We had major progress today including the major framing of the addition installed, a new and updated wifi system, nearly completed power update and almost (so far, we will finish tonight) storing everything we want to keep from our kitchen and powder room. Dan took the day off to pack up the kitchen and keep Saoirse reasonably calm. I was teaching today and had office hours late into the afternoon. Saoirse is exhausted from being constantly on alert to workers much of the day, although she got used to it over time. Dan is exhausted from cleaning and moving the kitchen supplies, and I am exhausted from the early frazzleness trying to get ready for class in the morning with crew all around and a freaked-out dog and then my general deep fatigue from teaching all day. Phew! We are, of course, just getting started. Fortunately Saoirse did get used to having crew members around as I had hoped. Classes end for me next week, so I will be able to both help with the logistics and get some rest from teaching. Maybe I’ll even get some research in!
The big news is that our new kitchen and bath are mostly framed-in.
You can see now that we are basically squaring off the back of the house. I will always wonder why the original owners didn’t do that on their own, except that my research suggests that they wanted a separate entrance for the help. The really exciting part to me is to see the opening for our three new kitchen windows. The addition will certainly give us a lot more space for the kitchen and a 3/4 bath to replace the powder room, but knowing how much light we will have is extremely exciting. You might also notice that the crew has lifted up the gutters. This is also moving toward a big improvement: replacing our narrow gutters with wider ones that actually funnel water effectively instead of pouring or dripping!
One thing I want to note about working with the contractors that we chose: they are really careful in ways that they don’t really NEED to to keep our house livable through this. Here’s an example: They needed to drill a hole through the powder room wall (we don’t know why, maybe to help anchor the new stud wall) and the hole was open all day. We didn’t worry that much about it–at least I did not. At the end of the day after everyone left, I notice that they covered the pretty small hole with tape:
They didn’t need to do this, but we really appreciate that they did. They also tarped the new frame, anchoring it to protect from predicted wind and rain. I’m impressed!
1936into2023 
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