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We’ve passed the framing, electrical, and HVAC inspections, so things are moving along. Below are some of the highlights from the past couple of weeks:

Insulation is in!

Even though spring is coming, our house just put on a warm wool sweater – insulation! While we didn’t specify the kind of BATT insulation, it ended up being one of Knauf’s ECOSE products, which they promote as being more green than traditional BATT due to using plant-based binders and fewer energy-intensive chemicals such as formaldehyde or phenol.

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New basement window

As part of the HVAC inspect, the inspector required an additional window in the basement rec room area for ventilation reasons (?). I was worried this was going to be a huge deal, but our contractor said it wasn’t an issue and no additional cost for the labor, so the only extra cost would be for the actual window frame/glass. Having an extra window in the basement seems generally like a win, and actually allowed us to make the windows symmetrical in the rec room (previously there was only a single off-center window). Kripa and I were pleasantly surprised to see that our contractor matched the brick arch of the old windows on the new window, and used original bricks to match as well, so it looks great!

Skylights are in!

Three holes are cut in the room, and the new skylights have been installed! Two of them open/close via a solar-powered motor with wireless remote, and the third one remains closed. Once the scaffolding is removed we’ll post a photo of the view from the ground floor up to the skylights, and see how much light they add (fingers crossed!).

Plumbing inspection delayed…

In our last post, we mentioned that the main water shutoff was unexpectedly positioned at the end of the basement stairs and it has to remain accessible to meet code, so we figure that we’ll end up framing that out as a built-in bookcase. During the plumbing inspection, the inspector required drywall be placed behind the wall where the main is. Neither our contractor nor we understand why, but it’s now done – though that one note means we have to get another plumbing inspection, which might take weeks. We’re in a waiting game now since the drywall in the rest of the house can’t go up until plumbing gets a thumbs-up from the city.

Original safe relocated

The original safe has been reincorporated into the house – though the exact location must remain a carefully guarded secret.

[Kripa: Also a carefully guarded secret – where we wrote down the combination? That should be fun to try to relocate…]

What’s next?

Once we the plumbing re-inspection happens, drywall goes up – which from what we’ve seen on HGTV will mean the house will feel totally different. Rooms will feel more defined, and light won’t be pouring in from all sides through the framing so the impact of the choices we made about windows and lighting will now show more clearly. Gulp.

The rear addition/extension has also come down, so in the next post we’ll show what the rear of the house looks like without the addition, as well as the much improved natural lighting in the kitchen area.

This post could have also been titled “Decisions, decisions” – because that’s what it’s felt like for the past month. Once we had the plans finalized back in July, there was quite a bit of time where we were waiting to actually get the permits, and then demolition happened and walls went up – but there weren’t actually very many new decisions during that time period.

That has all changed. Most nights after putting our 17 month-old to bed, we spend about 2 hours buying fixtures or reviewing decisions our contractor asked us to make. To give you a taste of decisions we’ve been making (and the things that have been difficult about those decisions):

• All bathroom fixtures that go in the wall and not into a cabinet/vanity (What finish? What style? One shower head or two? Rain shower or no? Handheld or no? How many gallons per minute? What f**king valve do we need?)
• Tubs (Cast iron – so basically a big Dutch Oven? Porcelain-enameled steel – what is that? Vikrell tubs – aren’t those for Norse gods?)
• Position of bathroom fixtures (On which side does the shower door swing? Exactly how high is the shower handle? Do you want lights above the mirror or on the sides? Oh, and how tall is that mirror you haven’t thought about let alone purchased going to be so we can center everything on it?)
• Location of outlets and light switches (Let’s put it there – oh wait, that wall has the ductwork so there’s no space.)
• Which lights are on the same switch or a different switch (Should this light turn on with the other hallway lights or as part of the dining room?)
• Framing decisions (Is the stair wall open or railing? What do we do with the space under the stairs? Should it be two closets or one double-door closet? Should the doorway have arches?)

