Up and Off

This week the roof framing has been finishing up. It's very exciting. They took the layers of asphalt off the upper roof, where there have always been leaks, and added some more wood to make an actual slope there, like, you know, what is actually required by the code.

They will cover this with plywood and it will get roofed, and nobody will ever see it from the ground but our roof won't leak any more. Also the new roof will help, but a minimum slope helps quite a bit.

Noel really likes the panoramic feature of the phone camera. I mean, seriously.

If you feel queasy about heights, don't think about how he took this photo. Just admire the upper part of our roof and how it has come together nicely.

Every day there is less and less of the old roof. Only one more really hideous day of demolition left before this is all gone.

In the meantime, exciting things are going down inside.

Like, this kind of exciting. The best kind of exciting.

Yes, the pink railing is gone. Well, not gone. It's in the parlours, rather drunkenly taking up most of the floor space.

No, it's not gone forever. The front staircase is an important part of the house and preserving it was a high priority for us. The railing has been taken off for some repairs, to be reinstalled with a replacement missing baluster at the top and slightly less wobbly than before when the new flooring is in place.

We noodled all kinds of ways of handling the stairs with new flooring on top of the old and none of them were as clean as I want a historic staircase to be. We didn't have the option of removing the old flooring and installing the new in its place because the old flooring is really a subfloor: it runs under all the walls and is structural, and contrary to popular opinion I wasn't crazy about the idea of completely demoing the interior to make it work.

So our compromise is to take up the railing, lay it aside, and reinstall when the new flooring and replacement stair risers are in place.

posted by ayse on 07/29/16