around for all this, and the skylights that were put in were a bit smaller than I wanted, but what can you do!  It will all look great in the end.  I'd say that my dad did a pretty fantastic job of co-ordinating things without me around.  And so great for me to see so much progress after a week of relaxation!  

But that's the end of the rest!  So much to work on now.  We've got windows coming in a week, stucco to arrange, the gable ends to finish, the basement floor to pour, insulation to order, the interior framing to finalize, quoting for heating and air conditioning....

The framing is done!

Well the exterior stuff is anyway.  Seeing it all take shape like this is just so exciting for me.  From coming up with the ideas back in September, to drawing it out on paper, to getting our engineer to design it in CAD, to THIS!

 I agree it looks pretty rough still but the shape is there-- it's finally looking like a house again.  Now we've got to get the roof on, the windows in, the back stucco done, and the stone facing done.  We are also going to build a small roof overhang outside the kitchen doors held up on one corner by a chain (on the left), a big cedar deck outside the kitchen, and add wood siding to the addition and loft.  I tried to colour in the above picture on Photobucket to get an idea of how the colours will work and came up with this.

Very messy, but it is extremely hard to draw a straight line with a mouse!  If you look at it from a distance, you can get a better picture of how it will all work out.  Except for the deck, of course.  I wasn't going to attempt to draw that with a mouse!

Tomorrow we order our windows, and our roofer comes next week. Charcoal grey windows and a charcoal grey roof.  

Our front closet dilemma

We've had a small issue from the beginning of our designing phase about where to put a front hall closet.  When we bought the house, it had a small corner closet just to the right of the front door as you enter but it was very flimsy and awkward and certainly didn't appear to be original to the house.  We ended up submitting this design for permits.

I planned to put in a freestanding wardrobe like this one behind the door or where the old closet was and to have the kids use the side door and basement for their coats and backpacks.  We put in another closet off the living room that could be used for off season coats and shoes but I never really liked the idea of having to go through the living room to access these things. 

modern entry design by toronto interior designer Lisa Ferguson

One of my regular blog reads is Life of an Architect written by Architect Bob Borson.  He has a casual and witty writing style and shares so many of his fabulous ideas in his blog.  In one post, he writes about his pet peeve of  powder rooms located right at the front door.  It's a hilarious read about something I would not have given any thought to before.  In that post he suggested a very unique layout of having a walk through closet leading to a powder room.

I thought this was a brilliant idea and wondered if we could incorporate this into our design.  The powder room as it was drawn was a little too narrow for this set-up at The Bennett House, but if we moved the wall out just a foot, we could do it.  The guys started some of the interior framing this week so now was the time to tackle this issue.  This is what we ended up doing.

I think it will work out beautifully!  The kids were expecting to have the clothes rail across the closet so that you would have to part the coats to get to the "secret bathroom".  They were pretty disappointed to hear that the coats would fit neatly to the side.  Still a bit of a secret bathroom though.  Thanks, Bob Borson, and sorry about the sink located next to the toilet (another of his pet peeves) ...  it's still a pretty small room!

Beams and stair design

It's been a week of beams around here.  We have 12 new beams in our building plans not including the giant 22 ft. steel one that we put in last week.  We needed so many because we wanted to open up the floor plan so much, and any time we removed a load bearing wall we'd have to replace it with a beam.  Our Engineer managed to cleverly hide most of them in the ceiling by specifying "flush" beams.  Instead of the ceiling joists sitting on top of the beam with the beam then hanging lower, we have attached the ceiling joists to the sides of the beams with joist hangers.  Two of the bigger flush beams on the main floor are sitting on top of the steel beam which is why we couldn't hide that one in the ceiling.  

But look at how open the main floor is now!  The temporary supports are all down and you can really see how big this space is going to be.  This is the view from the back of the house looking towards the front door.

   This is the view to the back of the house.  To the right will be the kitchen and to the left will be the dining room.  A small family room area will be in the back left corner in front of the big 8 ft x 6 1/2 ft window.

Beams went in on the second floor as well.  This is a big flush beam in the middle of what will be the master bedroom.  The big opening will be doors to a small balcony where we will hopefully be one day soon enjoying a nice cup of tea!

