We lived for a week without plumbing again. We pulled the trailer up and used the potty in there, and I did our dishes in the driveway. Warm dry weather makes that not as big of a deal, but I’m glad it was only a week.

 
At the end of that week we had our real toilet location up and running, though still with the old toilet. Unfortunately, the real toilet location is right by the existing stove.

   
 
It’s rather dramatic, as the walls that will enclose the toilet have yet to be built, as do the stairs that will occupy the big chasm around it. We did hang a curtain between the kitchen and the throne room, but it still doesn’t feel very private!

The rest of our plumbing is temporarily hooked in again, too. There was quite a bit of head-scratching and figuring about the placement of future fixtures before that happened.

Our new powder room still looks like this: 

 
But check out these pipes!

   
 

When we set the house back down last fall, more than one person said, “The worst is over!” I would raise my eyebrows, because yes, for sure, that was a big weird disruption, but the house we have always lived in remained pretty much intact in all of the meaningful ways. No longer.

 

  
   
This project requires the existing bathroom to become a hallway connecting new stairs to the new space. The existing kitchen will become our upstairs bathroom. The living room becomes a bedroom. As you might imagine, the dramatic transitions are in those highly used and utterly essential rooms with plumbing.

The hope is that we won’t have to give up the old kitchen and bathroom upstairs until there is something functional enough down in the new space to get by. The reality might be a little different.

Walls were removed today that make privacy a stretchier concept while in the old (and currently only) bathroom, and I think we might be putting a toilet in our kitchen this week, because that’s where it goes. Given the option between a toilet in the kitchen and a porta-potty, I’ll take the flusher over modesty. 

It seems wise in any major remodel to withhold judgment about what the actual “worst” is. In the meantime, I am grateful for a sense of humor and some flexibility around my hopes and expectations. 

This was a BIG weekend at the Hammershack! All of the detailed prep-work was ready and POW! Windows and doors!

If you are my Facebook friend, you may have seen me posting each one as they went in. Both Morgan and I were beyond thrilled to be able to do this big step. It means we won’t be freezing our butts off quite as badly this winter, no matter what.

Big thanks to Buphalo for working on this insanely hot weekend to help us with this, and to Benson for coming over to help with the big slider. Biggest thanks of all to my Grandma Helen whose generous gift basically bought us those big sexy sliding glass doors. So very, very appreciated!

Just as a quick aside, here, in the category of “Things we know now”:

It is probably best, when using a non-traditional building material such as insulated concrete forms, to purchase them from an active distributor, and not from someone who is shutting down their business and offloading them to you for “cheap”. BECAUSE, as it turns out, should you need any extra pieces to supplement what you got, it will be very difficult to locate them and will cause a delay. AND there will be other products that you will need to purchase that are specific to your materials that only a distributor will be able to attain for you. The internet will tell you this, instead of yielding up what you need.

Take heed, my friends, and learn from our mistake!

About six or seven weeks ago, some earth moving equipment started shaping the empty lot across the street from us. We live a block away from a light rail station, so density is definitely in our future, and this lot was inevitably going to host a home. It’s a bit shocking how quickly the house is going up, and somewhat disheartening.

I came home one day a few weeks ago and Morgan said, “did you see that they built their foundation forms today and will be pouring tomorrow?” It took us two months or something to build our footings and foundation forms. Now, to be fair, our situation is completely different, given that the land we are on required fancy footings with pin piles and that the foundation walls are also the walls of our new living space, but still. This week they slapped a roof on and started popping windows in, to Morgan’s great chagrin. They are, of course, doing it wrong. Or at least, that is not how we are going to do it, and for very good reasons.

We are reminding ourselves that what we are building will be bombproof and beautiful, and what they are building is clearly for profit and on the cheap. It might be sour grapes, but it also happens to be true!

At least they didn’t chop the trees down.

I haven’t posted anything in awhile because Morgan went to work for other people. I thought it might be a smart thing to post the various jobs he’s been doing so you all could see the breadth and depth of his mad skills, but you know, I didn’t.

He’s been *mostly* back at work on the Hammershack for the past week and a half, doing little bits for other folks here and there. It takes a bit to get your groove going again on a project as big and intimidating as this one. The other day he announced that he had a new strategy for dealing with that– “I’m just going to do what is in front of me!”. I don’t know what the strategy was before, but that seems like a good plan to me.

I am doing the same thing, putting one foot in front of the other, with a plan to create a new healing arts center in SODO that I can work out of in the company of other wellness professionals. I have my eye on one particular building, but no matter where I end up, if I want to make this a reality there is a certain amount of work that needs to be done. One step at a time.

Slow and steady wins the race.

   

  

Last week Morgan finally had a bit of time to fill this crazy hole in our living room floor. Once a vent to a heating system from before our time, it was for us a grate with a big dust-bunny and Lego collection vault beneath it. After demolition, it became a huge freaking hole to the outside, covered by a thin mat. 

Once we set the house down again, the new floor joists pushed the grate up so that every time we stepped on it it would make a huge thumping noise and give us a little bumpy ride. Annoying, but not dangerous, and not a priority. 

Finally, while the floor guys were working, the magic combination of time and available materials gelled, and we no longer have that noisy, cold-air channeling amusement ride in our living room floor.

 

   

We got back from a little spring break getaway last night and got our first look at the finished floor. It’s good, much much better.

A ramp had to be made of all available plywood and much of the available lumber so that a 1000-pound machine could make its way into the space. This effectively halted the framing last week, but that machine came through and polished off the rough and ugly remnants of a difficult concrete pour in December.

  

What we had saved, finance-wise, by not having a professional do the concrete pour, we have now spent getting it ground down and buffed– essentially a wash. We do have a somewhat prettier floor, though, because the aggregate now shows through– a look we like. Win!

                      

We are completely blown away by the help we got this weekend. We did weeks worth of one-guy framing in two freaking days! Such an enormous boost for us, thank you thank you THANK YOU Kevin, Dan, Damian, Shelly, Matthew, Greg, Jesse, Nathan, David, Mom, Jennie Kay, Matt, Ben, Ken, Jole and Justin. We owe you one. Or maybe two.

Now, to get some sleep 😴💤

 

   

This week has been defined by the intrusion of regular life into our project. 

The shop had to be cleaned for metalwork to commence, both as a means of earning money with a commercial job, and for the making of a beautiful object in which to place the ashes of our dear friend Amanda Corr, whom we recently lost to cancer.

Inevitable, these things, grief, loss and the need for money.

Although I am sad that his creativity had to be sparked by our friend’s passing, I am nevertheless delighted to see Morgan’s skill as an artist being used after what seems like a very long break. Thank you, Amanda!

As for the money, those of you with jobs that seem Morgan-sized (but not house-sized) can go ahead and start calling him again. He’s got mad skills in many realms, and can put them to good use for you.