We have a big chunk of messy indoor work to do here at the Hammershack before we can close that pesky permit we opened in 2014. The upstairs bath and laundry and hall will undoubtedly take many months and a good chunk of moola to complete, and though we have made progress on our design concepts and clearing the way by getting rid of large objects, we just are not quite ready to dive in.
There are a few smaller and more immediately achievable pieces we can peel off in the meantime, and last week Morgan finished these beautiful steel and gravel stairs connecting our front door to the upper driveway.
So elemental- steel, stone, gravel.The slippery slope of before, and process
It took 4.5 yards of gravel to fill, much of which I shoveled- oof, rocks are heavy, y’all. That said, I was very glad to contribute what I could after Morgan did all of the truly hard work.
Not shown- the step lights that pop on when you approach, and the sweet little under-boulder lights that he’s been playing with. You’ll have to come visit to see those!
Our little craftsman cottage, built in 1924, is 100 years old this year. I was looking at some maps from that era and trying to imagine what it must have been like in Seattle, in this neighborhood in 1924. Who built the house, did they do it on speculation or for themselves? There are some really cool historical photos online of the neighborhood in general, and we have this beauty from the WPA Land Use Survey in 1936.
1924 map of Seattle found on Ted’s Vintage Art. We live at Henderson and 42nd.
This weekend I was weeding along the fence line and a truck pulled up with these gentlemen in it. They said, “We used to live here. Did you raise it up?” We used to get mail for them, so I knew their names when they told me: Steve and Jim. Steve used to use the garage as his artists studio, and was glad to hear that it is still used as such. They said they had a little wood stove in the living room and they kept the house warm with that, and that they had enclosed the porch for extra warmth. It was so fun to get a little bit of backstory, and they remarked on the big changes, especially to the yard.
Speaking of big changes, this is also the month of our ten year anniversary of lifting the house! I remember writing somewhere long ago on this blog that we hoped we would be done in a year or two, but I also acknowledged that there was a lot of mystery to the process. Reviewing the posts about waiting for our permit or our excavation contractor, or Morgan realizing that he had to hand-dig what our excavation contractor missed, I am aware of how much we have learned about process and patience. Truthfully, once I got a new kitchen and we were able to move downstairs, it was all worth it. Getting a toilet back inside the house felt amazing, and getting one that actually had a door we could close was even better. A big upstairs bathroom will be luxurious when we finally get to it, but we have all we need. Nothing like living in privation to bring home how sweet heat and indoor plumbing are!
Future Bathroom/LaundryThe toilet lives there in the future, too.Future Bathroom/LaundryFuture Laundry Room/Hallway
We were hoping to tackle the big remaining piece of indoor work this year (that upstairs bathroom and laundry room), but circumstances did not line up for that to happen. It would have been so neat and tidy to finish our permits at the ten year mark, but life is so rarely neat and tidy. Perhaps we will be able to wrap it up by year 12, and move on to just fiddling and fixing and “stretch goals” and enjoying it. Heck, we are already enjoying it, so that’s a big win.
Happy Birthday 8824! Deepest gratitude for your shelter, your teachings, your protection, and for letting us alter you so significantly. You have been an excellent container for our family, and we love you. We have occupied you for nearly a quarter of your life, and somewhere around half of ours- or in Huck’s case, his whole life! We hope our attentions mean you will last another 100 years, and that we get to enjoy many of those with you.
This is such an exciting addition to our property. I’m just going to blast away with photos first:
If you read the last post, you know that we needed storage. We also needed some covered outdoor space that could flex between hangout and work zone. Hangout is obvious, work zone is maybe obvious when you see how small the Shop is, even when it is clean. Big railing jobs have historically been built in the driveway, and protected with tarps and pop-up canopies, which is not ideal. So check out our amazing new outdoor room! We love it!
Below, a video showing the custom locking mechanism that Morgan designed and created for the big sliding doors:
Shed as workspace with very bright work lights in full effect:
This is night time!