Not that we’re griping – this is what we signed up for. For me, the risk of getting something very wrong – or very right! – is very exciting, and makes this whole experience feel weighty and educational at the same time.

[Kripa: He says “weighty and educational” and I say “stressful and all-consuming”. But he’s right – don’t tell him I said that – this is what we signed up for. And we are in a lot of ways extremely lucky to be able to do it.]

OK, enough yammering – on to the pictures and videos!

First floor

Before you watch any of the videos, a brief warning: Kripa’s voiceovers definitely sound like she was hastily recruited to be a CIA informant and is whispering to handler over a concealed corsage mic but no one told her what her actual assignment is so she’s just winging it.

[Kripa: I can neither confirm nor deny this.]

New windows are in! These are new Marvin windows throughout the house – only the kitchen French doors aren’t installed yet.

[Kripa: UGH. First major design DISASTER. I thought I had ordered the windows SDL (simulated divided light) which means the grilles are outside the glass. Something got lost in translation, perhaps because we had gotten different quotes, but I missed it and they showed up as GBG (grilles between glass). It’s a stylistic choice only, with the slight function advantage of GBG being easier to clean. So, disaster is a little dramatic because overall the windows are beautiful and make a big difference to the house, especially from the outside. I squared my shoulders and moved on.]

The area from the dining room (on the right in the photo below, mostly not shown) flows into the informal living and the kitchen, and when walking around it just feels big and open – which was a feeling we really wanted and our architect David Ruffing put a lot of time into capturing, so I’m very pleased to have that reaction to the space as it’s coming together.

The showers are framed out, which gives a much better sense of what the bathrooms will actually look like. Here’s the first floor bath:

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The doorway for the rear French doors that come off the kitchen into the back yard is all framed out – and the opening feels massive! The other back window is installed (you can see it on the right in the next picture), which is already giving the first floor more light than it previously had.

I’m full-on adulting – because I am loving this pantry. It’ll have a counter with space for coffee accessories (grinder, espresso machine, etc.) and a built-in beverage fridge (read: beeeeeeeer fridge), so I expect to be spending some quality time in this pantry.

Second floor

Let’s head up stairs!

When you come up the stairs, there will be a railing on your right, and looking over the railing you’ll see the laundry closet and mechanical room. We decided to do stacked washer/dryer, so the laundry closet will have another ~6′ for storage. I have no idea what we’re going to do with all that space – I guess lots of detergent?

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The skylights are not installed yet, but the two windows around the 2nd floor cutout that looks down onto the dining room already lets in a good bit of light.

I had no idea what kind of tubs to buy, so I looked at our current condo and saw they were Bootz. And since Bootz made me feel like it was nineteen-nineteez-cool-to-add-a-Z-to-everything, I went with Bootz. And it feelz great.

The back left bedroom has a big east facing window (and a smaller north facing window you can’t see in the picture below), and I love the lighting. Even with the real addition still standing and casting shade, the room feels bigger than it actually is.

Kripa caught the trains going by in both directions – how cool!

Let’s head back to the master bedroom…

The master is split into two parts by a see-through fireplace, with the smaller sitting room on the left and the main bed area on the right. Here’s a look:

You might remember that the master closet is between the master bedroom and the master bath. Let’s take a look:

Kripa’s plan is to refinish the house’s original clawfoot tub (wait – is it the house’s tub, or ours?). Our contractor Martin brought it upstairs to position it for the plumbing, so it’s our first look at where it’ll go. We originally thought about centering it on the window, but a combination of plumbing fixture preferences and wanting to give more walking room around the vanities led to us nudging it back a bit.

Basement

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You might notice something at the bottom of the stairs there. That is our water main – it comes in the front of the house and up through the new cement floor, and has to be within 2 feet of the front of the house – so that’s where it ended up. We’re thinking we do a bookcase or something to make it look slightly more natural (and leaves the ability to operate the water main if ever needed).

