This old house.

I never got around to doing holiday cards this year, but if I had done one, this picture of Henry demolishing the bathroom would have been a good candidate for a Happy New Year card.

Progress on the house has been slow, but steady. Someone recently told us it would be easier to build a house from scratch than to do what we are doing. I agree. When we bought the house we thought we would be able to renovate room by room, but it turned out to be impossible. We have gutted almost the entire interior on all three floors at this point. We removed the old gas baseboard heating system and replaced it with radiant floor tubing and had to demolish the ceiling on the first and second floors to do that. The house had drop ceilings in it and when we opened them up, we found that a previous owner had literally chopped out the original walls at the drop ceiling height and destroyed the beautiful plaster crown moldings.  Aside from two plaster ceiling medallions, nothing was left worth saving. So it all came down and we were able to run the radiant tubing on the underside of the floor joists.  We are in the process of replacing all the old electric. We have a new panel and actual switches now on the first floor. Eventually the second and third floors will be electrified. We do have a few plugs and switches now, but they all need to be rerouted, since we have completely changed the floor plans.  By the time we are finished we will have also replaced most of the plumbing, since all the sinks and tubs in the house are in different locations than they were when we bought the house. 

The basement has some new walls coming in- this will eventually be my art studio. 

This is a good view of the radiant tubing and the new electric, along with my new archway in progress.


We are working on the bathrooms on both the second and third floors right now because we can't move on to other projects until the plumbing is rerouted. The third floor bathroom needs to be rearranged and the tub and sink moved so that A) the bathroom is accessible from the hall, and B) because the tub plumbing is hanging in the middle of the kitchen ceiling below it. Once we redo that bathroom we can create Henry's room, our room, and the kitchen below. And electric needs to be run to all these places and it is much easier to do before drywall goes up. Sigh.

Third floor bathroom after Henry got done with that wall:



Second floor bathroom that is framed and almost ready for tile and wainscotting. I am working on this bathroom quite hard right now because I just need one finished room in this house. And it is only 4' x 4'. It does seem possible. But of course I can't finish the ceiling until the upstairs bathroom plumbing has been rerouted. Which means that the upstairs bathroom may be done first. A never ending conundrum...



In the meantime, here's my tub in what will eventually be the dining room:



And another one, under the stairwell which I am using for my paper recycling bin. I don't even know why we have this one, other than my neighbor was throwing it out, and I just can't let a good clawfoot go to waste.



And yes, that staircase needs to be replaced, but it will have to wait until we have rerouted that tub.