Entrances and exits

Yesterday, many of the interior doors went up, including the ones in the bathrooms and closets. Where possible, we’re reusing existing doors (from the old pantry, bathroom, closets, etc.), so, at the end of this, we’ll have a bunch of old doors that need hardware and a lick of paint, but at least we’ll have some privacy.

Here’s Hyla, all excited about the door to the new downstairs bathroom:

Note the clearance between the door and the frame for the soaking tub in the left corner of the picture. Just enough.

And here’s the closet door for that crazily-tipped closet in the mudroom:

It looks better to me now that the sheetrock is up and the door is in, but, then again, the front wall of the house looks scarily off-kilter now.

Speaking of entrances and exits, they’ve finally cut the holes for the laundry chute! The chute will go from the closet next to the upstairs bathroom, down through the downstairs bathroom, and into the basement.

Here’s a (dark and fuzzy) picture of the hole in the upstairs closet floor:

and the same hole where it enters the ceiling of the downstairs bathroom:

The chute will be made of a round, plastic tube, surrounded by a wooden “chase” (which I imagine will look like a wooden box around the whole thing, with an opening on each floor through which we can shove dirty laundry).

As for chases, the house will have several of those, including this one in the new bedroom, which will house the stove pipe coming up from the small woodstove that will be installed in the living room below it:

One big result of moving the house is that the front door is no longer one step away from the ground. We didn’t leave much in the budget to deal with this situation, partially because no one really knew how much of an issue it would be after the final grading was done.

Now we know. It’s going to take probably around four steps to get us from the first floor down to the ground.

For now, McKernon is building us a simple landing and set of stairs that will match the look of the deck/porch on the back. It’s one of the things we plan to work on more when we get to “phase 2” of the project.

Here’s a view of the beginning of that landing:

Hyla thinks we should have a slide instead.