The Temporary House

It is after 5:00 PM on Monday and I failed to post on the weekend or even earlier today as I had hoped.  My excuse is that things are moving along and I had yet to finish emptying the small attic space and the upstairs hallway until Sunday evening. Work on the second floor began this morning. Now, with the exception of an area in the basement that will have to be cleared for the plumber in about a month, every working space is cleared. The two upstairs bedrooms are packed and I’m not sure I’ll be able to find stuff when this is over.

Back in November I had cleared a space in the garage and and opened up a large area  in the basement for construction materials and some workspace. The garage is nearly full and the basement area is rearranged so that footings can be poured for the columns that will support the added weight of the upstairs addition. In addition a beam that should have been there originally will go in. I’ll take pictures tomorrow when they frame and pour the concrete footings and hope that next weekend I will have a post ready to go.

Meanwhile, this past week the shingles were removed from the roof and the back of the house was covered with tarp. The front roof was covered with Grace Ice and Water shield. Monday was a perfect day for the job, but it snowed overnight so Tuesday was a messy day. The roofers needed an extra half-day on Wednesday to finish the Grace. Below is the what the flat roof in the front of the house looked like on Tuesday evening, and the next picture is what it looked like when it was finished. The shingles will go on both front and back after the rear structure is built. The Grace will prevent any leaking until then. Snow/rain is predicted for tomorrow—we’ll see.

                  

 

On Thursday a skid steer, also known as a bobcat, maneuvered into the back yard to drill a hole so the footing could be poured for the column that supports the roof overhang on the East side of the house. The first photo below shows how narrow the space was for the driver to navigate. The second is the plywood cover over the hole. I wasn’t quick enough with my camera to get the open hole.

 

On Wednesday evening Rick, the contractor, posted no parking signs across the street for the working crew to have a place to park and for large delivery trucks to have space to back into my driveway. My house is only one block from the high school and students park in the neighborhood because there is no parking for students on the campus. Also because there is no parking on my side of the street, the signs had to have the tacit approval of my neighbor across the street. This is a goofy requirement.

As you may have guessed this is what we saw on Thursday morning. We didn’t have to call Parking Enforcement to have the car towed. Another student knew who the driver was and ran to the school to get her.

I’ll finish up with photos of the places where the icicles form. These are really small compared to what happens when we have a lot of snow on the roof. These icicles formed when we had only 2 inches of snow on the tarp.

Note the stained siding and the missing corner guards from previous icicle damage.

I hope I caught all the typos, punctuation mistakes, and grammatical errors as I hurried to get this posted. Next week will show some dramatic changes.