Awesome weekend

We started off Saturday meeting my teammate Chip for snowshoeing in Needham.



Elliot was a good sport and enjoyed the view from the big baby backpack (hand-me-down from our wonderful ex-neighbors). Afterwards, we were famished and stopped at Bickfords for brunch. Once we got home, Elliot took such an unusually long afternoon nap that I ran out of little projects to do. :)

On Sunday, brunch again! We met our friends Julius and Sara at Masa. So yummy. We all went to Barisimo for coffee after that. Ed loved the Colombian coffee that we got so much that I'm concerned that the entire pound will be gone by tonight.

Finally, Ed and Elliot watched the Superbowl while I finished up a big project, a web site (which I put together using a pre-built template) for Elliot's small, non-profit day care.

So... perfect mix of exercise, brunch, family time, and productivity. I wish all weekends could be so awesome.

In my subculture, this is like a Superbowl party

I woke up super early to make it to Ride Studio Cafe (pretty much the best cyclist hangout in the greater Boston area) yesterday to watch the UCI Cyclocross World Championships. The women were racing at 5 am EST (11 am in St-Wendel, Germany?) and the men were at 8 am EST. We watched what I think was a Belgian video stream. A great time was had by all -- we ate waffles and drank espresso and gasped every time someone crashed on the weird icy off-camber little hill after the barriers. So fun and totally worth the sacrifice of 4 hours of sleep that I will never get back.

Big House Project: Part 6

After the blizzard on Dec. 27, both crews came back for a few more days of work and then stopped, perhaps until the spring.

Here's the current status:

Ed is going to rough in the electrical in the sun room and get it inspected. Then he can insulate and put in the drywall, trim, and floor. Once that's done, Bob's crew will move the kitchen vent and cut a hole between the sun room and our kitchen, removing the door and window that are there now. Bob is also looking for a new front door (for the house, which will coordinate with the sun room doors) for us and sourcing the fireplace.



The stonemason who did the footings will also be leveling the front steps and putting on stone. Then the permanent posts for the portico can be installed, as well as railings. There's some nice white flashing to emphasize the change in pitch on the gambrel roof here (installed after the previous set of photos were taken), but it's hard to see because of the snow/ice. I've always liked how much room the gambrel afforded us on the inside of the house (vs. a traditional Cape), but found it to be rather unattractive from the outside. I think the flashing makes it much more interesting. We had also thought about putting in dormer windows on the front, but the one that would go on the left as you face the house would open up into the master bedroom closets. I think going with the one skylight on the right was a much better choice.



Bob's crew will come back to finish the two sets of stairs you see here.





They will also be finishing the deck railings and building the third set of stairs into the backyard, which will go to the left of the french door. You can see where the window in our bedroom was moved. David's guys will be coming back to finish up the siding around that window, as well as install the gutters and the remaining gable vent. (The window in the upstairs bathroom is open in these photos because the ceiling paint smelled really bad.)





Then we get to decorate the sun room! So there will be more posts about the Big House Project in the coming months, but this is it for now.

Big House Project: Part 5

Here's the nearly finished roof, in Owens Corning lifetime architectural shingles, Estate Gray. There are two skylights, one in the sun room and one in Elliot's room.



As a refresher, here's what Elliot's room looked like before the skylight.

And here's Elliot's room soon after the skylight was installed. We kept his favorite toys and many of his clothes in the living room while Ed worked on the wall.



Ed designed and finished up the wall beautifully. It's a little hard to see here, because we decided to put the crib back in the same spot for now, but there's a nice deep ledge there. We're not sure yet what it will be. Play surface? Bookshelf? Window seat? Headboard/nightstands? (Probably a window seat. But there's lots of flexibility there.) It's amazing what a difference this makes -- the room is so nice and bright now.



Ed did some other interior finishing work that I didn't get pictures of. The ceiling in the upstairs bathroom, where it used to rain, needed to be replaced. Ed tore out the popcorn ceiling and found a layer of plastered drywall below it, most of which he was able to salvage. That's been fixed and painted now. The peaked roof of the sunroom made it necessary to move one of the windows in our bedroom closer to the rear of the house. Ed fixed that all up so it looks like the window was always where it is now.

Big House Project: Part 4

The old roof came off.





The new roof went on. We decided to put a skylight in Elliot's room, which was quite dark. David worked from the outside and Ed worked from the inside.



The decking (Trex in Madeira) arrived. One of the footings had been poured in the wrong place. It was too hard to fix, so Bob decided to build us an extra set of stairs in the side yard, and we agreed to make the deck bigger than originally planned. It ended up being a serendipitous error.



Bob's crew built a bump-out for the fireplace.

Big House Project: Part 3

The siding crew, working under David, soon had the house HardieWrapped.



Here's the siding, in a lovely shade called Boothbay Blue.



With all the work that was going on, our house was no longer completely sealed off from the outside. One morning, we heard some scratching as we got Elliot dressed. I went outside and discovered a very fat squirrel squeezing his way in to the house via the place where the gutters/soffit used to be on the front. I tried to wave him off with a snow shovel but he was tenacious. (It was very cold outside.) The crawl space between our closets and the roof is accessible through a door in Ed's closet, so after Elliot and I left, Ed found the squirrel in the crawlspace and made a lot of noise to scare him off. Fortunately this was our only critter issue. :)

The siding crew was Brazilian but understood David's North Carolina-accented Spanish. Heck, we understood David's Spanish. It reminded me of the SNL sketch "La Policia Mexicana," which was "written by Miss Larkin's 4th grade Spanish class."



The contractor for the addition, Bob, had a crew whose members reminded us of undergrads at UVM.



They burned our old deck for warmth.



The framing crew made quick work of the walls and rafters.







The windows and doors went in around Dec. 17.



I've always wanted a portico; David worked on this himself.

Big House Project: Part 2

All of a sudden, it was November. We picked the contractor for the "porch," which we started calling a "sun room." We started making decisions about windows, how big the deck behind the sun room would be, what work the contractor would do vs. what work Ed would do, etc. Oh, and we picked out a fireplace.

It turns out we were actually planning on building the Davis Square Starbucks and attaching it to our house.

On December 2, according to my Twitter feed (because I really don't remember), work began.



Soon, our house was naked; the siding and deck were torn off.





On the side with 40-year-old siding, some of the framing had rotted and needed to be replaced.



A crew came to dig holes for the footings for our sun room/deck/coffee shop.