The basement has a main living space we’re calling the rec room. It’s defined by the structural beam that will have a soffit around it, which you can see in this video:

[Kripa: OK, you’ll notice in the basement videos I do not narrate. This is because the lovely gentleman working in the basement were at the time listening to – wait for it – “The Boy is Mine” by Brandy and Monica. It was too amazing not to have uninterrupted in the background. Also, if you don’t know that 1998 gem, go YouTube it please, millennial.]

Kripa wanted a reading nook under the stairs with a built-in light, so I’ve lost my secret room and/or secret storage space for this to-be-designed nook. Womp womp.

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Another Bootz tub – gotta stay cleanz boyz!

While the next video shows the framed out basement bedroom, it also highlights the new floor that was poured. The ceiling height it just over 7′ 6″, so for a basement it does not feel at all claustrophobic.

The mudroom from the back door is framed out now – and it is BIG. We’ll have plenty of room for all of our mud.

And now for the part of the house I’m most excited about: the studio bedroom which we’re used as an INDOOR WOODSHOP. The woodshop now features a ceiling power outlet for a dust filter. It also has a single large closet which makes the layout much easier for me – with the closets, I can feed 8′ boards straight down the center of the shop through a table saw or planer and have some room to spare. We also added a power outlet inside that closet – not conventional, but will likely be helpful down the road for the woodshop.

That’s the update for now. Next is to get the rough-in inspection, and then insulation – then DRYWALL! My impression from HGTV is that once drywall goes up it feels done but takes forever to actually finish, so that’s where I’m setting my expectations.

Over the last couple of weeks since the initial framing went up, the framing has really matured. You can now walk inside the pantry and get a sense of how big it will be (great size), the master closet (feels like a friggin’ bedroom), and the sitting room inside the master bedroom (bigger than we were expecting).

Here’s a video of the 2nd floor master closet, then master bath (shower, then toilet room).

First floor

The light shaft!

Second floor

What about the basement, you ask? We’re waiting on the new plumbing inspection from the city before the new basement concrete floor can be poured (which then leads to framing the basement, which leads to framing inspection, which leads to electrical/plumbing roughin, etc.).

In the meantime, we’re getting windows delivered and bathroom fixtures ordered – more on that soon!

Kripa and I are watching Windy City Rehab – a show on HGTV where the renovations (mostly gut renovations) happen not in a small town or suburban area, but in a major city (Chicago) – and this is reflected in the home costs, permit complexity, and particular construction challenges of building three feet from your neighbors. We’re enjoying the show because the cost estimates they give for renovations are realistic and the house age/architecture is often similar to our house so it’s generative for our design process.

In episode 2 of Windy City Rehab, (spoiler alert!) a pipe bursts in the basement of a home they’re renovating and floods that floor. Chicago gets cold – many of you heard about the record-breaking freezing temperatures that hit Chicago at the end of January 2019. Apart from those sorts of headline extreme temperatures, it is routinely below freezing during the winter, which comes with it the risk of freezing pipes.

Ok, enough preamble: when Chicago was hit by a spurt of snow and cold in late January 2019, I went over to the project to shovel the snow because 1) I don’t want our neighbors to hate us, and 2) in Chicago you’re responsible for maintaining your streetscape (the space from your home to the street including sidewalk) which includes weeding and snow removal.

I went inside to check on the progress, and heard a sound. I searched around and figured out it was coming from the basement. The sound got louder as I went down the stairs.

I think we all know where this story is going.

[Kripa: It’s a ghost!]

About 2/3 back in the basement water was springing from the ground to the top of the window. The window was broken and water was going outside onto the sidewalk.

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I texted our contractor who I knew was out of the country, so while I didn’t expect a response, I took a shot. I looked for a water shutoff (couldn’t find anything), so I started finding emergency plumbers on my phone.

Luckily, our contractor responded within minutes and gave me the contact info for one of his plumber contractors. The plumber answered the phone on a Sunday and agreed to come by ASAP.

[Kripa: This is the point where Brian calls me and says, “Remember that episode of Windy City Rehab…” I don’t remember exactly our conversation – I think I’ve blocked out most of it, as one does with house renovation-related trauma.]

