Come Together

Yet again, I have gotten behind on posting. In an effort to justify my negligence, I will attempt to blame it on being sick for the past four weeks; however, I recognize that it’s a terrible excuse because I have spent a lot of time laying around doing nothing recuperating, when I could have been writing. Needless to say, expect another update shortly after this one.

In order to move on from the first floor, we needed one really important element: stairs. The main portion of our house is upstairs, so the first thing we wanted people to see when coming in the front door is a set of wide, welcoming stairs. I can’t decide if I am more excited about how great they look or about no longer having to scramble up the steep, muddy slope to get to the back of the house.

The main stairwell, as viewed from the front door. This wonderful addition serves the dual benefit of looking awesome and making it sooo much easier to get between the floors.

John building one of the small sets of stairs that lead from the half floor to the second floor

From there, we starting installed joists – evenly spacing structural beams used to support the floor above – and placed Advantech boards across the top to create the base of the second floor.

Me beginning work on the second floor. We constructed the flooring by placing advantech boards on top of 2×12″ joists.

It’s possible that the other reason I haven’t written in a while is because we made a bunch of important, but uneventful progress. When there isn’t some dramatic event or frustrating red tape to deal with, I don’t know what to write about. That being said, I am definitely not complaining. Hopefully our progress continues to be just as uneventful.

A view inside the garage now that we have added the stairs and the floor above.

The view from the road. All the foliage we have worked hard to preserve obscures most of the first floor (and even some of the second floor!), so we still feel a sense of privacy.