A Ceiling? Well, almost!

Well, first of all, I have a better picture of those windows that I’m still so very excited about. Had to take it after dark to have them show up decently.

You can see that part of the sheathing is plywood. A few of the clapboards either had water damage or were so loose that we pulled them off and replaced them with plywood. You can also see that the patches are irregularly shaped since we had crooked clapboards and new window openings that are square.

Now since my last post, we have removed all the stucco from the cantilevered bay, which means that my living room is once again full of bags of trash. The stucco was REALLY oddly done. There were boards nailed onto the wall under it for no apparent reason, and once they came off, the wall was fine.  Now it’s all wrapped in tar paper and looks like this:

Then we switched gears back to the inside. It’s impossible, no matter how much I’d like to, to focus on one thing at a time. Inside of this same room, it was finally time to start studding out for where the ceiling’s going to be. The house has a flat roof, but it’s not actually flat. And, unlike the other non-flat surfaces in this house, this one wasn’t intended to be. All parts of the roof slope down to one point over the back bedroom, where it drains into a downspout. The house has no gutters, just a valley in the roof. As a result, every ceiling on the second floor is a slightly different height, and this room’s is the lowest. I decided to borrow some of the extra “attic” space above this room and install the ceiling with a slant, but because it slopes down to somewhere near the middle of the room, instead we installed the ceiling flat in a little more than half the room, and slanted in the rest. The room isn’t quite square, so the break point in the ceiling now lines up with the break point in the walls. Hopefully it doesn’t look too weird, but I like my ceilings as high as possible, even if it does. Oh, and the closet doors I bought wouldn’t fit if I didn’t do it this way. Well, here’s where we are now!

That small window, that used to be in the bathroom, will get filled in sometime soon, and then the stud above it becomes a wall separating the bedroom from the closet. This was in my head for months, but now we’re starting to see it with our eyes! Are you as excited as I am? Probably not. And coming up soon, the electrician will finish roughing in the wiring (switches and outlets! Yay!) and I’m getting a roof. And I the inside of the wall in this room got wet, so I can see that I definitely need the roof. But as much as all these things are necessary, it’ll be a bad week for my checkbook.

Also, while we were making a mess of this room, I finished exposing the brick wall in this room. Isn’t it fun to see where the closet shelf and ceiling used to be? I’m leaving it that way so there’ll always be a trace of the house that was. Also did the abandoned chimney to the right just because so much plaster was already missing from it, but it’ll be covered up again later. It was fun to see that hole though, more evidence supporting my theory that the house didn’t originally have central heat.