Our shell has skin!

Yesterday was very exciting. It was the day in which our house finally started taking shape and looking like an actual house where actual people might actually live. Rolando and Gabe brought over their crew of 7 and all the drywall was hung in less than 10 hours... amazing! I'll never forget this day for the rest of my life. The day that our shell turned into a house. Of course, none of it would have been possible if not for the wonderful skeleton provided by Ray, Tony, Kevin, Josh and crew. Great work, guys! We're in the home stretch now!

And now, a few pictures:

quite the nice effect.. I should have asked them to leave it like this.

working on the skylight walls.

a little before:


and after:

Rolando the drywall master on his magical stilts.

the 3rd floor in most of it's glory. look, ma! no walls!

our entryway closet. perfect for all of your coat, glove, hat, key, cell phone charger, mail, and dog leash needs.

the kitchen is starting to take shape!

and in other non drywall-related news: this man is repointing our bricks. repointing basically means "making them look nice and purty"

The drywall should be ready for priming and painting in a week or two. Soon after we should be seeing some tile and windows. Exciting!

DRYWALL!

Yes! We have it! LOTS of it! ALL of it! It's UTTERLY amazing! Pictures forthcoming....

Stairs and More Stairs!

This is what Ray looks like after a few hours of sawing through bricks:

All of that reddish stuff on him is brick dust. It was quite a spectacle.

This is Ray and Tony. Tony has not been sawing brick, but has been sawing wood:


Here are those fabulous new concrete stairs we were bragging about the other day:


And here is Sean's latest masterpiece, the lighted stairway (queue the "oohs" and "aahs"):

The view as you're walking down the stairs:


And the view from the living room:

The plan is to install white acrylic toe kicks on these stairs, thereby making the glow fairly uniform across the entire underside of each step. Sean is not quite done with this project, but it's looking fantastic already!

Might as well post some old pictures...we have thousands!

This is a more current photo of the front of the house from the street:


I know it still looks pretty crappy, but if you compare with the photo from a previous post, you'll notice major improvements to the left (a full rehab, though not of the best quality), and some improvement to the right (come on, Rem!).

And here are our beautiful marble steps - we don't know how we're going to fix the cracked one on the bottom:


Speaking of Rem, here he is (he owns the house to the right of our place):


And this is Sean, using a strange pneumatic tool thingie to scrape the disgusting stuff off of our basement walls:

The photo is a bit hazy because of all of the dust that he's kicking up...washing all of this stuff out of the basement is how he became the scary monster-man below.

This is our drawing of the entry way bench/storage area thing we built to solve a construction problem near the front door:

And now, the man that makes it all possible...our General Contractor, Ray:


I have never seen him without that cheek full of chewing tobacco. It's a little scary, actually. Luckily, he is a SUPER nice guy!

New concrete stairs!

Excitingly, we have brand spankin' new concrete stairs leading to our basement! Unfortunately, since Sean is not here, I can't post pictures of them. You see, in our household, Sean is in charge of all the plugs, wires, and electronic-a. Because he isn't here, I am without the appropriate wire, and therefore, incapable of uploading new pictures from the camera. This is a sad thing. I miss him!

Some photos from the Peak Auction

A mini-contractor peruses the stacks of laminate flooring with his dad:

Boxes of hardwood flooring as far as the eye can see:

Some random travertine, our notes, and the ever-present tape measure:

Piles of tiles, most of which are made in China, where Sean went less than 24 hours after this little outing.

Here's Sean, on the phone with our foreman, getting some last minute measurement confirmation. That's our master bath tile in the foreground:

Sean getting ready to do some bidding:

Forgive the poor quality, but these videos should give you a decent idea of what's going on here:

Kitchen plans...

Let me show you Sean's handiwork in the form of a partial kitchen mock up:


Pretty cool, huh??

Sean is blogging from China:

Check out his blog here!

You know you're in Baltimore when...

....you find an empty bag of "Utz Crab Chips" laying around your construction site:

If you've never had/seen crab chips, your kidneys and heart thank you. Contrary to the clever labeling, they do not contain any crab. They are, like many lackluster crabs, completely coated in Old Bay. I am not even sure if you can get this product outside of the greater Baltimore area. I think it's what the average Baltimorean eats in the dead of winter to remind himself that somewhere in the not too distant, summery future, there's a seat at a newspaper-and-crustacean-covered picnic table with his name on it! Sadly, if the pillaging of the Chesapeake Bay continues, Crab Chips are as close as anyone is going to get to tasting the real deal; the sweet, delicate, delicious flesh of the Maryland Blue Crab.

