December 2001 Archives

Most of the recent work on our house has been upstairs. First, they built a huge tent over the back of the house to help keep the rain out. Unfortunately, before the tent was finished, the house sat through a very rainy weekend with a couple uncovered holes in the roof. Thankfully, there was no damage. Once the tent was finished, off came the roof!

I recently spent some time in a hospital, as a patient. I was at the University of Washington Medical Center to be exact, in the emergency room (3 times in one day!) and as a regular patient for 2 nights. The UWMC was recently ranked the 12th best hospital in the nation by US News & World Report. While my experience there was not horrible, it was very frustrating at times; it makes me wonder what it would be like to be a patient at the 1012th best hospital in the nation.

Anyone who has had a kidney stone would realize upon reading my last entry that the real pain had not yet hit. When the real pain hit, at about 5:30pm that same day, I would not have been able to open up my laptop had I tried. Luckily, I was able to walk to the car and then sit in the car. Somehow, I remembered how to spell my last name for the person who checked me into the ER, the person who was moving in and out of my field of vision; sometimes the right half of her face was there, sometimes the left. Or was it that sometimes my right eye was gone, sometimes my left? My brain had no resources left to coordinate things like binocular vision.

I have a kidney stone. Right now. It hurts. Wait, let me restate that.

Lots of progress so far this week. We never made it over there during the day on Monday, but I spent a few minutes wandering through after dark. Wandering around an active construction site at night with just a dim flashlight might not have been one of my wisest moves, but I did manage to see some of the progress they'd made during the day. The North wall of our house was missing up to the second floor, replaced by a temporary support wall a couple feet inside and some plywood sheathing for the night.

By Tuesday, the kitchen addition was taking shape. The framing was going up and they were getting ready to put the new steel beam in place to support the second floor. By the end of the day yesterday, the beam was in and the exterior wall had been framed and partially sheathed. The partition wall between the kitchen and bathroom was in, too, so we now have a pretty good feeling for the size of the new kitchen. By the way, those two backs in the picture belong to Andrey and Miguel, the two full-time Houseworks people working on our project besides Mike (the supervisor).

Elsewhere in the house, they put a temporary door between the existing basement and the new addition, so the house is more-or-less secure again when they leave at night. The new electrical drop, meter, and panel are now hooked up (and the old ones are gone).

We also finalized our tile choices for the bathrooms and kitchen. We'll be using lots of 3 x 6 "subway tile" and other period designs.

Just a quick post to answer the question that seems to be on everyone's lips lately...

Yes, Henry is walking.

We'll post more in the next few days including (at long last) more pictures!

It's been a while since we posted an update and a lot has happened. The concrete subcontractor stripped off the forms the day after the pour, leaving us with a very attractive foundation. The next week, the general contractor planned to put in the foundation drains, waterproof the foundation, and backfill. Unfortunately, it rained all week, so they concentrated their efforts inside instead (though they did get the waterproofing done). By the end of the week, they'd framed the part of the basement that will be finished and removed many of the existing partition walls. We left town for Thanksgiving, but progress continued while we were gone.