Afternoon Camera Playdate

On the Threshold

This is what our house looks like from the front, these days.  No change, really, unless you notice the odd light in the attic window.

Walking by, you might think you see something interesting through the front window.  If you were to (climb the construction fence and pass the port-potty, then) walk through the (still locked) front door and through the house, this is the sight that would greet you:

They're building a house back there.  I can't believe how fast it's going.  I know that the speed is partly because I'm a grown-up and time zips by for us, and I know that there will probably come a time in this process when progress seems to slow and I will be markedly less enthusiastic.  For now, I am utterly flabbergasted at how fast a debris pile is turning into a house.  I need to sing the praises of our hardworking crew here; they're out at dawn, and they're still there when I come creeping by near sundown.  I'm glad for them that the weather is currently pretty nice, and I wish them much future weather pleasantness and all the donuts they can eat, but I cannot believe that they're putting up walls faster than I can fold laundry.

On Monday morning I was pretty excited to see some lumber stacked at the site and structural stuff taking shape,

By Monday night they had built a whole room.   I walked through the actual back door of my house and it gave me chills.  It's hard to process that my dream house is being made real (knock wood!).  And that's all I can say about it, because I'm too superstitious to talk or write about how it feels lest something be tempted to go horribly awry (knock wood!), but that door-shaped wood thing up there is a miracle.

And by today they had the whole first floor.

Standing in the kitchen, looking at the porch.

In the garage, looking at the house.

That's my fireplace.

All of the walls are put together and then raised and bolted to the rebar in the slab.  That seems both awesomely secure and way too easy, to me.  It's almost magic.

I can't tell you how tempted I am to unscrew this and see what happens.

Back there is the new wall that will link the old part of the house to the new.  And they're cleaning the insulation and HVAC out of the attic, so I know the second story and new roof will be here before I know it.

This is just the prettiest attic ever.

I can't wait to see what happens tomorrow, and I'll be sure to keep you posted.

Probably something to do with these stacks of lumber.

Stacks of lumber, artsy version.

Easter Eggs

While I was frolicking around my brand new slab on Friday, a few things caught my eye that I thought y'all might like.

First, remember that awesome hot pink bird wallpaper in the bathroom?  Look what's peeking out from under it:

I might love that even more that the pink birds, except that I want to see more of it, and I can't bring myself to tear the bird paper to see the rest of the green tile-like design.  I've been pricing antique wallpaper on the Internet.  I might have a problem.

Next, I found this in a pile of broken and to-be-carted-off cinderblocks.  

I washed it, but it's still more clear in person; that's a random chunk of marble.  That top-right edge is beautifully cut (Google tells me it's a DuPont edge.  I'm going to have to learn more about that stuff), and to the touch, you can tell that it was once polished.  It's riding around in the back of my car if you want to check it out.  

I'm not sure where it came from, but I think it might have been in a stack of stone leveling the piers that the house's beams are resting on (we got these new ones poured with the foundation for a few of the back ones). Is it from a furniture piece, I wonder, or did there used to be marble in the bathroom or kitchen?  

My favorite find required me to poke around under the house a little.  I was careful, I promise.  Since the back of the house came off I've been able to see, from afar, a pipe (cold water?) that appeared to be wrapped in bits of something, and I've been curious.  Under-the-house is possum territory though, so my curiosity has stopped where encounters with Rodents Of Unusual Size might begin.  They more recently cut some holes in the floor to fix up the foundation, and I was able to check out this pipe a little more:

Definitely wrapped in newspaper.  Mostly so fragile that it just shattered at my touch.  But luck was with me:

This chunk of headline is pretty stable.

The Houston Chronicle from Tuesday, January 7, 1932.  

It's like a warm Grandma-hug, to me, to think about the guys who originally lived in my house carefully wrapping their pipes in newspaper against the cold of that long-ago January.  It amazes me to think that the brittle newspaper did such a great job of insulating the pipes that 82 years later I was able to successfully get water from my sink on 30 degree mornings.  The power of human engineering is on display every day in Space City, but the power of simple stewardship, of maintenance, of love and home and coziness, has been underpinning that innovation for a long time.  And there's your grandiose thought for the day.  Happy Easter!

Ode to Concrete

Slab, glorious slab!  As of this afternoon, we have a fabulously curing hunk of concrete behind our old house.  It's the beginning of the new house!  Here we are, sitting at the breakfast table, looking out over the porch.

 Welcome to the family room.  Please mind the rebar.

Here's the entrance to the porch from the garage, looking into the kitchen and family room.

And please enjoy the awesome closet under the stairs.

I know that the concrete is still curing and hardening and all that, but I'll admit I did have to frolic on it a little.  It's really nice, a giant slab of reinforced concrete that your house is going to stand on top of--super nice.

So Monday, clearly, was pretty rainy.  Let me tell you, I'm lucky to have made it out alive after having taken those pictures--that clay-goo-mud was epic.  On Tuesday I went by and happened to catch my new friend, the concrete guy, and he said they had been lucky to be able to reschedule the seven trucks worth of concrete (!) we were going to need for Wednesday, because otherwise they'd have to wait for next week.  He seemed to think that the rain hadn't hurt the earthworks much, though.  His guys were hard at work wrangling massive amounts of wood for the forms and steel for inside the slab:

It was unseasonably cold that morning (40s! In Houston, for April, that's downright apocalyptic.), and the poor guys had a rough time between the damp and the cold.