Some details:
You don’t see the brackets here, that’s on purpose.This cool thing Kevin and Leah gave us a long time ago.
Here are some process shots, including our main helper Jeremy Calvert and occasional helper Mark Tomkiewicz:
Thanks Mark!Thanks, Jeremy!
And finally a few images to remind us what this area used to look like, plus a previous blog post for context:
The back door and the basement door. Looking at the house and yard from where the Shed is now.Funky old decking and back porch during demo.
We have one more big disruptive piece to do, but that’s for another post. In the meantime, we will enjoy this great new addition to our day to day lives.
As we were finishing up the permit set one thousand years ago (or in 2014, but who’s counting?) We realized that we had just eliminated our major cache of storage space by designing a new first floor out of our funky old basement. Where would all that stuff live? We scrapped together a quick drawing with our good buddy Thomas (of SHED Architects) and Barbara got it on the permit set before it was finally approved. (Barbara is one of my besties and also our dedicated designer, you can find more of her work at Allied8.com. How lucky are we to be resourced with all this talent?)
Here’s a cute little action shot of Thomas and Barbara helping us look over the plans.
In the sequence of this build, you might think that the last thing on the permit set would also be the last thing we do to complete the project, but again- where does all that stuff live?
It originally went into every cranny we could find. We purged hard, burning piles of sentimental scraps and donating, selling, trashing whatever we could. If it was replaceable, we didn’t think it would be worth paying to store it so we only kept what we could stash on-site. The attic space above Morgan’s Shop was stuffed. We opted to use the attic of the house as well, despite the loose insulation and awkward access. Things that went up rarely came down. The yard absorbed a lot of it, and we did our best to keep it tidy.
Here’s a version of storage we used until the big tub move last fall.
When we did the new roof in 2021, all the stuff we had in the house attic had to come down. By this time the old kitchen space could catch it, so there it has been for the past couple of years, along with my bike, a late 2020 acquisition that I LOVE, and that cannot live outside tempting thieves and enduring the weather. In order to do that last big piece of the inside of the house we had to create the Shed. THAT is where the stuff lives!
A month or so ago the Shed became waterproof and lockable, which meant we could finally drag all the stuff out and decide what to do with it.
Emptying out the Shop atticThe old kitchen holds lots of junkContents of the downstairs closet
We did a deep clean of the Shop attic, starting (at my insistence) with ALL empty containers coming down, even if they were “holding space” for something. We dug stuff out from the closet under the stairs, went through the piles and stacks in the old kitchen, tidying up those spaces we already use and figuring in that process we’d see what wanted or needed to move.
There are a few items that have to be in the shed- the bike, *large tools and heavy sports gear that just aren’t safe to lug up and down a ladder. There are a lot of things that might be great in the shed- Morgan has to climb that ladder a lot to access his work stuff, and his life would be a lot easier if there were more of it on the ground level. Camping gear in season, yard tools, coolers… we have a lot of stuff!
In the end, most of it fit neatly back into the spaces we had already been using, leaving a LOT of room for what we want to access instead of what we need to access. This is such a good feeling. I couldn’t stop Morgan from putting a few big empty containers on the shelves of the Shed closet, but at least we know they are empty and they can be filled when it’s time.
So now we have a tidy Shop attic, a pile of things to be donated or sold (Garage Sale, coming soon!) in the old kitchen, plenty of shelf room to use in the new Shed, and lots of space in the Shop to work. (*The Shop, until this lockable space was created, was CRAMMED with large tools and toolboxes, making it very difficult to use. I wish I had thought to take a “before” photo, but I didn’t.) It feels great to know where things are and where things go, at long last.
Shop Attic, including a “landing zone” for stuff to rest temporarilyThe three bays of the new Shed.The Shop in all of its spacious glory!
The tub is BACK! Here are a couple of photos of the big move back in mid-October, with big thanks again going out to our helpers. Some of them helped us move it into place originally and they STILL showed up for this awkward heavy job. Y’all are the best!
