At this point in the project, the interior walls that we wanted gone are completely out and the new staircase is in! It really is wild seeing the plan come together.
Let's start with the main living space.
Note that the ceiling is covered in plastic to prevent the insulation from falling all over everything.
I'll translate the below photo a little to help contextualize this for you. Everything in front of the tile floor is addition. The old living room got about 3 feet wider due to the removal of the fireplace. The staircase is now un-split, and to the right of the staircase opening you see framing because that is the new boundary for what had been the smallest bedroom.
In the picture below, you can see by looking at the floor on the lower right that we removed the L wall that had separated the kitchen from the living room. When it is all said and done we will put a new kitchen island in for additional counter space, storage, and seating.
We can see that opening up the kitchen does make this area more spacious indeed!
This next picture is just the addition area - we have a lot of pictures of this room since it is basically the crown jewel of the project. Look at those lake views! Even with the plastic window protector over the big picture window, you can get a sense that it is a nice one.
From the below vantage, you can see that we have the patio door at the ready for our future front-facing deck.
Next, let's head downstairs -- to get there, we'll need to use the new staircase. Since there is so much work still to be done the framers haven't yet put the real treads on.
At the bottom of the stairs we look ahead and see the lower level addition room.
Here we see the new "front door". We also see the line in the floor where the old house stopped. This channel has since been filled in with concrete. Good as new.
The view below is looking from the front of the lower level, back into the existing house where our home gym is setup. I will say that one thing we aren't super crazy about is that while we were able to completely clear span the upstairs by putting in a lot of beams, in the lower level, we weren't so fortunate.
I personally wish that the post on the left and the one on the right were symmetrical - but they are not. We had to leave more cement block on the right-hand side to accommodate the load of the house. We could have forced symmetry by further closing the space on the left, but the goal is to leave this as open as we can. We got A LOT of the things we wanted with our design plan, but not everything. There are always compromises.
This next pic is a little difficult to interpret. I'll try to explain. The wooden door comes from the garage into the lower level of the house. Directly to the left of the door is a hallway to the new addition front room. The stairway is framed on both sides and underneath the stairs is storage space (a closet). The "pink tile" hallway leads from the garage to the existing gym area of the lower level. A little further into the process we will be removing the tile and installing LVP floor throughout.
Whew! Ok. Today is 5/21/2022 - since the pictures were taken, we have had the HVAC team out. They extended a couple of existing runs, and had some fun figuring out how to handle that with the new beams being in the way in some spots. The electricians are here today - this is a 4 day effort for them and they are on day 2. They had some fun yesterday dealing with "old house challenges", colorful language was in play. Thankfully, they are trucking through it and should be done by Tuesday. HVAC/ Electrical inspection to follow shortly thereafter and then we can get started on insulating. Stay tuned!
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