Our construction project is all-but-finished and so I thought it would be fun to look back with some before and after photos. The only thing left to finish is the stucco on the outside of the dormer and that should be happening in the next few weeks.

For those that haven’t been following my series, the quick recap is that about 18 months ago, the pressed fiber tile ceiling on our second floor died of old age and fell down all over the bedroom and office that we had up there. We worked with my dad, a retired architect, to rethink the space; took months to find a contractor and get on his schedule; and in October, we finally started fixing the mess. Instead of just repairing, we decided to add a bathroom and replace all of the windows. The previous space was like a cave. There were no overhead lights, ancient insulation, and everything was covered with knotty pine paneling. We had been intending to update this space for about 20 years (not kidding) and we’d been saving up for it, but some other project always came up with more urgency (like replacing the furnace) and so it wasn’t until the house decided to self destruct that it forced us to jump in.

The previous photos are a before and after of the space. The following photos are the brand new spaces we created by cutting a giant hole in our roof where you see that row of closets. We added a second dormer, which made the ceiling high enough to add the bathroom and window seat.

One of the last fun details I added was to design some wallpaper for the inside of our linen cabinet. When they demolished the old walls and insulation, they pulled out huge booklets of newspaper from the 1920s that were used to insulate between the floors. It was very fragile, but I went through pages and pages and cut out all of the advertising that had to do with soap, toilet paper, and beauty products. I put together a collage of these that was about 24″ square and made a repeating pattern. The cabinet and drawers of this beautiful vintage furniture piece are now lined with this wallpaper, which delights me every time I open a drawer.

Here’s an update after 7 weeks of construction. When we last talked, the upstairs was still open to the outside. They’ve spent a couple of weeks making things more finished and closed in. The electrician has been here and replaced our electrical panel with a larger one to accommodate the new circuits upstairs. The plumber was here to connect everything up from the basement so we have water, vents, sewer and everything all connected up. The power and water were off again for a day so they could make all of those connections. On one memorable day, we had 5 different people simultaneously working in 4 levels of our house (that includes 2 guys up on the roof!)

They also did a lot of finishing to the new roof section and getting everything weather tight. We really enjoyed talking everything through with the electrician to help figure out where to place lights in the new spaces and how we are going to use the spaces. He is going to put some extra light in that end room because we mentioned that we like to play board games and he thought we’d like the extra light there. You can see some of the wire spaghetti down in the basement in the photo below.

Although we aren’t really doing any of the work, it is surprising how tiring it is just having all of that activity going on around us. There’s just a lot of coming and going. Mostly they’ve been able to use the outside staircase that they put up early in the project, so not everyone has been through the house. But the plumber and electrician both needed to work on every level to get everything all tied together. They like to start early in the day and I am not really a morning person.

We’ve been trying really hard to keep Stanley out of the way so he’s not getting in the way of people trying to work, eating chunks of plaster off of the floor, or barking at the new people. So we’ve started a ritual with him that after all of the workmen have gone home for the day we announce “You are free to move about the cabin” and then we open all of the doors and gates downstairs. He always grabs a toy and runs around wagging and gurgling at us. (We call his happy noise a gurgle; he sounds like a Wookie.)

Want to listen instead of reading?

What a couple of weeks it’s been! Once they got all of the asbestos, old insulation, walls and all of the rest out of the way, it was time to start creating the new space. This wasn’t without a few hiccups. First they needed to cut open the floor to install some new joists in the floor to hold up the new dormer. Our house was built in 1927 so nothing was what you would do if you were constructing it new today. Things have different sizes and spacing. And for some of the spaces, we weren’t sure where the supporting or load bearing walls were exactly or how they were constructed because all of that is hidden. So there was at least a day of investigating and measuring.

Once they had done some preliminary work to make sure the roof and walls could support it, it was time to cut open the roof. And then it snowed. Sigh. We knew that the snow was going to be a problem at some point during this project. So they delayed a day, but meanwhile the crane showed up to deliver two steel beams that are now helping to hold up the new roof.

