If you would like to work with a dedicated team producing residential, religious, and limited light commercial work, we welcome you to submit your qualifications.

The position is open immediately; we are looking for a full-time intern architect with 3-5 years of experience who can interface with the team to carry schematic designs forward through development, documentation and construction. Computer proficiency is required, since we do 3D modeling for all our work. We prefer a positive, energetic, honest, and community-minded individual.

More on the AIA Job Bank Posting

Wednesday afternoon we had the beginnings of our new second floor. The corner to the right side of the photo will be the master bathroom. The tub will sit under the small high windows. In the middle of the wall will be the kids’ bathroom, and on the far end will be our older son’s room. He’s going to have a great view to the backyard. We’ve opted for fairly large windows on the second floor to provide natural light and solar gain in the winter months.

The west end of the house is to be framed next. You can see from previous posts how the house will now be squared off. Putting a second floor over the new mudroom/entry and the existing porch has allowed us to add two more bedrooms. Our family entry will now be on the west side of the house rather than the driveway side. (See the framed doorway about 1/3 of the way from the left.) This will allow a sight line all the way through to the front window of the house, which will visually expand the space.

We’ve been asked, “Why cut off the whole second floor?” Well, we made a list of all the things that needed replacing: windows, siding, flooring, bathroom (whole remodel), lighting, roof, insulation and plaster/drywall. The things worth saving were: our newly installed toilet, an antique towel bar, and the newel post. The toilet and towel bar in the garage, and the little newel post has been the “last man standing” all week. That 102-year-old has been standing strong–a testimony to good work and materials of long ago. You can see it in the bottom right hand corner of the photo. One of our unwritten goals (as it is with all of our projects) is to create something that will last the test of time and be worth remodeling 102 years from now.

By the end of today we should see some framing going up at our own house. The porch had to have a new north wall (which now will be the wall between the mudroom and “porch”) since the old one was too bowed to salvage. The crew has also started preparing for the floor joists above.

The whole driveway is covered in roof trusses, floor joists and lumber. It will be interesting to watch the lumber piles shrink and the walls and roof grow. The roof framing plan we drew allowed the truss manufacturer to make them in the factory and ship them assembled. It is a big time savings for the framing crew to have them premade and ready to set, especially since the roof has been removed over finished ceilings below and we don’t want them to get rained on.

The roof is not a typical hip style roof and it will be interesting to see the pieces go together. The 3D model we created with our computer design software allowed us to modify it until the proportions were right and we were able to see the final massing (volume relationships) before it was built. We’re looking forward to seeing it go up.

Ok, so we haven’t experienced a war. But it does look like our house has been shelled–the roof and second floor are almost completely gone. I took this photo early this morning after a very busy yesterday. Duden and Viken’s crew arrived early with saws and began by chopping approximately 2 x 4-foot sections of the roof off.

After the roof and gable ends were removed, they started cutting slabs out of the walls. I couldn’t help but think about carving a turkey…they cut fairly uniform size shapes out and stacked them on the dumpster/platter. Probably my favorite part was wondering how they’d work around the vent stack for the water heater. No problem! They whacked it off with the saw and lifted it through the remaining roof.

Above is the photo of the house Monday morning before the major demolition started. As you’ll see, they removed siding to get to the upper floor framing. I like to think of this as the ugly duck phase–very unattractive before the transformation to beautiful swan begins. I hope the neighbors feel the same way. We are fortunate to be in such a nice neighborhood–everyone has been patient with the noise and extra street traffic.

Here it is with most of the second floor and roof gone. “What were we thinking??!!??” keeps creeping to the forefront of my mind. But now the framing can begin and soon we’ll see roof go on. The house will take on another whole feeling once that starts. This is one of the paybacks in the design world–seeing past what exists, modifying it with what we’ve imagined and drawn, and then see it come to life.

Today the first new walls were framed, a milestone!

Our contractors also worked with the existing headers in the old screen porch. The goal was to have the new windows match the existing windows’ head heights (top of window match top of window). Demolition revealed that the existing headers were too low to make that work, since the existing porch floor is a couple of inches lower than the rest of the house.

Since we were trying to land-fill as little as possible, we tried to save the porch walls. You have likely heard that it is cheaper to tear down and rebuild new than to futz around with saving existing construction; well, in this case it is probably true. Our desire to be green saved a few walls, but no money here and the windows will not line up by a couple of inches.

So it goes in remodeling. We could still pull down the existing walls and rebuild new, but that just doesn’t make sense to us in terms of budget, sustainability, time frame, nor aesthetics, honestly. Take a look at the old homes around town. Each seems to have some idiosyncrasies of its own and ours will be no different.

The weather looks dry for the next week, so major demolition is scheduled. Stay tuned! The plan is to remove the 1/2 story walls, roof, and ceiling from the second floor up. Trusses arrive on Tuesday and a crane is scheduled for Wednesday to set them in place; things will start happening quickly now, if the rains stay away.

We now have footings and block for the section of our house that we are adding. You can see Gary Duden, working with the concrete to fill the footings. The “addition” part of the house is only about 12 x 12 feet, so we did not need too much concrete. This will become the mudroom/back entry to the house and (hopefully) the Home of the Backpacks. We decided not to put basement under this section of the house since our basement seems adequate now and we weren’t very easily going to be able to add an egress window to this corner.

You can also see the block in place before the backfill was done. As they dug for the footings, the excavator came across an old cistern that was not being used. We were able to avoid any complications (standing water, too close to the new wall, crumbling) but it goes to show that you can’t know about everything you may find when working on a remodeling.

To date, these are the unexpected “finds”: two antique bottles, 5 bats (the majority were dead), a marble, a vacated wasps’ nest, a vintage baseball card, and some Northfield News newspapers from 1967. We’re still hoping for wads of cash stuffed in the walls to be unearthed. Maybe that baseball card is extremely rare. One can hope!