Random images from today. I went over to the cottage today and found Seth hard at work cleaning up from Seth and Greg's last project of getting stairs in and sistering the stringers on the second floor. When I went over there yesterday, I could barely contain my overwhelmed self by the sheer messiness of the place. So I pitched in and we got most of the cottage somewhat clean. I have some organizing to do, but I thought I would share photos of today.

I was out on the second floor balcony when the snow started this afternoon around 3pm. Here is the view from the balcony back towards Merithew Square.

Seth did a fine job cleaning up the second floor and organizing. The trusses at the far end of the room are just temps, that's why they are not straight. I am standing in the sliding glass door to the deck and looking back through the space. This used to be four bedrooms! When we got the house, two the walls had been removed. The bedrooms are good sized now and we'll keep it that way, otherwise there wouldn't be much room for anything larger than a double in each bedroom.

I love the shape of the tree through the sliding glass doors of the master bedroom

Things are looking up and very well framed!

STAIRS!!

It's hard to blog about work going on at the cottage without being there. What I know is this: When I spoke with Greg the other day, he was exhausted from putting in new roof stringers. The original roof line completely sagged in the middle, making the job of sistering the old roof stringers a very tough job. Greg and Seth (no relation) got about half the stringers up by themselves using two ladders and a sledgehammer. They are straightening out the roof line as they go. Greg reported in last night that he spent Sunday cutting and laying out all the framing for the actual staircase. He spent seven hours cutting and matching the framing to the crooked-ness of the house
Meanwhile, I am furiously taking in rental weeks. I think I added at least four or five weeks to the rental schedule while I've been in New York. It's been difficult with Sunnyside since we have no interior photos yet. I am relying on the photos and comments from the Little Bohemia website to show folks how we operate.

No exciting pictures today. We are progressing well with phase 5, reframing. The second floor is almost all framed in. We then have to do the trusses and the roof and then the new interior walls. The new stairwell is all framed in and set to take the stairs, which will be great for me as I cannot jump and bend and jump some more to get from stepladder to the riser to the second floor all that well. It's what being 43 and overweight and old means!!

With Seth (no relation) working on the framing (zipping through it with the new (to us) Paslode cordless framing nail gun), I can see real change. We are not tearing down, nor repairing anymore. We are actually building! The Craig's List nail guns both work swimmingly. What a deal at $150 a piece. While Seth (no relation) worked diligently on the walls, I did things like exchange the $65.00 box of nails I got for the new nail gun for the proper nails and saved enough to buy some blades for the new sawzall, replaced the cord on our chop saw so that it is useable, and cleaned and organized more of the downstairs.

If Greg and I bought Sunnyside for us to use as a weekend and summer house, I would definitely keep the second floor all open (except for the bathroom.) It's so extraordinary to stand in the middle of the second floor and look out at the water from everywhere in the space. The view out the front window is almost just as perfect, looking down into a small neighborhood park surrounded by other gingerbread houses; big maples overhead.

My first task tomorrow is going to be to try and disconnect the drain from the cast iron tub so we can move it back for framing.

Rushed home to give therapy to Sebastian's knee and make orange ginger shortbread for our dinner hosts.

Today (Tuesday) was a snow day.

The real world gets in the way again.

I have three days before I go down to New York for the week for business. I thought I would have a bit of time at the cottage, but with only being in town for a week between travels, I find that there are lots of odds and ends, and dogs to take care of and I cannot focus on the cottage work at hand. I have had positive responses from a majority of my clients about art objects coming up for sale next week down in New York. So, part of my time here is researching the pieces so that I can be intelligent about them when I go to examine them. I have the potential to make most of my yearly salary next week, so I have to be on the ball.
The cottage suffers, but that is what Seth (no relation) is for during the next month or so that he is in town. He seems to like working there and is good at working there, so I am happy about that. I just feel bad that I am not working there more.

I'd like to open this post with "the Money Shot." The correct sliding glass doors were installed upstairs at Sunnyside a few days ago. Here is the view from the deck outside the master bedroom. Not too shabby. This is going to be a good house for someone. With a railing around the deck, depending on the design, we might be able to block out the roof lines and power lines from the view. A nice 200 square foot sun deck, a rarity in ole' Bayside.

The reframing is coming along. Below is the corner of the second bedroom where the queen bed will tuck in. Our friend Seth (no relation) who is working at the cottage said to me yesterday that he wished I had a framing cordless and compressorless nail gun like the Passlode. Seth has been doing manual hammering and he is pretty fed up with jammin' his fingers. I told him to investigate pricing, and he found they run around $500 including nails and fuel cells. We would need one gun for framing and another for finish work. While Seth was checking retail prices, I jumped on Craig's List and found a guy in Dexter who was selling both framing and finishing guns for $300.00 for the pair. We jumped on it and drove to Dexter...found the Passlodes in workable but used a fair amount. Bought both plus two sawzalls for $350.00...a great deal as the Ryobi sawzall we got looks hardly used in its original case with batteries and charger. Same with the Passlodes. Each has a battery and charger and so we just need nails and the fuel cells. Yay for our team.