The stairs have been a huge headache this week!  We didn't originally intend to replace the basement stairs but have since dropped the basement floor by a few inches.  By doing this we get a bit of extra height throughout the basement, but have now totally messed up the stairs.  Once you decide to build a new set of stairs, you then have to comply with the building code which says we have to have a certain amount of head room going down (I think it's 6 ft. 3 in.-- a lot more than what we had anyway!).  But we couldn't get that head room with the space that was there so we had to do a lot of measuring and drawing and brainstorming of ideas.  

To fix the basement stair issue we decided to move the side door about 6 inches back so that we could then start the first stair 6 inches back from where it was.  This should do the trick.  Moving this door opened up another issue of how to finish the brick.  We decided in the end, to add a side light to the side door instead of trying to messily patch up the brick -- the brick veneer on this house has been nothing but a headache!

We put in new headers around the entire stair well and new posts that carry down to new footings in the basement.  All very straight and solid now.  Actually that's a temporary post there on the first floor.  The real one will be set right at the corner.

Next we'll have to design the new upper stairs.  I was hoping to do something simple and modern like this staircase.  I love the hidden stringers and that it's not over the top modern.  The handrail I think I'd like to do in glass but that can be decided later.  

On a final note, we had our second inspection this week and again it went extremely well.  A couple of small issues have to be signed off by the engineer but that is underway already.  Both the inspector and the engineer commented on what a tremendous job our guys are doing.  Love hearing that!

The 1,200 pound beam

The big, heavy 22 foot steel beam went in this week.  It is a doozer!  Our engineer designed it for our building plans based on our load requirements.  This is fine and dandy on paper, but when it came to the logistics of getting that sucker up into the ceiling it was another matter entirely!  Even our engineer told us with a laugh that it would take 10 men to carry it into the house and that they might collapse the front porch doing it!  I laughed too at the time, but this week the reality of this set in.  

So my dad came up with a plan to cut the beam into 2 or 3 pieces and to splice it together on site.  Originally he planned to do this with big bolts which I thought would look cool and industrial since we were planning on leaving this beam exposed.  But the steel company that makes the beam talked him into welding it together on site since it is (apparently!) much stronger this way.  Not nearly as cool.  

Even with the beam cut into 3 pieces, it was still a lot of weight for 3 guys to get up onto the scaffolding and set into place.  

They had to have all three pieces in line and on the posts ready for the welder.

It took the welder 5 1/2 hours to do his job -- weld each piece together, weld plates over the cuts, and weld one side of the beam to one post (the other side was left free to allow for expansion and contraction but was set further over the post into the masonry).

It's solid, but it doesn't look quite as good as I'd hoped it would.

Even that rusty red colour is not what I expected.  I was hoping for a dark grey steel colour.

With the framing work that was done today you can see how the beam will sit below the ceiling joists.  Still looks good enough to leave exposed, I think.  We'll likely paint it though.  Thinking a dark grey to match the big back window and bi-fold door.

The start of framing

Our mason and framer have been in and things are starting to take shape.  Some old windows have been closed up, and others are being built or re-opened.

This first floor addition looks so big, but it is actually only 2 feet further out than the original bay window that was there. We took off the bay window on the other side completely to make way for a great big bi-folding door that will eventually lead to a deck.  We had permission to go out 8 feet for the addition but opted to take that back to 6 feet.  Our framer thought I was completely mad!  He had never heard of anyone making the house smaller than the city approved!  But we felt that we would rather have the extra 2 feet in backyard space and didn't want the basement walkout to feel like you were walking into a tunnel.  We love how it's turning out!

The inside view is even more exciting!  Just look at those giant windows!  I'm loving how that narrow horizontal window is turning out as well.  We'll get plenty of early afternoon sun without losing wall space --we plan to put a TV under it.  I put one of those windows in the basement and second floor design as well.  I really love them!

Beautiful view out of that huge 8 ft x 6 1/2 ft window --and the trees don't even have their leaves yet!

At the front door we found a transom and a side window that had been blocked up.  We would like to open up both but may have to wait on the transom.  The aluminum cladding on the front porch is hanging down below the transom at the moment and we aren't planning on re-building the porch just yet.  But we can do this down the road (now that we know it's there).  

But the side window we can open up, and did!  I especially love the windows on this side of the house because they get so much sun.  You can see the sun in this picture shining away.  

We did change the original shape of it  for two reasons.  I first of all wanted to tie it in to the narrow horizontal windows in the back of the house, and secondly wanted to leave room underneath for a coat rack, or hooks of some sort.

Our great big steel beam has been worked on this week --probably the biggest structural element of the reno!  More on that soon...