An in progress picture from the demolition this morning. Unfortunately, I suspect the construction cam video will not be as interesting since the camera is on the other side of the house.

Pictures from today (Credit: David Jenkinson). Updated with better pictures.

We had another Wednesday morning design meeting with our architect. Much of the meeting was a review of the mechanical design, both the heating and cooling ducts and the other duct work for the bathroom fans, dryer vent and stove hood.

Most of it is unlikely to be interesting to the internet audience. But I will point out a few decisions we made. First of all, we were unable to find a ventless dryer that did not have built-in WiFi so we will need a dryer vent. Dryer vents require frequent cleaning to avoid being a fire hazard and the original duct design had the exterior of the dryer vent positioned on the second floor. Having lived in a house with a second floor dryer vent exhaust, I knew that such a location would make cleaning the vent a rare activity.

Instead, we played around with the design and decided to route the dryer vent through the front hall closet (shrinking that closet by a few inches) so that the exterior of the dryer vent comes out near the ground on the first floor, hidden behind the foundation plantings, but easily reached for occasionally cleaning.

Similarly, we redid the routing of the duct work for the bathroom fans to make the ducts shorter to avoid too much inefficiency. The current plan is to route the first floor bathroom fans up to the second floor and vent them through the dormer behind the second floor kitchenette. We may lose a thin cabinet that was planned for storing a broom, but it means that the bathroom fans do not have to push air half the length of the house to vent out the south wall by the game room.

The architect has done a rendering of the front of the house, showing the siding and all the selected colors.

There will be a seam between the first and second floor at the top of the windows that cannot be helped. We also can not add any space between the top of the second floor windows and the siding accent for the same reason — we are already using the maximum length of siding boards.

The rendering does include the breezeway that we are now allowed to have (as long as we leave an inch between the breezeway and the garage, which will be hidden by the overhang). It also shows the old location of the dryer vent — which now will be moved down much closer to the ground. (Can you see it in the rendering?)

We have been picking appliances. We really, really want are appliances without WiFi or at least appliances where the WiFi can be completely turned off. This has limited our choices significantly.

During this process, I had an interesting conversation with an LG chat agent. I was asking whether the WiFi of their washer and dryer could be completely turned off. He replied that it could be turned off through the control panel, but to be really sure it was disabled you needed to use an advanced setting. How do I use that advanced setting, I asked. Well, he answered, you get to the advanced setting through the LG ThinQ app. So, as I pointed out, this means that in order to completely disable the WiFi for a washer or dryer, I first have to install WiFi in the house, download an app to my phone and use that app on my temporary WiFi network to tell the appliances to disable their WiFi. I guess you have to be Korean to understand the logic.

As it happens, we have found a well rated washer and dryer with no WiFi. We also found a dishwasher with no WiFi although it is not as well rated as one that has WiFi, which the manufacturer insists can be disabled. The question is whether to trust them.

Looking ahead, here are the next steps for the site:

• Stumps get removed Thursday.
• The existing house gets removed on Friday.
• The civil engineers come by next Wednesday to mark where the foundation will go.
• As soon as that is done, site excavation will happen. They will excavate four feet beyond the foundation in all directions.
• Then the civil engineers come back to mark the foundation location again.
• Then the foundation can get poured.

I do not have the exact dates of the later steps, but I will keep my construction camera running every weekday.

Its springtime and the river is up. Here is a panorama of our waterfront taken today.

Meanwhile demolition and site preparation continues. First, up is the garage. This is what is left of the garage. It will be rebuilt, although probably after the house is framed since that will give the equipment another angle of site access.

The house itself is a shell of its former self. The walls have been removed (asbestos), the electrical wiring has been removed (and will be recycled), the plumbing has been removed (and will also be recycled). The appliances and the kitchen cabinets have been removed and were taken by a neighbor to be used in a renovation. And the windows have been removed (but not recycled).

Here are two pictures from the house, basement and main level. The rakes and other yard items were in the garage.

Actual demolition of the house will probably happen at the end of next week. After that, I will put up a story page with construction videos (I already have a video of the window removal and the garage demolition).

Here it is. I think one permit is for the demolition and the second is for the build. Demolition starts tomorrow with the removal of all the windows. By the way, I do not believe the construction cost estimates. After all, for some unknown reason, wood costs have gone up 25% recently.

With luck, in two weeks I will have some video of the demolition process.

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.

We have been forced to hire an asbestos mitigation firm to remove the asbestos in the house before it is demolished. The asbestos removal is necessary since any material that includes asbestos needs special disposal, and if it was left in place during demolition, not only would there be a risk of releasing a lot of asbestos into the air, but the debris from the entire house would need special disposal.

The asbestos remediation team has been working in the house for over a week. They took two days off while the tree removal was ongoing, but now they are back and they have moved a dumpster into place to hold the removed material.

I guess it was convenient that we removed the trees and rhododendrons to make room for that dumpster. Although, I liked the look of the greenery better than the look of that black box.

Over the course of a day and a half, a local tree removal company came and removed 15 trees that needed to be taken down before demolition and then construction. I have added a new story page here: Goodbye to the Friends We Barely Knew, which includes some pictures and a video of the process.

Meanwhile asbestos removal continues (with a brief break while the tree work was going on). The asbestos has to be removed so it can be safely disposed of before demolition. In some of the pictures, you can see that the old house is sealed with warning signs because of the asbestos removal process.

Next up will be disconnecting the power from the existing house and adding, instead, a construction power panel on site, but off to the north side of the garage. Meanwhile, we wait for the building permit to be granted, which will allow us to move forward with the demolition process and then construction.

There is an existing garage on the property which we will be rebuilding. The garage is currently too close to the road, but because it already exists, we do not need to move the garage back, even if we rebuild it in place. However, because it is non-conforming there are a bunch of zoning laws that constrain what we can do.

Here is a picture of the existing garage, proposed garage extension, part of the deck and a corner of the planned first floor. The deck is in brown (this is actually a screen shot showing the two-tone pattern we will be using for the deck).

In an ideal world, we would connect the garage extension (shed) and the pantry door with a breeze way so we can go from the house to the garage without getting wet if it was raining. The breezeway would just be a roof over the western end of the deck (west is down in the picture).

Unfortunately, connecting the new house to the existing garage violates two different zoning laws. First, since the garage is non-conforming (it is too close to the road), the law says that we can not increase the garage footprint by more than 50% and connecting it to the house would count as increasing its footprint by a lot more. Second, there is another zoning law that says that out buildings (like the garage) can not be closer to the road than the main house.

Originally, when we were just going to refinish and not rebuild the garage, the town building department said that we could not have any breezeway and we had to keep the house at least 10′ from the garage. We then thought that we could connect the garage to the house with a breezeway after 5 years.

However, since we are now planning on completely rebuilding the garage, it seems like different conditions now apply. Based on our latest information, the town says that we need a 1″ gap between the garage and the deck. The two cannot be connected at all. So, it seems like the 10′ gap no longer applies, and we can actually have a breezeway between the house and the garage as long as it stops 1″ from the garage and does not actually connect.

The architect has reworked the foundation for the deck based on the fact that it cannot connect to the garage. We are still working out how we can put in a breezeway with a 1″ gap.