New Roof Preparation
I know things have been quiet on the blog front lately, but they’ve been busy at the house! Our big push happened to coincide with my busiest time of year at work, which wasn’t ideal, but it meant that I got to come home from a week of travelling to some fun changes. Fortunately, my dad has been able to take advantage of the resources at his company so we have access to skilled workers and equipment for the things we aren’t able to do ourselves.
We are finally moving forward on getting a new roof. As much as we have enjoyed the sound of rain pitter-pattering on our dining room floor, we couldn’t be more excited for this work to get done – mainly because it means we can finally repair some of the water damaged walls without worrying about having to redo them. The water damage is causing a lot of the concrete walls to crumble, so we always have little piles of gross sand-like stuff on the floors.
Before the roofer can start his part, all of the structural changes that will directly impact the placement of the roof had to be done. First up was removing the industrial air conditioning units and corresponding duct work from the roof. One morning a few weeks ago, I got out of the shower only to hear our dogs barking their heads off. I threw on a robe and ran to the front door – where I was met by eight guys, lots of trucks and a huge crane. They were VERY early! They got started hooking up the units and lifting them off and were done before 9 am.
At the same time, the mason was working to repair the cracked, crumbling chimneys – there was a lot of excitement that morning! Once the units were taken care of, the guys started on the other tasks – repairing the poorly patched old doorway in the doctor’s office, widening the doorway upstairs and installing a new lintel for our future french doors, and demoing the old vestibule on the doctor’s office. Here are some fun photos:
As you can see, where the old patched doorway used to be, we had orginally planned to just re-patch it, but ended up deciding to install a window there. It looks awesome and makes such a difference! The window was taken from the side of the house, from one of the exam rooms. Where the vestibule was demolished, the window on the edge of the street-facing wall was able to be made into a corner window (using the window from the other exam room). Fortunately, one of the guys was a welder so he handled the window installation and all the lintel repair (the steel lintels on the doctor’s office were all corroded and needed to be repaired). Check out that beautiful red front door too (detailed pictures to come).
Unfortunately, I will have to update later with a picture of the house from the street without a whole bunch of cars parked in front (that huge direway has come in handy!), but here is a bad picture to give you an idea of how it looks. Bonus: you can see our new MINI!
I love this shot because you can really see the clean lines of the roof – the air conditioners were so distracting before. That window at the front of the house (with the paper taped over some of the panes) is the guest room – it used to look right onto the back of the vestibule. Now there is finally daylight in that room!
After the main house work was done, it was time to work on the guest house – I will post that update this weekend, hopefully!
