Construction Update

If you looked at the hole in my hallway yesterday, you would have seen "knobs" from the old electrical system. You will also notice that the previous owners of my home, people who were on the cutting edge of the mortgage foreclosure crisis back in 2003, dealt with the cracking plaster by simply covering it over with drywall (foreground). You can also see, to some extent, that they nailed greenboard over lath (!?!?!?), which is probably why my stud finder had trouble when I was trying to hang up the hooks to hang brooms from. For those who are keeping track at home, the previous owners of the house took advantage of their "do it yourself" spirit (and their distaste for building permits) and plumbed the drain lines from the kitchen sink, the dishwasher, and the washing machine to go directly to the storm sewer and not the sanitary sewer. Thank god they called a real electrician to rewire the house early in their renovation project, before they ran out of money.

This afternoon, the innards of the wall have been hidden, and the door that used to lead from the den to the kitchen has been recycled to now lead from the hall to the cellar stairs. (Sorry the photo is sideways. My camera's auto-orientation detector is on the fritz, and I was too lazy to rotate this by hand.) The two kitchen doorways at the right of yesterday's photo have been framed in with two-by-fours and are awaiting the time that they will be covered over with drywall. I am tempted to hide somewhere in the walls a diagram of how all the various doors used to be located and configured. I know that it drives me crazy that there is a door being stored in the basement that matches all of the other doors in the house, and I have no idea where it used to go. We are now storing two doors in the basement, as the old cellar door is not being repurposed. Also, I wonder what it is about the linguistic geography of where I grew up that I only say "cellar" as part of a phrase like "cellar stairs" or "cellar door" but otherwise call the space beneath my house the "basement."

We're not going for full door equalization. However, the removal of two doors is being somewhat balanced by the widening of another. This will make the kitchen much sunnier in the morning, as the sun comes from the front of the house. As you watch the progress of this remodel, the refrigerator will go where the shop-vac now stands.

I didn't take a picture of it, as it is just a green piece of paper with some boring stuff on it, but guess what else I have? I have a building permit! This may be the first time ever in the history of this house that a building permit has been filed for construction work.