Our future selves may wonder: what on earth compelled us, in the middle of a pandemic, galloping inflation, and a European war raging just a few hundred miles away from us, to take out a massive bank loan to renovate the house?
The answer:
That’s not dew. It’s rain. And that’s not the carport or the terrace, but the living room ceiling.
Below the ceiling is, of course, the living room floor:
That’s just one spot. By March 2022 any substantial rainstorm would cause rain inside our house, and not just in that one spot. There were also other spots in the living room, as well as some in the kitchen and the old master bathroom. Every big new rainstorm seemed to create big new leaks. We’d known we needed a new roof for quite a while, but it had finally reached the point where couldn’t put it off any longer.
Not very pretty up there on the roof. The weirdest think is the laziness of whatever electrician had chosen to run a wire over the roof. There was already an electric line running inside the house to the location that piped-in wire leads (to the awning box), so neither we nor any of the contractors we worked with could ever really figure out why that line had run over the roof… in piping that allowed rainwater to gather around it and sit.
The garage roof had also been leaking for years because the frames around its skylights had rotted.
And as long as we were going to take a big loan out, the house had other problems:
The pool has been completely turned off for more than a decade, but for some reason it was occassionally flooding with water from the runoff sewers on the street (we assume: it was, thank god, clear water: the discoloration you see is a consequence of the muck embedded in the bottom of the pool and in the drain and pipes themselves).
That particular flooding episode last spring required me to take more than 50 trips from the bottom of the pool up and out of the pool, out of the basement, and up to the street to empty a single 20-liter bucket on each trip. Once I got it emptied, however, the seepage continued very slowly, and I found myself having to do a couple of buckets every 2-3 days. For many weeks.
Meanwhile, of course, the kitchen was falling apart: the cabinet lights were failing, many of the drawers no longer slid properly on their runners, some of the cabinet doors were wobbly on their hinges, and the glass of one of the bar cabinets had been smashed thanks to one of the girls’ fits of rage months previously and we had seen no point in replacing it when we’d been toying with the idea of kitchen renovations anyway.
Also, please have another look at the picture of the living room floor up there: it’s not dark wood, it’s just darkened by years of filth. Raising two kids, a dog, and two cats takes its toll on a floor.
So the decision was made: new roof, new basement, new kitchen, sanding and refinishing of the floors. And while we’re at it: expand the terrace and replace its dilapidated old awning, give the whole living area a fresh coat of paint, and add a couple of skylights.
This post includes a godawful lot of pictures of all the work done on the house. I’m therefore going to try and limit textual commentary to the absolute bare minimum: to provide context where necessary, or where some bit of information may be helpful for the permanent record. But generally the idea is just to have a single post we can access easily to remind ourselves exactly what was done, and how, during the 2022 renovations.
Before we get to all those pictures, those, here’s a refresher of where things stood last spring and summer—these pictures are all taken from the 2022 summer blog, but they’re worth revisiting as we gear up for the main event.
This shot of the new foyer cabinets, which arrived about six months before I finally set them up, is also useful as a shot of the living room floor: see how dark and scuffed?
And of course the roof wrapping was a permanent fixture of the yard from May or June all the way through September.
The basement in its before condition:
That was my home “office” through the two years of the pandemic, and I actually thought it was pretty sweet.
Man, it really was a zoo down there. But for the renovations to occur, it would have to be entirely emptied. That took some effort.
A lot of the kitchen we knew would be moved down to the basement, but we decided to sell the nice wooden counters. That’s what the next two pics were for, but they’re also decent “before” pictures of the kitchen.
You can tell we’ve begun clearing out the living room here, and you can also see again just how bad the floor was.
Work on the roof began first (we had the guys move the roof material over to the side so we wouldn’t have to stare at it all through our summer vacation, two of the three weeks of which we’d be spending at home).
I mention in the summer 2022 post that the roofers quickly found rot and we hoped that insurance would cover it: I’m very, very happy to report that it did.
While the roofers roofed, we managed to get the basement entirely cleared.
For the terrace work to begin, we had to get rid of the big shrub on its southwest corner.
I remember thinking how naked this side of the house looked without that old familiar hedge.
Oh, and look—the roof rot had penetrated all the way into the fyrrum:
With the hedge out of the way, the terrace work began.
The terrace furniture spent the summer out in the weather, over by the apple tree. Fortunately it was a warm, dry summer.