While I was waiting, I took a closer look at the leak. I could see that the pipe had a leak near the ground. I bent the pipe up a bit, and that dramatically slowed the water from a spurt to a dribble. My heart rate dropped to a normal level.

At this point I surveyed the damage, and I was surprised that there wasn’t THAT much water pooled either inside or outside. I mean, there was 3’x8′ ice pond on the sidewalk outside and a 10′ diameter soaked spot around the leak (though since the concrete floor was torn up some was soaking into the ground), but for the amount of water coming out per second I would have expected worse. My hunch at that point was that the pipe had burst that day, maybe even just an hour or two earlier.

Phew.

I went out and shoveled for a while, and then the plumber arrived. He surveyed the leak, and said we would need to turn the water off at the main, which is outside the front of the house.

The problem? There was so much snow we couldn’t find the water main. We dug around for a while, but the amount of snow combined with the lack of tools like a snowblower made this a fruitless task. It was also very cold – I had to keep running inside and blow on my hands because they were hurting (inside being around freezing versus below freezing outside).

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The plumber then went back to the basement, found a sledgehammer standing along the wall, positioned it below the leak, took out a hammer – and hammered the pipe flat. The leak stopped. “Fixed” he said, standing, and smiling at my dumbfounded look – which reflected the fact that flattening the pipe would never have occurred to me.

He said this would work for now, and then once the snow stopped, which wasn’t forecast for another 2 days, he would come back and do a proper fix. He positioned the gas heater they were using during the day close to the leak and turned it on, saying that would keep the basement above freezing.

Now my only problem was managing anxiety about having a gas-powered flame active inside our house 24 hours a day.

UPDATE: It’s been a few weeks, and I can happily report that the leak was handled, and our contractor confirmed no damage to anything. The gas heater also didn’t have any problems, though I did go check on it a few times.

Our last post was about demolition starting at the end of December – now fast forward a month to the end of January 2019. Framing is going up!

First floor

The perimeter walls have all been framed, and you can start to get a sense of the different rooms and spaces. The living room is pretty defined, with a large case opening. Our contractor has installed a steel header for the large open span between the kitchen and the informal living space. All-in-all, you can start to see the first floor floorpan coming to life.

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Second floor

The second floor has a temporary load-bearing wall in it that makes getting a sense of the final room sizes a little difficult. In the master bedroom, the separate sitting room is defined by the original tall french doors and a large case opening to the rest of the master (where we’re planning to put a fireplace). The master closet and bathroom aren’t framed out yet, nor are the two back bedrooms and back bathroom, so you still need a bit of imagination to see the final layout.

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The Basement

The basement can’t be framed out until the new concrete floor is poured, which can’t happen until the plumbing is put in – so no pretty 2x4s in the basement yet. They did put in new support columns (which is good since the whole rest of the house needs those to stay up), and poured footers below the ground rather than chunky footers sticking up to trip over.

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When I saw all of this initial framing go up and new basement columns go in, it felt like there is still so much to do (true) AND I could suddenly imagine things going very quickly. I’ve been thinking a July move-in isn’t crazy, and I could imagine it going faster (knock on wood, spit three times, whatever avoids jinxing it) – but I’ve also seen enough HGTV to not anticipate totally smooth sailing. Either way, seeing the partition wall framing go up will really help us see individual rooms and get a sense of how the floorplans we settled on translate to real physical space. Gulp.

Yes, this post does contain pictures of all the walls ripped out. You can quickly scroll down to see them, or enjoy the journal as we did…

December 15, 2018

I went to meet our contractor, Martin, at 8am on a Saturday – and found out the permits had been issued the previous night! This was very exciting because the construction could actually start, 6 months from house purchase and 10 months since we first saw the house.

[Kripa: And 4-5 solid months of design panic and indecision…]

What caught us by surprise was how quickly things would start moving: Martin was meeting with a demolition company at 9:30am that same Saturday. He said they would probably start demolition on Monday.

