Asbestos removal is almost done. The workers said next Monday should be the last day. Here is a picture from the side door of the house. They have been bundling up the asbestos laden materials and putting them in a trailer for disposal.
While I was there, I took pictures of the two largest stumps (from the recently removed trees). The one on the left was 110 years old, measured by counting the tree rings. I used my lens cap for scale. There was too much saw dust to count the rings on the stump on the right (maybe when I go back to the site I can clear it off).
Finally, I will leave you with this recent picture of our view. The recent warm spell has melted a lot of the river ice and all the snow in the yard.
At this point we are impatiently waiting for the building permit and demolition permit to be approved.
It seems that Wednesday is our designated day for meetings about the new house. At this stage of the process, the Wednesday meetings happen at our current residence and just include the architect. Soon, however, we will start having Wednesday meetings at the build site, a tradition that will probably continue throughout the build.
Today was about coming to decisions on some remaining issues. The architect comes with a detailed agenda and drawings and samples, which we work through for a couple of hours around the dining room table.
I do not have a list of everything we discussed, but I will cover some of the highlights.
One of the big outstanding questions was how to deal with the siding. The architect brought some mock-ups of the house showing a horizontal placement for the siding boards and a vertical placement, including suggestions where there would be seams (and there will be some seams). After some discussion, we decided to move forward with a vertical orientation, which has fewer seams. But we are now exploring adding panels (instead of just long, thin boards) in some sections of the front as an accent. Hopefully, I will have a drawing in a few days to show you what it may look like.
We talked about selecting a door. They do not make what Daphne wants, which is a door that has panes of glass and yet can stand up to a fire for 20 minutes. For now, we think we are going with a solid fiberglass door, but the actual model has yet to be selected.
We had to pick a new bathtub. The Massachusetts Uniform State Plumbing Code mandates that all products used in plumbing or gas fitting systems must be Product-Approved by the Board, and the tub Daphne selected is not approved. So we reviewed some tub designs that are approved, and we watched as Daphne stood up, bent over, and use a tape measure to determine what she considers to be the optimal length and depth for her lounging plans. Then we picked a tub.
We started discussions about where we will place switches, outlets and lights. I had already worked out a preliminary design, which the architect is using as a base for the actual plans. We discussed some changes during the meeting and we now await a revised plan for further discussion. We are still struggling with the choice of a lighting solution for the game room since it has a sloped ceiling.
While the architect was here, the measuring tape came out. One thing we discovered is that our two bedroom dressers are different lengths. This means that they would not fit in their designated wall by four inches (since the original plans were based on the width of the smaller one). We did realize, however, that we would be removing their side overhangs so they fit together better and that would give us back 3 inches of length. We will manager; at this point, we refuse to redesign the south side of the house over one inch of bedroom dresser width.
There were a lot more decisions, but I will leave you with these pictures instead. This is a physical mock-up that was assembled by the architect to show how the walls would be put together. The left picture is an exterior wall with the siding on the right, pink solid insulation and framing beams. The right picture is the other side, showing among other things the framing that will be used on the porch to hold the screens in place.
