Strides and a road block

Here's a post about the progress on the house addition. Yes, we're still plugging away at that, though I now have zero time instead of very little to participate in that. That, combined with the fact that plumbing rough-ins and mechanical ducting and electrical wire just doesn't make for very interesting photos results in fewer updates.

But, work on all three of those areas has been moving forward. The plumbing rough-in is nearly ready, same with the mechanical. The electrical wiring has been slowly moving forward until this morning when it made a big jump towards completion. A number of years ago (I think I was pregnant with Reuben??) we did design work for a home remodel/addition for a neat couple with a large family (she was pregnant with their fifth at the time. I laugh at myself now thinking that was a "really big" family as we will now pass them up this spring!) that live less than a mile from us. They, like us, were planning on doing most of the work themselves and work at a reasonable pace to be able to pay as they went instead of having to go into debt to do the work. Duane is an electrical engineer, so even though he doesn't do electrical work himself, he understands it, and his oldest son did the electrical work for their new spaces as his 4H project under his Dad's supervision. (And they passed inspection!) Eight months ago, Matt emailed Duane to see if he could ask a few general questions about the panel and things like that. Duane was very helpful, and offered to answer other questions as things went along. A week and a half ago Matt emailed to see if he could stop over sometime next week when my parents are up and we were hoping to have the electrical nearly ready for rough-in inspection just to make sure there were no glaring errors. His response last Friday was more than we had anticipated - he and his oldest son offered to come over today (the day after Thanksgiving) and put in a long morning of work to give Matt some man-hours to actually get it done!

After a great morning's worth of work, the electrical is probably 97% complete (as far as what is needed before the first inspection.) Wow!!! That means that when my parents are up next week, mechanical and plumbing are the primary tasks, and will likely also get to the point of rough-in inspections which will put the whole project at a point where we'll be ready to start doing the inner layer of insulating and then sheetrock!!!

We got other good news last Friday - the gas boiler for the radiant system (we switched from electric to gas for a variety of reasons, so needed to swap boilers) was set to ship on December 18th. I don't think I've mentioned that we're hosting Christmas this year, and made those plans back when we thought the addition would be done in December. Ha ha ha. ;) Well, a boiler that ships on the 18th isn't quite going to get here in time to be heating the addition by December 24th, now, is it? And even if it does, who is going to come and do the gas hookup the day before Christmas Eve??? So when we also heard last Friday that the boiler had arrived at Menards, so now we have a much better chance of having heat in the addition. Even if it doesn't look beautiful, we can use the space to spread out a bit.

So some big strides are being made in a number of different areas.

And then there's the fireplace. Heh, heh, heh. You'd think the architect would have made sure the chase space was big enough for the wood burning fireplace chimney, wouldn't you? After all, isn't that why you hire an architect??? Oh wait. We designed this thing. [sheepish grin]. Matt's been working with the fireplace supplier/installer for a few weeks now, and has finally been able to get some more useful dimensions on the fireplace we had selected, but that bump on the back of the addition would have been much better if it were six inches deeper. They've been figuring and working stuff out, but just today Matt got an email from him saying he showed drawings of our situation and proposed alignment to his head installer and he simply said, "No." Hmmm. That's not what we were expecting. Or wanting...

So what's plan B? One option is to talk further with our favorite structural engineer and see if there is any way we can cut away the top plate on the back wall to get a few more inches right in that area. But even that may still be too tight.

So, plan C??? Maybe we switch to gas. Matt and I both have a kind of fundamental opposition to "fake" fireplaces (read, "gas"), but oddly enough, neither one of us has felt that so strongly today. The reality of kids, and kids who are physically more capable than their developmental abilities, is that a gas fireplace will be much simpler, and definitely safer. We just happen to have recently decided to get gas service to the house, so that's already an option where it wasn't three months ago. And the mix of traditional and contemporary style of the addition mean that we can lean one way or the other without it feeling awkward. Gas would be a no-brainer to install.

That means that my plans to go to bed early tonight went out the window as Matt and I huddled together over our AutoCAD files and played around with different proportions of the intersection of the fireplace, window bench extension, mantle, and metal shelf/firewood storage unit. Oh, yes, and control joints. ;)

Here was our original living room north wall elevation with the wood-burning unit we really liked:

The fireplace is the small rectangle roughly in the center of the room. The three purple circles were air vents for circulating warm air, and the red vertical box on the right was the wood storage/shelf unit depending on whether you were above or below the mantle. We liked this option. ;)

This was the first gas unit we considered. The firebox is bigger, and we didn't like how the proportion of it was more square. It pushes the mantle up so high, and just felt a little more clunky than our original "final" design. The notion of a wood storage box is also kind of odd with a gas fireplace. Also, because it was so tall, we had the move the control joint that its bottom aligns with to the bottom of the window bench instead of the top - harder to pull off in reality. But it could work...

 

So we looked at a different brand, and found one with proportions we liked much better. Only problem is that this unit only comes with a brick firebox, which doesn't have the right look - we've always wanted something a little more streamlined. But the size was much better...

 

So then we decided to go a completely different route, and try a long horizontal unit. We were surprisingly pleased with the result. It's a very different look from what we had started with, but there are many things that it accomplishes visually that are appealing to us. One thing in particular that I think could be nice is that a long fireplace makes it easier for a larger family to all find a place by the fire. Next step, I think, is to see how this compares in cost to our original options. Being gas, it *could* be comparable, even though its a larger unit. We'll see!

(sorry this image is at a slightly different scale....)