This is the outside of the addition to the house. To give you an idea of scale, the french doors on the left are 6 feet wide. The addition includes two bedrooms, a bathroom, a laundry room, and a storage room. Our builder, Kenney, is mixing concrete to pour footings for the new wall to Nora's room which will move out about 5 feet to be flush with the rest of the house.
This next pic shows the inside of the new bedroom that will actually be my new office. My old office will now be a playroom/den for Nora. This room is approx 13' X 13'. It is wired for ethernet and with USB to all walls so I won't have to run wires on the floor. It will be carpeted, as will the other new addition bedroom. The door to the new hallway is out of the frame to the right. The french doors opening to the porch are out of the frame to the left. The wood up against the wall on the right was stained this morning for baseboards (to go into both bedrooms) and closet shelves. I was standing in an approx 6' X 6' walk-in closet when I took this pic.
This next picture shows the view down the new hall from my new office. The two doors on the left are to the guest bedroom and the laundry room/storage room. The door on the right opens into the new bathroom. Their are cupboards along the right in the foreground which need to have their doors hung. The room at the far end of the hall is my current office/current guest bedroom/current library that will become Nora's playroom. This hallway will be tiled with some brown saltillo-type tile and the bottom cupboard will have a marble slab countertop. The baseboards in the hall, as in all rooms in the new addition with tile, will be a 4 inch tile to match to the floor.
This next picture shows the new guest bedroom. It is approx 14' X 13' and has a 6' X 6' walk-in closet. This room will also double as my day sleeping room for when I work nights. It has been insulated/soundproofed so I won't be interrupted as much as I currently am. We're going to buy black out blinds for the windows. This room, as with the other bedroom/new office, has a can light in each corner and will have a fan in the center with further lighting.
The next pic shows our new bathroom. When done we will have 3 1/2 baths in the house. This bathroom will have the brown saltillo-type tile on the floor and around the tub/shower. The vanity will be granite slab-topped. In retrospect, if there were anything different I would do in this entire project, it would be to have designed this bathroom a little bit larger. It is very functional, just not "grand" by any stretch of the imagination.
This next pic shows the new laundry room and the door leading into a room we will use for storage, a more formal office for Denise, or a treadmill room. Both these room will be tiled and have tile baseboards.
This last picture of the new addition shows the new hallway from the room that is my existing office. The hallway has 3 can lights in it, two tube lights to bring natural light in, a HVAC vent, a HVAC return vent, and a vent for one of our new swamp coolers (when we're done there will 3 swamp coolers on the roof to cool the entire house in the summer and, hopefully, avoid 4-figure electricity bills).
This picture was taken from the vantage point of the hallway leading into Nora's future playroom. We have put multi-colored slate into what we call the hub hall and into the 1/2 bath leading to our bedroom. This same slate goes out into the family room, the breezeway, the terrarium, and will go around the edges of the living room/media room. The tile is about 75% laid at this point, with about 30% of it grouted. It is a natural stone and, though ostensibly gauged, has quite a bit of variation in thickness. Our builders kind of hate us right now due to the trouble it has been to lay, cut, trim, and gauge and are glad they will be going to the very uniform tile in the new addition soon. A roof-top swamp cooler will sit above the hub hall and will have a vent in the hallway and has also been tied into our bedroom.
This next picture shows what is currently our living room, but will likely become a sitting room when we are done. We have a 67" TV and this big sofa in here now. It will likely end up sans TV and have sofas/chairs/tables and reading areas. The room is going to get two badly needed can lights and a fan with lights in its center area which is currently very dark at night. We considered changing the granite tile around the fireplace to the slate, but feel the current brown granite tile looks just fine with slate. All the baseboards in this room, as with all the areas that have had baseboards removed (except the breezeway), will have stained pine baseboards as opposed to the painted baseboard we took out. Rick, our builder in mid-picture, is replacing a few tiles that either were not all the way set with concrete or were gauged so differently from their surrounding tiles that we were afraid people might trip on them.
This next pic shows the breezeway. It used to be a covered entry porch to our house, but basicaly served no purpose at all except to make it a pain to get to the room on the far end (our future living room/media room). We ended up not using that room for anything besides junk as you had to go "outside" to get to it and had to be opened with a key. We knocked the doors going in that room down so the house is open from the family room on the east wall of the house all the way to west wall of the living room (we estimate this length to be something like 70 feet, which provides a nice, open feel to the house). The breezeway has the multi-colored slate in it as shown here and will have a slate baseboard. The bright opening to the left is our now-enclosed terrarium. This terrarium area has 3 largish sky lights and will likely be an indoor garden area with a fountain and hanging plants. The lighting for the breezeway includes one 14 inch tube light, 2 can lights, and 2 semi-flush fixtures which will total 180 watts each. There is HVAC from what will be our third HVAC system for the house along with a a roof-top swamp cooler in this area. The slate in this area was just completed today and will be grouted, we think, in the next few days.
I have a few more areas to photograph including what will be our new pantry and the terrarium, and will post pictures of these later.
3. We had the Land Family Birthday Party for the month. Amongst others, we celebrated the birthday for our niece, Alex, who turned 16. We also Celebrated Father's Day.
