Birthing the Staircase...

This is the "before" for the staircase... in the center of the house- walk in the front door and there it is leading into the heavens... well... No Longer!

We are going to be living upstairs and, in re-thinking the spaces and the flow, we don't want the retail traffic to be 'naturally' directed to come upstairs.

This means that the stair case needs to rise from the back of the house and end toward the front AND it means that we need to move it from the center to one side of the center weight bearing wall, (making the space for the Kookie Bar).

We stripped away all of the things that used to be on either side fo the staircase and Volia!
A free-standing staircase! (These are very expensive and trendy in L.A.)...

Here is the old staircase, quietly resting on the floor after it's hundred or so years of service:
Because we were changing not only the location but also the orientation, we had to walk the staircase out of the house and turn it around and walk it back in from the rear to make it work...

I framed all of the "receiving" places standing up on ladders and then The Crew gathered for the big lift!

Gnngrrgh!
Mrrghnghth!
Quick! Stick the big stick underneath! That should do it!

and now, presenting for the first time in its new location, The Stairs!
It was days in prep and moments at the end... "don't know nuthin 'bout birthin' no staircases, Miss Scarlett!"

It's an Inside job...

Well...

Starting essentially from the beginning, Victoria and I have looked at the envelope (the outside of the house) and TOTALLY re-imagined the space... this, of course, means that we have to remove all of the walls in the interior and put in new ones where-for now- only we can see them (in "FutureLand"!)
Putting up walls in new construction is a snap- lay it out on the deck- nail it together- tip it up into place! Putting up walls in an old house is not a snap... it's not a button, or zipper or even a buckle!

In an old house, with chimenys and stairs and bearing walls, etc., you don't have a big flat place to layout your entire wall so you can put it together. So you get to look at each individual wall as a puzzle that has to be divided into parts that get individually assembled (usually at the other end of the house where the room with the biggest open floor is) and then passed through openings and doorways, to be reconvened as the wall that you imagined in the correct location.
It's a lot of math. Oh boy, yes it is...

One of the "Funny" things about old houses is that while we know that they all probably started out true and square with flat floors and ceilings, 100-or-so years later they don't have any of those things. Often, as you measure to fit the new wall into the old place, you have to measure the ceiling heights along the path of the wall and cut different stud lengths for each position along the way. And, Yes, it's almost as much fun to take apart your new wall, after putting in the studs in the wrong order, as it was to put it together the first time! Squishing closets in between masonry is fun!
Eventually, if you do a lot of this for 3200 square feet, it begins to resemble what you imagined when you looked at the back of the napkin together...

The language of framing sounds like a badly written piece of Film Noir- your day is populated with 'studs' -King studs and Jack studs- and 'cripples' and 'headers' and 'sills' and 'plates'... Heady LaMar brings lunch and there's always scratchy violins playing in the middle distance...
Here is Xan in front of the left-hand wall of her Kookie Bar!

The Back is Back!

Well... out with the old and in with the 'new-just-like-the-old-but-so-much-better', as they say down at the building department!

We took the wood framed part off the back of the building so that it looked like this:
and now we have to make it bionic- you remember? "we can make it better, faster, stronger..."- the first step is, of course, the mud work.

Duwayne has all of the big toys and brought his Bobcat over to make a hole for the footings... took him about 2 hours to do the whole thing!
then there was some shovel work and some 'dressing' before the hole was ready for mud...
In the course of the excavation, we found the handle of an old chamberpot, a bunch of a shiny green stone (jasper?), some square nails, and an old brick path leading to the back alley...

When the cement had a few days to toughen up the block guy came over and in quite short order had all of the cinder blocks assembled for the foundation.
Seems only a moment later and the 'deck' was on the joists and the framing was under way!

Now, the 'new construction' framing is fun! You have this big empty flat place that you can work on ...
and you can put the entire wall together on that flat surface, lift it into place and tack it down. You do this well, and the bones of the house leap up and reveal themselves to you quickly!
This is the first floor, almost framed up! (with Xan supervising- of course!). Things proceed apace until...
The second floor is in place and the sheathing is started on the ground floor...
and we barrel along until the rafters and the roof deck are in place!
We made sure that the roof extends well over the rear so that even in inclement weather we'll have some protection out on the kitchen deck...
and now the back is back where we started- only all new and shiny! ready for bits and parts!
and there is Xan, up until the last, making sure that everything is exactly as it should be...

Another one bites the dust? the dirt? whatever...

In order to make the changes that we want inside, we need to move some of the bearing walls inside the house around... not far, but far enough to warrant putting more support under the house directly under the place where the walls will carry the weight of the roof and the floors above...

In order to do that we have to feed the 'skinny guy' to the house:
Corey is ready... Hair is covered, Mask in place, knee pads on...
Going...
going...
and then there was a slurping noise and a loud burp and that was the last we ever heard from Corey...

Well, not exactly...
Here he is, sliding around under the house, looking for the blue wires that we drilled down through the new framing so he would know exactly where the holes had to be dug for the concrete pads that had to be poured.

Either that or he's looking for a cool, dark place to take a nice nap...
Special thanks to all the skinny guys who can, and did, fit under the house for this project! We'd make you a cookie but then you'd gain weight and then who would we send under the house?

Bringing the outdoors in...

This is the 'new' part of our sweet old house!

The House was built somewhere around 1900 and, sometime in the 20's we think, when they thought that indoor plumbing was the wave of the future, they added this wooden framed addition to the back which has all of the substantial plumbing in it...

Well... it's gotta go! We've struggled with the idea of how to make it work but there isn't enough there to make into something that isn't there so...

Duwayne and his crew go to work and
cut the roof off of our house!
Then, like some giant munching through the christmas gingerbread, parts of the back began to disappear!
The walls of the upstairs cascaded down to the backyard leaving that open airy feeling to the place that is so appealing...

The second floor disappeared into the dumpster and we had a moment to really appreciate the fine color choices that the last owners had made for the bathroom walls...

Until, with a huge cacophony of saws, bad language, and the sound of heavy things falling from great heights...
it was all gone...

The canvas back here is prepped and now?

How About This One?

Xan is not fond of going to the lumber store...

You see her here in front of a pile of two by fours with one reject standing behind her against the wall...

How, you might ask, could there be a way to not LOVE a two by four?

It amazes us what is offered for sale - ones that are warped, twisted, cracked, moldy, knotty (maybe even naughty), cupped, spalled, chattered, and even covered with bark!
OOps! another reject!

This trip we were only purchasing 40 pieces of lumber... about one afternoon's framing for the two of us...

But we had to sort through about 160 pieces of lumber to get there!

This is our reject pile:
Sooo...

Xan likes to go to look at formica samples for the Kookie Bar counters, loves to look at the sparkly ceiling fixtures (potentially for her new room), and doesn't even seem to mind the quick scans of the clearance shelves...

No more lumber please!