They lifted the beams with a crane up and through the window in the front of the upstairs to get them up into the space. Steel is very heavy so it wasn’t practical to try and carry it up a flight of stairs. We didn’t know it at the time, but when they delivered the steel, they basically dumped the beams off a flatbed truck into our front yard and the brackets to secure them got bent. We’ll discover that a few days later.

Once the steel was in place, it was time to cut open the roof for the new dormer. Yikes! In order to have enough room to put a bathroom, we needed to take the sloped part of the roof and make it taller, so they cut out a huge piece of the roof and built a new section and new outside walls. Here’s me standing in the opening. If I took a big step forward, I would be just about in the doorway to the new bathroom. Up over my right shoulder you can see a reddish beam in the rafters on the other side; that’s one piece of the steel. If it looks like it’s a little wonky that’s because it is. And yes we are looking at the outdoors. You can see the roof of my garage and the big tree in the backyard.

Next they started putting in the new roof and walls. You can see the beginning of that here. Unfortunately things went a little sideways here. Our contractor, who is completely awesome, had to be out of town for a couple of days and the crew that was working on this part of the project were a little underqualified for the job. Things progressed really slowly for a couple of days and things like the bent brackets on the steel and some other major details got missed. I won’t go in to the details of that, but let’s just say that it was all completely fixable and because our contractor is awesome, it’s fixed now.

Meanwhile, the plumber was also here getting the plumbing set up to add that bathroom upstairs. He had to join in to the plumbing stack in the basement and snake it all the way up through the first floor to get it up here. They had to move some wiring so our first floor bathroom lightswitch is in the hallway for the next little while. Here’s a photo of the wall they cut open, but before they got the new plumbing in place. The new electrical will run through this same space. This was one of the major unknowns: figuring out if there was enough space to get everything up through this wall without having to tear out part of the downstairs bathroom too. So far so good! He’s got everything now connected from the basement all the way to the upstairs floor and you can see where the shower and toilet will be.

Next comes Thanksgiving, so we get a couple of days off from construction chaos. Hah! We had Thanksgiving brunch because my husband had to work in the afternoon and there’s a giant hole in our house so we weren’t going to go anywhere. For those of you that don’t know, Mr. Becka has a little side job working as a replay tech for the NFL for Vikings home games. So there was a Thanksgiving day game and he was off on the football field for most of the day. I was just settling in to watch a movie and work on some holiday gifts when the dishwasher started making an unhealthy sounding racket. Stanley was barking at the noise and suddenly there was water pouring out the front of it. I turned it off, I threw its circuit breaker. Still water flooding the kitchen floor and running through the floor into the basement. And not just into the basement but pouring down a pipe directly into the electrical breaker box. The shutoff valve for the water to the dishwasher was completely corroded and stuck. After a frantic couple of minutes, I managed to get the main water shut off and throw the main electrical breaker to the house. And then when the water was *still* pouring down the wall, realized it was siphoning the hot water out of the water heater. I called my dad to help me figure out where the shutoff valve was for that.

I was drenched. Every towel in the house was wet. And I spend the rest of Thanksgiving day in the house with no power, no water and no heat (since the power was off, the furnace couldn’t run.) I called 2 emergency plumbers and 8 electricians trying to get help on whether it was ok to turn the power back on. No one could help me until the next day. So Stanley and I curled up on the couch with a book on my iPad and a down comforter. That whole saga had absolutely nothing to do with the construction at all. We figured out the next morning, when there was enough light to see, that the water pump for the dishwasher had broken. So we Black Friday shopped for a new dishwasher and we are hoping that the plumber (who will be back this week) can install it while he is here. Except for the dishwasher everything else was fine and we were able to get it dried out and turned back on. Please think us calm and unchaotic thoughts for next week! It’s supposed to snow on Tuesday again and we are scheduled to get the new roof done, so I am hoping the weather gods cooperate with us!