That meant we had 48 hours to:

• Mark everything we wanted the demo crew to keep with blue tape
• Move anything particularly fragile ourselves (Martin said we could leave it to the demo crew, but since he wouldn’t be there 100% of the time it was better to move anything ourselves)
• Decide if there was anything the previous owners left that we wanted to keep

At this point, I sent texts to some of our friends to see who was free for some Sunday help.

[Kripa: We have very, very good friends.]

Doors

From the beginning we knew we wanted to keep the original doors. The two apartment entry doors with frosted glass feel ripe for some kind of cool re-use, and the original hardware on many of the doors is an attractive and original element we’ll try and reincorporate.

One challenge with the doors: each one is a different size, ranging from 28 inches to 44 inches wide. Even the ones that seem like they should be the same size (like closet doors or bedroom doors) have 3-5 inch differences. This means we can’t just throw them into a standard door frame – we’ll have to either modify them or do a custom install.

If all else fails, I have a nascent idea of planing down the doors into lumber and making a table out of it. The idea making a central piece of furniture out of part of the original house really appeals to me – adding a touch of historicity to the mundane. (I fully expect Kripa to tease me about this.)

[Kripa: Other than that totally made up word, I actually do think this is a nice idea. And also a clever way to get me to agree to the 17 new power tools I’m sure will be essential to building this thing.]

We ended up saving ~20 doors and hardware. Some of them were extremely heavy – definitely solid wood, not hollow. Thanks to David (the architect), Caitlin, and Cory for helping move everything!

[Kripa: These are our very, very good friends. Everyone else is dead to me.]

Original elements

The next thing we did was take out (or mark for removal) the original elements we thought we could re-use:

• An original large mirror in the hallway (called a “Pier mirror”)
• The two original built-in cabinets in the dining rooms
• The round safe built into the bedroom wall on the first floor
• Iron (?) vent grates scattered through the house. We’re not sure what we’ll do with these, but they’re heavy and cool looking so we’ll figure something out.
• The original clawfoot tub. The plan is to refinish that ourselves and use it in the master bathroom.

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[Kripa: Nothing pictured here is coming back into the house. I don’t even know what those rusty things are?]

Inherited items

The last thing we did was look through items left by the previous owners for anything we wanted to keep:

• Flooring. So, we’re changing out the layout so much that we didn’t see anywhere we could keep the original floors without having to do a large and unsightly patch. BUT we’re going to repurpose some of the flooring as ceiling treatment, and any leftover we’ll keep as lumber for future projects.
• Solid metal shop table in the basement. Might be useful in the basement wood shop, or maybe we’ll put it in the garage.
• Fridge. This refrigerator works, so we wanted to keep it for selling/donating/recycling.
• Oven. It works, so we’ll probably donate it.
• Dishwasher. I *think* this works, so we’ll donate it.
• Kitchen cabinets. There were a couple of newer cabinets in the two kitchens, and I’m thinking I could use those in the wood shop.
• Pegboard. There was some pegboard in the basement and kitchen pantry that was in fine condition that I can use in the wood shop. Also lots of pegboard hardware – and while none of this is super expensive, why not save a few bucks and reuse it?

We finished Sunday evening (December 17th), and went home, fairly tired.

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Saturday, December 22nd

We swung by the house to check on things, and had quite a surprise: demolition had not just started, it seemed damn near finished. Not only were the walls gone, the support columns in the basement were gone and temporary supports holding up the rest of the floors (gulp).

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Turns out there was a SECOND safe on the second floor behind the drywall – though when it was uncovered it was already busted. Looks to me like someone pried it open years ago. Scene from my next Chicago-based historical science fiction novel?!? What could have been in that safe – the Mafia’s time travel device?!?

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December 30, 2018

Kripa went back and got some video walkthroughs of the demo

It was one day until 2019, 10 months since we saw first the house, 6 months since we closed – and for me, seeing the the demolition made the whole project seem real in a way it hadn’t before. VERY exciting!!

[Kripa: All of a sudden, I want to start singing, “FIVE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED MINUTES…]