Plans and Permit in Hand

You know that relieved feeling you have when you almost tip over (perhaps in a chair, or a ladder) then catch yourself? That's the sense I had last Thursday when the e-mail came in saying the Accessory Dwelling Unit permit was approved.

From then, it took a week before I finally had the permit and revised plans in hand, so just for that yesterday was a very good day. Beyond that, this week has seen some very impressive results. On Tuesday we passed the Electrical, Plumbing, and Natural Gas inspections. Wednesday we passed the Framing inspection and today we have the final insulation going in, yet have already passed the Insulation inspection. Next week: sheet rock and siding!

We'll try to get some pictures either today or tomorrow of the walls now that they're filled in with insulation.

Can You Spot the Difference?

Work continues on the city inspector's to-do list. Ben has already rebuilt the stairs, which look oddly like the stairs he built originally. See if you can tell what changed.

New stairs:


Original stairs:


Give up? The platform at the top is slightly smaller now, and the turn is a little more gracious on big feet.

Additionally, Sam and I went through the house and shot flame retardant foam into every little hole through every stud. Apparently this buys you a few extra minutes in the event of a fire. Apparently the "very sticky" warnings are also worth following; Sam and I both have a thin but rough layer of this stuff on our hands, which Ben says will stick around for at least a few days.


The last big thing on Ben's list is to finish digging out the basement windows. We finished moving the electrical wires, which used to run just below the bedroom windows. All of the wires connecting to the main floor now sit above the windows, while all of the wires that are strictly for the MIL apartment run a few feet below the windows.


Sam and Ben finished digging out the holes outside the windows this afternoon. As you can see, they basically take up the entire walkway leading to the backyard. We're thinking of rerouting the path to the other side of the porch to compensate.


Ben then rented a concrete saw from Home Depot and started cutting through the foundation. The windows are going to be huge -- 4' x 4' -- probably too big for the MIL bedrooms, but Seattle code necessitates this disproportion. Ben cut through the foundation as far as he could and then took a sledge hammer to it. He managed to get a little bit of the foundation out -- I guess enough to give hope that he's on the right track, but not enough to finish the job today. Ben's hoping he can finish the rest tomorrow, but I guess we'll just have to see how that goes.

Ben and Sam also installed our new front door last week. This wasn't on the inspector's to-do list, but it was time well spent. What a good looking door, eh?

Setback

Well, we've been thrown off track a bit after the city inspector came on Thursday and found that much of the work was up to Bellingham but not Seattle code. Some of the changes are relatively minor -- for example, we need to fill every hole in every stud with a flame retardant -- while others are a pretty big deal.

Sounds like the two biggest problems are the stairs to the loft and the windows in the MIL bedrooms. Ben needs to rip out the stairs and rebuild them because they are too narrow in parts (where the staircase turns a corner). He also needs to make the bedroom egress windows taller, which means taking out a chunk of the foundation. This, in turn, means moving a bunch of the electrical downstairs, since most of the wires are currently running just under those bedroom windows.

Of course, this pushes all of the other work back. We were planning on having the insulators come in Friday and the sheetrockers start next week. Hopefully these fixes won't set us back more than a week, but I must admit the news is quite daunting.

The Smallest Sink You've Ever Seen (and Other Fixtures)

Here's the sink we ordered for our half bathroom. Isn't it adorable?


Here's our jetted tub, at home in the master bathroom.


Take a gander:


And here's the tub and surround for the second upstairs bathroom:

More Electrical

We decided to put a second breaker box in the basement, and all the basement is wired through that. This way, if we decide in the future to separate out power bills from the renters', we can. The breaker box is in one of the bedrooms, next to the closet.

Window Pictures

Pictures of some of our new windows, which Ben and Sam spent an entire day installing last week.

Picture window next to the main entrance:


Picture window next to the MIL entrance:


The view from the second bedroom upstairs (looks into the backyard; you can see the shed out there):


And the view from the master bedroom (looks toward the townhomes):


The boys also got all the basement windows in, but I don't have any pictures of these yet. They will have pretty deep window sills, which should be nice.

More Basement Framing

It's kind of hard to see what's what when you're just looking at framing, but here's the basement, basically all framed out. You can see the entrance at the far end of the room (and the new picture window right next to the door). The bedrooms are on the left side of the picture. The closet for the closer bedroom juts out into the common living area because there wasn't quite enough room for it in the room itself.


Here's a picture of the entrance, which now has a little coat closet (on the right in the picture -- sorry, it's dark and blurry):


This picture looks into the doorways for the bathroom (on the left) and one of the bedrooms (on the right). Like I said, it's hard to make out what's what, but I promise it makes sense.