Good grief. So where to begin? So much has happened!

OK.. let’s start with the good stuff. We met with our trusty architect, Craig, on Thursday, Jun 12. He stopped down after work with the first draft of the design which isn’t terribly different from the concept drawing that we gave him except for a few things:

- The master bath will move to the rear of the 3rd floor so that Bill the Plant has a window to look out of. He’s going to love the southern exposure back there.
- Spiral stairs to the roof are gone. Replaced with another switchback stair.
- The 3rd floor office will be made big enough to be a bedroom at some point, but for now will be just an office.
- The master bedroom front wall will be aligned with the rest of the house and have a juliet balcony instead of the original design, which stepped the top floor back a bit and allowed for a patio.

Another significant, and maybe a little sad, bit of news is that the two fireplaces will not make it into the final interior design.  One or both will find a new home in the rear yard, but the interior is too modern to really use them well. Less sad, but also gone, are the radiators. A plumber we found on craigslist came, removed them and all the pipe for free, and paid us handsomely for the radiators as well. A win-win, as they say, all around.

As soon as Craig is done with the updated floorplans we’ll post them for all to see!

In other news, we’ve closed on our home equity loan which was necessary to fund our folly into the world of renovations.

We also found out some interesting things about the water department issues we were having (see the earlier Love Notes From The Water Department post). Turns out that the violations existed for at least three months and, according to my plumber who knows “people,” the previous owners have known about this for over a year – despite the affidavit they signed indicating that they had no knowledge of any problems.  In any event, it was time to get this straightened out, so it’s getting fixed starting tomorrow.

So, right now the schedule looks to be such that we’ll have plans for at least the building envelope by sometime in early July.  We’ll go for the permit process on that portion of the work and, assuming no major hassles, we’ll be good to go for bidding out the major building demo, front wall, new rear and widening of the back of the house.  Hopefully big heavy hammers will be swinging by August.

So, next update expect to see at least building envelope drawings if not the whole set of floorplans.  Happy Summer!