It has taken awhile to get the tub fired up again because enough shed structure had to be built to run new wiring to plug it in. The wiring became the next thing to do once materials for the roof had been ordered and the wait for their delivery began… and as it turns out, wiring was the perfect sized job for a roofing delivery window- those panels arrived just yesterday.
I haven’t had a chance to try out the new location just yet, but here’s Morgan enjoying his first soak, checking out the new vantage point.
new tub location
This particular spot hasn’t gotten much love from us in terms of landscaping. Once upon a time it was where our three-bin compost storage was. Then it was a place where we stored all the stuff that needs a shed but doesn’t yet have one (you can see where we moved it- the orchard ladder and scaffolding to the right in the photo). Eventually the slope to the left in the photo will be dug out and carted away, but for at least a few years we will have to work on beautifying it as it is. For this mid-winter moment, just sitting in a tub of hot water for as long as we want to is a beautiful thing.
You may recall that last winter we had our peninsula finished in a lovely big slab of granite. We have been enjoying that quite a bit, but the wall below it remained unfinished plywood.
We had several ideas for the wall finish- tile? Wallpaper? Paint? And then Morgan did a cool job for someone using repurposed copper roofing tiles they had picked up at Second Use Building Materials. There were enough left over that he was able to buy some for our little job, and voila!
Bird poop patina
Once installed it kind of disappeared, which is what would normally happen with a space like that. Morgan pulled a bit of LED lighting out of the cabinets (pretty sure we got it from a white elephant exchange a few years ago), installed that, and now we have this fun, fancy, under-the-counter once-somebody’s-roof situation going on.
We really wanted to wait on this project until after all the glamorous stuff got done; it isn’t part of our permit and it’s money and time we could be putting to use finishing that out. However, a slowly spreading stain on our old bedroom ceiling started to drip and crumble on those heavy soaker rain days and our priorities shifted, just like that.
Exposed
So here we are, tearing the roof off in a sunny stretch and fixing the sags, the rot, the parts that got no love the last time someone did this- whenever that was.
Seattle in June is not a guaranteed sun fest, so there is urgency in the pace, long exhausting days for Morgan, who as usual decided to tackle it himself (with a little help from some friends).
This way those sags and rotten bits get properly addressed, and we save a lot of money, some of which we will spend on upgrading to metal. We fantasized about the newfangled solar shingles being sold out there but it seemed out of reach and maybe ill-advised for our particular situation. A metal roof will set us up for big solar panels when we are ready, so it is a step in the right direction. The metal has an ordering lead time that likely means this project will be two-phased: tear-off, repair and shore up, sheath and then waterproof is phase one. Phase two is metal.
Right this moment we are in the middle of it all with our top wide open to the elements, sunlight streaming in where darkness and wasps usually rule. The forecast looks good for at least a week, let’s hope they got it right!
Well, my friends, let me tell you a tale of showing the scars of actual history, of acknowledging what has been while turning towards what will be, and of using the remants of the old to make something new.
In which a doorway disappears, but its ghost remains visible.
Having moved into our new living room downstairs, we are transforming the old living room into a bedroom. This is the simplest small job in the very complicated large job, but it did require covering what was the door between kitchen and living room and patching a lot of plaster. The old plaster has a texture, and while Morgan is usually a perfectionist prone to spending too much time trying to get it just right, he has recent been heard saying, “Dying time is coming, I want to enjoy this house before I go.” Indeed. Plus, this little 1924 bungalow was never a fancy home; the original plaster work shows all kinds of funky lines and splotches, and it seemed silly to obsess over something we will mostly hide with furniture and art.
In which a hole that used to be a vent to a long-lost heating system (before our time) gets a skin graft from the old kitchen floor.