Anyhoo....

In other news, we're digging a big hole:



Hopefully, this hole will someday accommodate our brand spankin' new basement stairs (complete with low rise and long run for Sean's ease of schlepping). Rumor has it that concrete will be poured this week.

Here is Sean doing some low-voltage installation:


He has worked incredibly hard on running (literally) THOUSANDS of feet of wires/cables that will make our home the "house of the future...today!" Intercoms and cable and cameras, HURRAH! The working conditions in the house are somewhat horrendous, as we have no windows or doors - just plywood coverings - and it has been below thirty degrees all week. I so appreciate his hard work, but wish he didn't have to suffer through it as he did. All told, his efforts saved us a ton of cash, so hopefully, it will all be worth it.

Speaking of the end, we're not nearly there. As a matter of fact, here is what our interior looks like after two and a half months of work:



That ladder is standing in our "kitchen." This process is somewhat frustrating because, turns out, there's a lot of stuff in your house that you don't know about (unless you're a general contractor), and all of that stuff takes an inordinate amount of time to install. Framing, plumbing, electrical, low-voltage...all of those things need to be done before insulation can even go in and drywall goes up. The builder's rule of thumb (to turn an awful phrase) is that you can move in 60-90 days after your drywall is up. Speaking of insulation, we have some...and by some, I mean this much:



If you want an idea of the scale of this pile, each of those rolls is about three feet in diameter. The punchline is that whoever threw this pile haphazardly into the house had to take it right back out because the inspector demanded a higher grade of insulation. Ha. Ha.

This morning, Sean left for his week of pre-olympic training in Beijing. He's going to try hard to resist the temptations of injecting human growth hormone since doping at the Olympics can cause an international incident. But I really think the javelin is going to be his big event this year. Just kidding - he's going to be sitting in a hotel conference room with a bunch of broadcasting equipment and pasty, office dwelling tech-geeks, learning how to run the network that is going to bring the Olympics out of Communist China, directly to you on your couch!

Before he went, we traipsed off to the Peak Auction. This was a TREMENDOUS experience, both for our building materials and for the unbelievable people watching. The per capita rate of sausage consumption at this event averaged at least triple what the American Heart Association recommends for a whole year.

I'll try to post about that outing tomorrow, once I am assured that our GC has retrieved the two pallets of tile Sean aptly procured for half the market price!

Inspections, Inspections, Inspections!

We're waiting on a re-inspection of the electrical, after an unfortunate confluence of events that prevented passing inspection previously. The electrician failed to realize that the electrical inspector was going to have to sign off on the low voltage wiring that Sean has been doing himself, despite the fact that it was under a completely separate permit. Oh well! Hopefully all of that will be taken care of by the end of the day today. Sean is working his heart out to get all of that done before he leaves for China this Sunday. By the time he gets back, there should be drywall!!! (Fingers crossed!)

Sean is a very scary monster-man!

Here is an amusing photo of Sean powerwashing our cruddy basement:





He worked so hard! It was a really disgusting job, and I am grateful I had nothing whatsoever to do with it!

In other news, Sean is working hard again today. He is roughing in all of our low-voltage hi-tech house stuff (intercoms, whole-house audio, computer and cable and tv, oh my!). I am tremendously glad that he knows how to do it because it is VERY expensive to have it done for you. In other happy news, we met some prospective buyers of one of the vacant properties on the block today. A lovely couple who seemed unphased by the insanity of the scope of the project. We'll be keeping our fingers crossed!!

We're getting close to a dry wall installation! It's all very exciting! Let's all keep our fingers crossed for the placement of a window order by next Tuesday!

Totally tub-ular!

Our tubs our in their respective places (FINALLY!) and our framers have built the decks around them.

Check it out - here's our master tub:



And here's the middle bathroom tub:


Our mechanical rough in is done! So we have our vents and bulkheads! Here's a sample from the master bedroom (you can see the top of the window behind the plywood board there....that's the window that facilitated the New Year's break-in. It's more secure now!):


Our electrical rough in started yesterday, and today, Sean is power washing the basement. Pictures of his protective gear/halloween constume to come shortly!!

We are terrible bloggers....

Two weeks without a posting! For shame!

Anyhoo -- here's the update. Our mechanical rough in is well underway. Our (white, eco-friendly, energy saving) roof is on, and our skylight is in! Check it out:




Oh, and here's the view from the first floor, looking up the light well:


Our plumber is sort of stuck because we don't have our tubs yet. We will not have them until the first week in February, so they're going to take a break and let the electricians come in for wiring until the tubs show.

