We’re under construction! Or soon will be, anyway.

We’ve been looking to expand since we moved into the house about four years ago. We have one bedroom, one half-bathroom and a floor plan or small, compact rooms, so we’ve been working with a contractor to open the place up a bit and make room for the next generation.

Our contractor put together a construction plan, which we then took to the city to get the appropriate permits and variances. Our property is a special case with no street frontage, so we had to get special approval to build.

This room had a bookcase that was also a doorway to the secret attic.

The first step in construction was to essentially demolish the existing second floor. The framing as it exists now isn’t adequate for the space we’re going to build, nor does it have the right electrical or insulation. To get ready for demo we had to clear everything from the second floor and bring it to ground level – not an easy task, since we’ve always used the second floor for storage.

The den is now storing pretty much everything we own.

 

We got it all down with some extra help from our friend Andrew. Hopefully we won’t need ready access to this stuff for a while!

The tree that fell on the roof

And at some point we’ll have to get this tree off the roof! About once a year our abutters in the back have one of their trees fall – this one happened to land on our roof in January, I think. It didn’t damage anything, though this is the one time where it would’ve been OK if it had!