So warm and dry, in fact, that we put up the party tent to shelter our living room furniture while that part of the house was renovated.
…which of course meant it was finally time to clear out the living room completely.
The last of the old summer 2022 pictures offers a tantalizing glimpse of just how much larger the new terrace would be.
And that’s it for the old, previously published pictures.
Now we go to the Renovation Chronicles themselves, arranged by area.
Basement
I have to say, it was very weird for all of us walking around over where the pool used to be. For days, maye even weeks, we walked very nervously over that part of the basement, terrified we would suddenly fall through the floor into the pool below.
The grooves for the floor heating: they seem like stupid pictures, but it’s useful to chronicle where the floor heating is.
This is how the carpenters got stuff down to the basement: they shoved it throuh the hedges on the corner and down their “ramp” onto the evening terrace.
These next shots are very valuable in terms of identifying the exact limits of the three floor heating “circuits.”
Once the floor was in place, we had the old kitchen installed down there.
And now that the floor was down, we could also relieve our master bedroom and the guest room of some of the boxes and furniture we’d stashed in them all summer.
Last pictures of the pool “machine room” before its total removal:
Celebrate your triumphs…!
Also: the gutted machine room:
And here’s the floor heat system, operational:
Big Room
The most important thing about the big room (the only renovation to which was the new skylight) is that we found out the hard way that one of the outlets on the floor (down by the fireplace) actually controlled the north chimney’s fan. Also, it had shorted itself out. It’s on the same circuit as every other floor outlet on the ground floor. So one day in early winter we were suddenly unable to use any of those floor outlets: that meant more or less everything that used power on the ground floor except for the kitchen appliances and washer and dryer, all of which were on separate circuits.
So here’s the offending outlet for the permanent record:
The real importance of the big room was its use as our kitchen and dining room during the major renovations. And also storage, obviously.
And here you see the spot where the skylight would eventually arrive:
(For the picture of the skylight itself you have to go to the Skylight section.)
Carport
There were no renovations to the carport, but it was a valuable storage area all summer.
Front of House
The area we call “Front of House,” which is where we spend most of daily life, only got floor and wall treatment. But it made a dramatic difference.
It goes pretty fast in the preceding photos, but the process took weeks: weeks without a living room, dining room, or kitchen. No television. No stereo. Nowhere to just toss oneself down and veg out except one’s own bed, which in most cases was in a room stuffed to the gills with boxes and extra furniture.
So it was quite a big development to get furniture back where it belonged (even if it cost me a foot injury that took three months to heal).
Foyer
The foyer renovations were very limited. We had all the walls done, and a lot of the old electronics removed, and we replaced the old wardrobe and cabinet. Mainly the foyer served as our kitchen pantry during the renovations: we kept the old basement fridge in there just to have a fridge.
Remember the part of the wall one of the puppies had eaten? I’d never even bothered fixing it: the metal plates I’d put up to discourage the puppy from dining any further on our infrastructure were still there.
The “puppy corner” is lower right in this next shot—all fixed!
Fyrrum
Nothing at all was done on the fyrrum, but the rot discovered by the roofers and the constant need to rewire the circuit box by the electricians made it a hub of activity.
For the permanent record, however, I did get a photographic inventory of everything stored in there. I’d recommend skimming right past them, but they’re useful for me to have.
Guest Room
There weren’t any renovations at all to the guest room, which I use as a bedroom weeknights to prevent disturbing Trine with my late bedtimes and early risings, so almost every cubic meter of the room was used for storage while work went on elsewhere.
Kitchen
The kitchen was a very major part of the project: Trine spent months agonizing over every detail of what she wanted from her new kitchen, and I’m happy to say she got exactly what she wanted.
The post-it notes you see all over were Trine’s notes to the contractors saying what to keep, what to trash, and what should end up in the basement.
I guess a side note is called for here: the animals were deeply, deeply disturbed by the disruptions to their lives. But they all made it through just fine.
It was when things looked like this that we sometimes wondered: dear god, have we made a colossal mistake? Is this really going to turn out all right?
And here we have our future kitchen still boxed up:
Time for the wild rumpus to begin: it goes fast here, but the four-day installation ended up taking four weeks.
Milestone: the coffeemaker comes back into my life!
And we finally have a kitchen sink again—no more doing dishes in the bathroom sink!
Office
The former guest room which then became Maddie’s art studio was transformed into a combination office for me and kitchen pantry for all of us during the height of the renovations.
