Progress Report

Plans and Permits
Squirrel Access Corridor

We’ve worked on a number of smaller projects the past few weeks. We finished removing trim from all of the front rooms of the first floor as well as the two layers of hardwood flooring in the front bedroom. We also moved the stuff being stored in the middle bedroom to the back so we could take down the drop ceiling, and did some cleanup of the resulting giant piles of wood and debris.

I got the mulch spread on the front easement, leaving only some small tufts of grass in the back yard to be dealt with. We put up a locking mailbox to hopefully resolve our missing mail issues. We set up a cheap swimming pool in the back yard since we don’t have air conditioning, but the weather immediately dropped into the forties.

We met with an HVAC contractor that we like and got some new ideas on how to do the radiant. We also met with our architect and discussed plan revisions, including the back deck and more recently the garage. One potential challenge with the deck is a section of code requiring the second floor deck to be no more than 12′ above grade, when our second floor is 15′ 6″ above grade.

Yesterday Sarah heard some kind of animal in the walls. An inspection of the attic revealed that my hole patching was effective in preventing anything from getting into the attic, but the rot on our top plate was allowing squirrels to get into the wall without even getting into the attic. I spent the better part of two hours getting metal mesh and brick into position to block it out, reaching out the tiny hole in the soffit and sliding it back and forth, using a makeup mirror to see what I was doing. So far today they haven’t returned, so that’s a good sign.

I’m contemplating how to re-run the gas lines in the basement so they don’t run along the support beam, since they’ll be in the way when we replace the beam. We have a gas inspection on Monday that may provide additional to-dos. I turned off the boiler since the weather was in the nineties, but with the temperature shift the house was sixty-three degrees this morning.

Our next step is to buy some more shelving and move everything being stored on the first floor into the basement. We’ll cover it with tarps to shield it from some of the dust and once the gas lines are re-configured we can move the laundry down there too.

Near-term we’re planning to get a permit to start demo of the first floor, before we’ve gotten the final blueprints and construction permits. That will let us get some work done, since the whole process is taking longer than we initially hoped.

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