Longtime readers may recall the hole in the floor that for a time was a direct shot to the outdoors. We assume there was some kind of heating system that it served before our time, but for us it had always been a dust bunny nest and place where small things gathered to be lost. A plywood patch has been adequately serving to fill the hole but it was time for integration. If I understand Morgan correctly, there is continuous fir flooring underneath whatever other surfaces we walk upon in this house, so he decided to take some from under the two layers of linoleum of the old kitchen/future bathroom where we won’t be needing it. The wood there has been covered for at least sixty years (based on that first layer of linoleum) if not longer, and was covered in a tarry substance, so it wasn’t going to look exactly the same without a lot of work or a stain job. There are also a couple of spots that got really beat up by a rolling chair and tons of dings and dashes in the existing floor that no amount of stain or work could really hide. We decided we are fine letting the patch stand out. There was a hole there, that happened. Life has been happening here, no obscuring that.
And life will continue to happen here, higher power of your choice willing. I am listening to a book by Steven Pinker right now called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. He reminds us that if the news were written over longer spans of time, say 50 years, rather than updated every single second of the day, it would be rather more upbeat. Morgan reminds me, however, that if we are complacent progress does not happen. Why change something if it feels to you like it’s working well enough? So here we are, looking for that sweet spot between enough information to stay engaged in the issues of our time and not so much that we shut down in overwhelm.
We didn’t tear this house down and start from scratch because we couldn’t pay that kind of price up front and would have had nowhere to live while rebuilding. We knew that it would be a slow and steady project, with long pauses and some pain. Nevertheless, I continue to see the usefulness of prying up the layers of linoleum and uncovering the sturdy wood below. I enjoy the reward of transformation that much more because I have put in the love and attention and held my vision for so long.
May we hold a collective vision of peace and abundance for all, may we see the humanity of those we disagree with, and may we find solid ground together from which to build a better tomorrow.
Over the past couple of weeks, Morgan took some time to recondition our slab floor. He figured it would be easier to do this before cabinets went in, and it had certainly lost whatever luster it had after four years of construction-site treatment.
The slab was kind of a nightmare for Morgan, and I will admit that it is not a beautiful floor, but it is perfectly functional and I like it just fine. Now it’s freshly sealed and shiny clean, ready for cabinets to go in!
It’s been a dramatic couple of months here at the Hammershack. If you know us, you probably know this on some level or another. Morgan and I had a sudden and urgent need for emotional space, and I was welcomed into the homes of a couple of different friends to make this possible. Obviously, this was really hard. “Really hard” doesn’t even approach it, actually, but there it is. We are doing much better now, still keeping a little bit of space, but spending a lot more of our time together, and feeling the real rewards of giving ourselves that time out.
One good thing we were able to do with that space is accelerate the project of giving Huck our bed. He had outgrown the loft bed we bought him when he was 5- it was fine to crawl up into a small space a bit too close to the ceiling back then, but as his 14-year-old body is probably 6′ at this point, it was getting ridiculous. In the photos above his “before” bed is the blond one, with orange wall. Our plan has been to give our bed to him when we finally move the living room downstairs, freeing up that room to become a larger bedroom in which we can have a king sized bed. This will eventually happen! But not soon enough for Huck.
Morgan built our bed for us when I moved in in 2001 to accommodate a closet because the closet in our bedroom is teeny tiny (see photo above). Giving Huck our bed would take away the majority of our clothing storage without the new storage we have built being quite available yet. When I moved into my temporary “emotional space” home (thanks, Buphalo!!) I suddenly had a huge walk-in closet and was able to take all of my clothes over there, freeing up the bed for Huck. It seemed like one good thing we could offer in the middle of an otherwise unhappy and confusing time.
While we were at it, it was time to fix the plaster cracks, paint the walls, finish some outlets, and generally bring the room into a nearly-finished state (floors will have to wait). Huck chose purple walls and grey trim and decided to move the bed to a different wall. Morgan spent a lot of time bringing this whole vision to life for him, and he loves it. He has made it a cave, and our cat Vader loves it, too.
For Christmas, he got some LED strip lights and a hammock, among other things, to really bring it all together. He is hanging out there now…
Hammershack Report 