We're putting this in our master bath:
And here is our smaller guest tub:

We're also shopping like crazy for shower wares, and faucets, and tiles, and flooring, and appliances, and.........well, if anyone knows where we can get a Bertazzoni 36" range on the cheap....we'd love to know.

On an ecstatic note, we seemed to have shaken the right tree, and have EXTREME POLICE PRESENCE on our block and the surrounding areas. No one has ever seen anything like this, least of all, the drug dealers.

They are trying to set up new corners, but because the police are right on the scene, it is difficult, at best. Particularly since the worst corner (where the troublesome tri-fecta of the liquor store-carry out-laundromat live) is now completely indicted (as we like to say around the courthouse - this means that there is a constant and aggressive police presence there).

This also means that the dealers have been driven to corners where their loitering is a lot more noticeable. So, when someone calls 911, the response time is insanely fast, and there's really no where to run.

Hopefully, there is sufficient police presence to prevent a turf-war over the control of particular corners in the neighborhood. The police need to start arresting the buyers so that they'll tell their friends that this is no longer a safe place to score dope. But let's just hope this show of force by the police (and support from our friends at City Hall) continues. We are giddy with excitement about this development!

We promise more soon! Feel free to email us and harass us for updates!

Happy New Year!

On new year's eve day, we awoke to a call telling us that our house had been broken into, and some tools had been stolen (namely, the generator, a pneumatic nail gun, and a saw). Apparently, the thieves were rather ingenious. They built a ladder of 2x4's up to the second floor breezeway window, assuming (correctly) that the upper level windows would be less secure. We were actually lucky - a house up the street had all the appliances stolen!

Our foreman, Josh, assures us that such things happen, "even in rural Pennsylvania." But at least this gave our GC an excuse to buy that new generator he was talking about!

Our (grotesquely expensive) windows have been ordered, and should arrive in 4-6 weeks. The guys at Kolbe have been really great. They have helped us keep the cost of these windows down by making little adjustments here and there - ordering standard sizes where possible. But the cost is still quite outrageous. We need the wood windows in order to be approved for our historic tax credits, and we know that they will look better when all is said and done, but the cost is staggering. Let's all keep our fingers crossed for that historic tax credit!

Once the windows and (yet to be purchased exterior doors) are in, we can get the HVAC up and running and this will give us the requisite environment for floor installation. The flooring needs to be in the place of installation for a few days prior to going down so that it can adjust to the temperature and humidity conditions. It's really kind of a strange thing....treating the floor like a goldfish....

In other news, the group members have now purchased 5 of the 8 houses out of our corporate entity, and the remaining three should be in the works very soon. Our framers are finished and have move next door to work on Remington's house, and our HVAC and plumbing rough-ins are chasing one another around the house. Things are looking good in '08 for Linden. Block warming parties dates are already being tossed about....and we're all holding hands and singing Kumbaya (just like Willy B. always wanted)!

I guess you'd like to see the front and back, then?

Just realizing that there are no pictures of the outside of the house on here....these pictures are a little dated - the hole in the roof that you can see through the window of our neighbor to the right (2213) is no longer there. Our buddy Rem has purchased this place out of our LLC and is working diligently on improving the property.

Our neighbors to the left (2217) are some small time developer types who have illegally converted this property into three units. We (and the whole neighborhood, really) fought this at the Board of Municipal Zoning Appeals, and guess what? We actually WON! We had TONS of calls and letters to the Board, opposing the waiver to create a three unit building here, and we really appreciate the support of our friends and neighbors! Now this unit will remain a two-dwelling unit. This is not ideal, but it's better than three!



Here's the view from the back. You can see the rear of 2213 caved in there (on the left). This has been repaired, and actually looks great right now! Our backyard is full of construction leavin's, but is otherwise unchanged for now.

Exploring the third floor....

If you stand on the roof, at the front of our house, this is what you see - the street runs south-southwest, and you can see the skyline in the background.


The view if you're looking our the third-floor front windows (from the relative safety of indoors):


And here's what you see directly across the street:


The walls are up on the third floor now, and the crew takes the coverings off the windows to let the sunshine in (those three radial top windows are ridiculously expensive)

The stairs from the second to the third floor, in their raw form. Sean has BIG plans for this custom staircase, including LED lighted risers!

The saw at rest for the first time in a long time. Here you can see the first floor bath, framed out in the left hand corner next to the back door. The saw is sitting where our fridge will be :)


Sean tests the integrity of the stairs from the second to the third level. On the second level, you can see the framing of our master bedroom in the background (with the boarded window):