Home addition: framing

We've been so busy with the house and everything else that I have not turned my computer on in days.  I finally got a chance to sort through some of the pictures we've been taking of the home addition.  Last time, I left you with a cliff hanger.  We had a cliff outside our back door into the newly-walled basement. Oh, bad one.

For the past three weeks the contractors have mostly been framing.

We get almost daily deliveries of lumber

and the giant dumpster parked in front of our house is, I'm sorry to say, filling up fast.  There is so much waste during construction!

But the form of the place has started to take shape.  Here they've started on the floor joists for the main floor.

Drew is standing in what will be the french doors to the back porch.

Looking out from our new kitchen/office area.

Here is a cool video of all hands on deck to raise the east wall. Drew helped while I took video.



We have been busy shopping and making critical design decisions. One of the glamorous shopping days was window shopping. 

Down in the basement, we still had a dirt floor.

And the one corner of the foundation made me uneasy. Up above, they were building all kinds of structures, but this was at the bottom of everything. You can see the original foundation on top of dirt and inside of that (to the left) is the cinder block walls someone made when the basement was later dug out to create the "shelf basement". 

A couple of weeks ago, they poured the floor of the basement, and last week they formed and poured a step connecting the new and old floors and fixed the edges of that unstable mess.  I don't have pictures of that.

In the midst of all this, my strawberry plants were producing even after I transplanted them in May on a very hot day.

It was after that that things got really interesting. In order to put the new master bath and closet above our existing kitchen and spare bedroom, they had to saw off the back portion of the roof. Once the saw cuts were made, they roped the large pieces to a crane and lifted them over the house!

I was so nervous, but nothing bad happened. What made me particularly nervous was the 50 mph gusts that day and a strong chance of thundershowers in the evening. Adam wrapped up the house as best he could for the night.

Somehow, we lucked out and the rain never came. We've had good weather ever since.

Framing continues. Here we are on the upper level with no walls around us.

And the upstairs walls are going in

The view from our new bedroom is going to be great!

And finally, we get a feel for the shape and large size of the addition.

 We really were not prepared for how tall this thing would be!  We have modified the original plans a little to bring the roof of the porch into perspective with our yard.

As they start to put on the roof rafters and sheet the roof, we can get a feel for what it will be like up there. It is going to be so nice!

And finally, we got rid of the giant piles of dirt everywhere, including on our young tree roots. Sadly, we had to say goodbye to a hawthorn we planted four years ago.  It was in the wrong spot now and had blight anyway.  The contractor is going to try to save it, so Drew helped load it into their truck.

We placed the rocks we pulled out from under the vinyl fence, which had been acting as a sort retaining wall, out into the yard 10 feet or so and made a raised bed.  It will be so much fun to plant!