Old Bathroom
As already chronicled, the big change in the bathroom was getting new lighting (and wiring) for the vanity: we were down to just one light that worked, and that one only sometimes, but we managed to get one of the electricians to completely rewire it and install new fixtures in just an hour or two. It made a massive difference.
Naturally we also had some flooding in the bathroom during the renovations: the plumber looked at it and determined it was just because these pipes weren’t fixed together:
Outdoor (Roof, Yard, Etc)
With all the work going on inside, on top of, and around the house, our yard took a hell of a beating.
We were so, so lucky that all this work was done over the course of a warm, dry summer. Having the tent for storage was a godsend, but as we learned in late August it was only a godsend because there wasn’t a single heavy rain for more than four weeks in a row.
The house was almost always at least partially surrounded by scaffolding.
One annoying thing about getting up into parts of your house you never really have a chance to look at is that a lot of them really suffer for all that neglect.
I dealt with that—badly, as you’ll see—but first let’s take a walk around the scaffolding.
You can add “bricklayer” to the list of jobs I should never be entrusted with.
Here’s how the “good” column looked on top:
And here’s murmester Greg at work…
Good enough for government work, I guess.
But barely.
And now behold the beautiful new roof.
The roofers even patched up the chimneys.
The property, meanwhile, was suffering enormously.
That’s all cleared up now, and has been for a while, but it’s left behind a lot of damaged hedges and dead grass we’ll have to deal with this spring.
Skylights
Previous we had one skylight in the old master bathroom and one in the main hallway. Both of those were replaced, along with all four garage skylights, and we also added skylights to the kitchen and master bedroom.
That meant that for quite a while we just had four big holes in the house. (Covered with tarps and sealed with plastic, but still: just holes.
But when they were done: mwah! Magnifigue! So much more light in the new kitchen!
And the old master bath:
And the hallway!
And the master bedroom:
It was already autumn by the time the skylights were installed, so we haven’t had much use for them yet, but they’re all controlled with remotes, and if left open are even “smart” enough to close themselves if it begins to rain.
Terrace
The most important permanent record note about the terrace is that this summer (2023) we need to paint it with mahogany oil using a wide brush.
And now to the terrace chronicle:
It looks done, right? And it should have been. Except we quickly discovered the height was wrong: the door that opens out of the dining room couldn’t open more than a few inches!
A lot of the terrace had to be dismantled and reassembled due to the door issue…
But it did work:
That’s it… the full chronicle of all the renovations.
This isn’t a normal post, so I’ll remain abnormal by just describing where we stand on everything right now.
The Kitchen is done, and it’s glorious. We all love it.
The Basement is almost done: we still need an electrician to do the very last thing by connecting the stove to the electricity. Beyond that, we still haven’t quite figured out just where everything’s going to go and what part of the room is to be used for what. It’s kind of a mess right now, and will be as long as we’re sorting it out, but Maddie already has a nice art area down there and there’s a great stereo system, a couch with a coffee table—the exact set up we used to have in the solarium when we called it the “iPad couch” (because it was the designated area for the girls to use the iPads). There’s also a table with a bunch of chairs around it. Molli’s already used the basement once to have a bunch of friends over for drinks one evening; Maddie likes playing our old CD’s on the stereo, which is so far still unequipped for streaming but has a CD player, a dual cassette deck, and a turntable.
The Office is now entirely my own and a great joy to me.
The Guest Room is once again “the quiet room.”
The Master Bedroom has been decluttered, although there’s still more clutter to get rid of.
The Terrace is spectacular but we still haven’t had weather to enjoy it in… but those days are not far off.
The Garage no longer drips water whenever it rains, and we’ve also been able to bring a lot of the stuff that we’d stored out there indoors. Our spring cleaning this year will almost definitely involve a lot of decluttering out there.
The Fyrrum will also need a thorough going-over. I like having all my tools and stuff down in the basement, but they take up a pretty big footprint so most of it will probably have to be relocated back to the fyrrum.
The Roof is obviously also completely done, and best of all: it hasn’t rained indoors all autumn and winter, and probably never will again.
We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us in the Property—not just the usual yard maintenance stuff, but as part of this whole big project we commissioned a landscape designer to draw up the property just the way we want it. There wasn’t money in the budget to include all that with these renovations, but that’s definitely next up. Eventually.
But first we’ll probably take a few years just to enjoy all the nice stuff we’ve just done.