By Wednesday the sun was fully out and they were putting in even more steel but not quite ready to pour.  My buddy said they'd start pouring Thursday morning.  I got there around noon to see a truck in action:

And then swung back by around three that afternoon to see the last of it poured (and make some small handprints in the porch steps).

My husband swung by on his way home around seven, and they were still out there, smoothing and buffing every last bit.  They were out again this morning taking off all of the forms.

I've seen few lovelier things in my entire life.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Cold steel

All this week we've been working on getting the lot ready for the foundation of the new part of the house.  For some of you, when I say that, you'll think that of course we've been digging a big hole for the basement.  For others, I say foundation, you think slab.  Nope to both. 

Our old house has a pier and beam foundation, and we're putting in kind of a modified version (I'm not really sure what it's called) for the new addition.  Here's why:

So, the Houston visitor's bureau tells the casual reader that the noble founders of the city of Houston were "John K. Allen, a shopkeeper and dreamer, and his brother Augustus, a bookkeeper and a pragmatist."  As with all things Houston, the story is a little shadier than that.  Any Houstonian who's stepped outside into a 100 degree day with 98% humidity in August knows that whoever first convinced people that this was a good spot to buy land had to be a crook.  And while the official stories will always gloss over the parts that might make our founders look less than venerable, it is clear that they bought the 6,000 some-odd acres of Houston because they were asked to stop being pirates by running blockades for the Texans during the Republic's war for independence.  Pirates!  Their land speculation also bordered on piracy--they sold the 1,000 acres of my neighborhood to the developers for $45 an acre after having bought it for $1 an acre.  How did they command so much?  My neighborhood is a nice little high spot just north of downtown, it's true, but rumor says that the Allen Brothers flat-out lied about the beauty and productiveness of this land, saying it was seaside (the Gulf is 45 miles away), declaring the beauty of the waterfalls (waterfalls?!) to still the soul, and gushing over the fertility of the land.  Let me tell you about the land.

Does this look fertile to you?

This is some dirt in my yard.  Before we started construction, some guys came to get a core sample of about 20 feet of dirt in our lot.  They discovered that we had white clay, red clay, grey clay, water, and black "gumbo"clay.  For 20 feet down.  That's Houston for you--we are the bottomland of the whole Western half of the country.  We are the swamp that the Rocky Mountains have drained into for zillions of years, and all the teeny particle bits of the whole country are gathered in my backyard.  Which makes it not only NOT fertile, despite the Allen Brothers' claims, but also sort of not great for building houses on.  As my very rudimentary understanding has it, anything you put into the ground is likely to get waterlogged, and when the ground dries up, it gets as inflexible as kiln-dried pottery and shifts.  Add to that that Houston is lousy with faults, and it becomes necessary to get a little creative with foundations.

Last weekend, these exciting guys were stacked in what's left of our driveway.  Oh, yeah.  THAT is some building material, there.  Then, on Monday, the kids and I stopped by and got to witness some excitement.

It's hard to know, isn't it, if cement trucks are awesomer than backhoes?  

Sometime Monday morning, they came by with a giant auger and drilled 10-foot deep holes where our new piers will be.  Sadly, I missed that, and sadly, I couldn't see to the bottom of the holes to check out how they're belled at the bottom, but nonetheless, giant holes are cool.  Then they put some of that fancy rebar in there and filled them up with cement.

That left us with a nice little grid of reinforced concrete piers.  The next day was possibly even better--they built the frame-thingy for pouring the bulk of the slab, and now I can see the footprint of the new part of my house.

I'd have to figure out a way to get arial shots to give you the best impression, but I get to sneak in after everyone's done working and walk around imagining my new house where it's actually going to be.  This was Tuesday morning, and then I caught a cold and felt dreadful for a few days.  Fortunately for our house, I'm not in charge of actually accomplishing anything, and shockingly, the work continued without my constant snooping.

My six-year-old got into the act and nice pier-and-beam-ish foundation himself.

They trucked in some more fill dirt (something that magically helps offset all the clay a little, though I don't know how) and ran the bobcat over it to pack it tight.

The plumbers came by and set up some stuff.  I think those are mostly waste and vent lines, but I don't really know. One is about where the master bathroom will be, one is near the kitchen sink, and one is right there at the guest bath.  Those three little pipes in the middle, though?  I don't know what they're for (gas supply?), but that's where my kitchen island is going to be.  That's my actual kitchen island.  A real one.  It exists, if only in pipe and dirt.  That's even better than cement trucks.

And then today the guys came out and dug some lovely trenches connecting the rebar sticking up out of the piers. They're going to come (Monday? Weather permitting.) and fill those trenches with cement to make a neat grid of cement beams that will connect and support the truly giant (18 inches above grade) slab that completes the foundation for our addition.

They're going to reinforce the beams with, you guessed it, more rebar.  I can't wait.

Not being a structural engineer, I only have the most basic understanding of all this stuff, and I'm grateful to our architect's neat plans and the concrete foreman's explanation to know even what's going on so far.  I do know that Houston is stuffed with horror stories of houses splitting in half down the middle, I've seen egregious cracks in houses and slabs all over town, and I know that I had gotten used to not being able to actually close the bathroom door during the drought a few summers ago because the house had shifted so much (We had wall cracks, too.  I'm now a master spackler.).  I'm glad that folks have a way of making Houston livable and my house safe, since I've chosen to live in it forever.  And if you think I can talk about foundations for a long time, just wait until we get to the hurricane clips.