Big Changes - Update May 12, 2015

My updates seem to be getting closer together and showing more drastic changes. So far this week we've had contractors, plumbers, electricians, landscapers and arborists all here busily creating chaos in our lives and transforming our home. I'll let the photos tell the story of what's gone on since the last update.

Johnathan and Dorian rip the old roof off the carriage house. Most of the larger planks you see in the foreground aren't from the roof. They're from the floor that was torn up inside from the area that used to be our closet, laundry room and hallway leading to the carriage house.

This shot gives you an idea of the amount of debris being carted out of the carriage house. You can also see the difference in the pitch between the old original roof and the new one if you look in the corner where the roofs meet.  There was considerable rot in the old original roof but it never leaked since it was under the new one.

So this is the laundry room and hall and closet floors ripped down to the floor joists. You can see some of the water pipes that ran to the washer and to the barn in the lower right of the picture. Below that is dirt. This part of the house only had a crawl space under it. The further part of the floor (with the blue tub sitting on it) is inch-thick terracotta tiles that will have to be jack-hammered up. That was the old carriage house floor. All of this will be ripped up and replaced with a concrete slab (poured right over the dirt) that will have in floor heating as well as a channel going through the center of it that will house all the plumbing and electrical that goes to the barn/garage.

Looking up from inside you can see the extent of the rot in this one area of the roof.

In this photo I'm standing against the wall (teetering on a floor joist) and taking a photo looking "down the hall" toward the laundry room. It's ironic that the partly demolished area is in our house and the gleaming white surfaces you see at the far end is actually the interior of the barn.

And then there were three. Yesterday morning there were 7 giant Poplar trees. Burton's Towering Tree Service arrived and spent the day dispatching four of them. They'll return today to get rid of the remaining three. Trevor (Burton) wanted to get them down before the leafed out. I'm very happy to be rid of them. They do open the property up quite a bit but at least we won't be cursed with the white fluff they spread over the neighborhood each year. Last year it clogged our pool filter, our heat pump and even got into my car heater and caught fire.