Victorian House Renovation in Bloomingdale, DC
Still under construction. still boarded up.a bit sturdier now, since it will be a few more days until the door goes in, because apparently the brick mortar needs time to dry. so it looks like we are behind schedule a few days. oh well.
but we are making progress:
the house ‘eyebrows’ are still there, you see VIB is winking at you/us. But only for another day or so, these are on their way out…
The door has arrived. Or rather Sergey and our builder picked it up and delivered it home, since the warehouse wasn’t ready for delivery for several more days.
But before we can get to the good part, it must get a little uglier. And so we are all boarded up.
It took just about an hour to remove our door and window in the kitchen,
Along won’t our security bars. These things always made me feel safer – we are in the city after all- but the look would not be becoming on a beautiful French door.… Read the rest
So as last week all of the construction has happened in 3 days, but we are still scheduled to finish be the end of this week with phase 1, or structural work + major electric upgrade.
I suppose this is as good a time as any to update everyone on our evolving plans – that’s a nice word, evolving. Also could say expanding, second-floor consuming, ever more expensive plans. After we took down the ceiling in the kitchen and it became clear that we need to fix the mess of second floor joists, and then when we thought about the fact that we are moving all of the plumbing (except for the stack) and vents for first and second floor, due to new framing for the powder bath (all of those pipes are located inside the walls of the powder bath), we said to hell with it.… Read the rest
Not much to report in pictures, just a new electric panel! We upgraded from 100 amps to 200 amps, which should sustain us not only for the kitchen but for any other future undertaking.
This cost us a pretty penny (or more like 3,000 plus) but hey what are you going to do. You gotta do what you gotta do. Onwards and upwards, day 4 awaits.… Read the rest
I was already excited about the forthcoming transformation of the Florida Avenue historic Union Market, which is about a 15 minute walk from our house. But this just blows any.previous.expectations.out.of.the.water. This is going to be amazing.
map source: Washingtonian
A butcher shop you say? an outdoor dining that stretches over an entire block?! amish goods, french specialties, ethiopian cuisine and a flower market? i am literary dizzy with excitement. this is probably not a healthy reaction.… Read the rest
Ok so construction day 2 did not bring us any surprises (unlike day 1) — though can’t say the same for our contractors. According to them, the second floor joists were not nearly the piece of cake like the first floor joists. In part because of the shoddy job that was done in patching them up before, and in part I imagine it’s much more difficult fit the beams into place than dropping the into place.… Read the rest
Wheeeee – it has started. We handed over a whole lotta monies, keys, took a deep breath and prepared to trust the professionals. The builder agreed to take pictures of Day 1 for us – so here it is in all its glory, i.e. new floor joists and leveled sub-floor:
To start off the day – nice and airy. It appears that our joists were not even in as good of a shape as we imagined, so all had to go (we did save them because the wood would definitely work as island butcher block)
here are all the new joists:
nice and level – apparently this is the hardest part of installing a new floor in an old house.… Read the rest
So how cool is this? Nation capital’s own ginger ale. Just one of many, many, really many bottles we discovered digging out our basement/crawl space below the kitchen.
Although a lot of the bottles were kind of cool looking, I must say the sheer quantity that turned up are quite astounding. Here are some shots, and these don’t account for all of the broken glass and some of the newer ones that we recycled.… Read the rest
All of the hardwood boards have been removed, nails hammered out (or in) and we are left with the bare bones carcass of a kitchen/ powder room.
On friday night we started out with this:
And after three hours of prying and hammering out nails we were done! All of the wood boards are clean and ready to be re-used and re-purposed. I am not quite sure yet whether to toss all of these nails or keep them for the memory of good times.… Read the rest
We are getting a bit tight on timing, with structural builder coming in next Monday and actual kitchen work schedule to start June 1 (make it June 4, Monday actually). Plus we have been doing a bit of traveling on weekends for weddings and family/friends events, which makes weeknights the only possible time that we can squeeze in some more demo and prep work.
Obviously that wasn’t going to get our bricks walls clean and ready to go for June 4.… Read the rest
