Day 10 - 9/17/2010

Well it was quite an interesting day on the Perkins renovation project today.  We are in the phase of the project where dramatic changes occur very quickly.  We thought Day 9 was a WTF day.  Day 10 was at least a double WTF? WTF? day as you will see.

Around 7 am Andy went into the temporary kitchen to get our morning drug of choice (aka: coffee).  There were already a couple of guys hanging around out back ready to get started which they did in just a matter of minutes later.  Lots of noisy banging and sawing commenced.

Andy had his laptop in the bedroom so spent some time checking email before venturing back to the office. As he walked toward the bedroom door he noticed that the light under the door seemed a bit brighter, which he attributed to the plywood being removed from the rear opening.  When he opened the door, it was a huge WTF moment when he saw this:

The view that greeted Andy this mroning

In less than an hour the entire middle of our house disappeared without the assistance of a tornado.

This is at 8:30 am

By mid-morning they only had a little bit left to do.

It is pretty obvious where the new two story addition will go

Around midday, material arrived and the workers got after it again, but this time they switched from destruction to construction.

By 2pm, the new walls are taking shape

As the afternoon wore on, we could actually begin to visualize the downstairs rooms that were previously only lines in the architectural drawings.  We could imagine where the stairs would be located, the doorways between the rooms, the location of the windows including the picture window and the french doors.

Finally at the end of the day, they had the floor joists for the second story in place.  This gave us a great perspective on the new downstairs room layout.

This is the front of the kitchen (cooking area) looking through the kitchen into the sunroom in back and the informal dining on the left which highlight the open great room concept we wanted for this part of the house.  The stairway is off camera directly to the left.

Looking from the sunroom, through the informal dining area into the foyer where the staircase will be located.  The kitchen is to the left of the dining area and foyer.

At the end of the day there is still no roof of course.  Fortunately, there was no rain in the forecast for the next week.  But, they put a huge blue tarp over the roof in any case and plywood over the rear wall.  The pics pick up the blue tint from the tarp. 

As luck would have it, a pretty hefty thunderstorm cell popped up south and east of the house and appeared to be moving toward us. The wind begin to twitch, the house began pitch... well, not quite like in the Wizard of Oz.  But the wind was whipping the edge of the tarp around something fierce  The crew was up on the roof trying to batten down the hatches before the stormed moved in.

We got lucky the storm just barely missed the house.  We had dark clouds overhead, saw some lightening, heard some thunder only got a very few light sprinkles (rain.. not the cupcakes).  Andy was watching the weather radar on his iPad and he watched the storm just bypass the house ever so slightly.  If we were located just a bit north or east it would have been a bit dicey.

The crew will be back bright and early on Saturday to do more framing working their way up to the second story.  Hopefully on Monday they will have enough framing for the  roof to be decked and made watertight.