The place is coming along slowly but surely.

Pardon me, but you have a hole in your ceiling, or is that the floor?

Got to the cottage today after almost three weeks away to find a whole lotta hole in the ceiling!

If you embiggen the first picture, you will see a platform just behind the red ladder, this is the new half landing for the stairway to the second floor. The hole above my head in the photo used to be the hallway upstairs. When the chimney was removed during the prior renovation, the second floor hall was put back together with a mishmash of boards and vents and screws, so in our efforts to really make the place sparkle, Greg took the hallway out yesterday. We have saved enough boards from our demolition to replace the floor there easily. What I love is that new window in the upper center of the photo which will illuminate the stairway and fill it with natural light. The window to the right is the corner of the master bedroom.

This photo shows the other end of the hall. The taupe paint on the second floor delineates the upstairs bath. The small window on the first floor directly ahead will be where the new second bathroom is going (used to be the outside door into the kitchen) You can see how wide the span is between the second floor floor joists where the hall is located...We'll add another floor joist here to strengthen up the floor.

Have taken another rental week for Sunnyside already. I know it must be difficult to rent a cottage for one's vacation without seeing what the interiors look like. My goal for this house is to make it turn key condition like Little Bohemia so that when the market returns we can one or the other. There will always be a strong place in my heart for Little Bohemia since I'd always wanted to possess that cottage. Sunnyside is a wonderful place, but I see it as an investment rather than our guest house, a la Little Bohemia. That said, I really want to do right by this cottage and make it a showplace. Every ounce of effort we put into the cottage will come back to us several fold.

I can't wait to get back to Maine and get back to work.

I received another couple of cell phone shots of the work going on at the cottage today. GREAT progress was made and I couldn't be happier not to be there as I would just get in the way. As I said, I've been dismayed at what I consider my lack of progress on the house, but after I seek out and line up my "before" and "after" photos, I can see we are really moving right along.

Again, a few set up shots. The first photo shows the kitchen and stair (to the right and above the fridge. ) just after purchase. This was the kitchen that the previous owners had. You can just make out where the new addition to the cottage starts at the extreme right in the photo below. Where the edge of the dishwasher is was the original back wall of the cottage. The wall behind the fridge is now completely gone and the downstairs of the cottage is one big room now.

This photo below shows a detail of the kitchen the way it looked just after buying the place.

Now you see it

Now you don't. Here is the photo of the newly gutted kitchen area with the old stairway at the left.

Just add a new window and things start to look up! However, you can see here the original framing for the house. Its a bit scary, since a lot of the studs were cut out and the walls were never shored up again. The previous owners began reframing the interior of the cottage with 2 x 6", but they never got into the kitchen or around the stairs before they knocked off their renovation of the place. We are continuing their reframing (notice I say "we" here, but I am down in Florida while this all goes on)

Here is a lovely picture of Seth (no relation) finishing up the new framing in the kitchen area
This next photo (sorry if the light is shining in your eyes!) tells the full story. Though pretty grainy, the photo shows a living room window at the left and the new kitchen window to the right and a shadow of the old stairs in between. You can just make out the newly patched hole in the floor that was a stair to the basement at one time. The hole was causing all sorts of moisture problems on the first floor because water vapors from the underside of the house were getting into the first floor walls, causing them to get soaked when there was a lot of rain or snow. Frost spread out along the walls in the kitchen from underneath the stairs. That problem should be fixed with the covering of the hole and the subsequent foam insulation that will happen in March.


And here we have a pretty clear picture of the new framing as well as the newly patched floor. Greg and Seth (no relation) were able to reuse a lot of the old boards from the walls we took down to patch the floor. As I said, great progress was made today! The new stairs will rise in the same place, but they will be wider and better.

Ooooo, it's been a long time since I visited this blog. I actually have not been back to Sunnyside since before Christmas. Christmas happened, then we went to Kansas, then New Year's, then I came down to Florida to help out my mom. She is recovering from ankle replacement surgery. Today is Saturday and she had her ankle replaced last Tuesday. I am still here, but the work on Sunnyside continues. Today, the stairs came down.
Remember the stairs? With the new 2 x 6 studs going in and walls going in for the first time, the stairs were going to be far too narrow so we are building new ones. Here they are before demo.

Greg was hot to get these down before I get back to it....so I got this grainy cell phone photo today:


Just to orient you: The place where the fridge sat is no longer there:


In its place is a gaping hole to the basement which used to be steps going down to underneath the house. The hole will be plugged, and a new, wider set of stairs will go in.

Til the next photo