First, let us apologize for the title.

The crew started the interior framing on the garden and parlor floors. It was great to get a feel of the room sizes. Some feel bigger, others smaller.  One disappointment (and there is always disappointment in renovation) was that the square footage calculation for the master bathroom did not account for about a foot and a half of space taken up by the old brick fireplace–this was not drawn on the plans.  This fireplace will not be removed because they are concerned that it provides structure for the fireplaces on the two floors above it.  There goes the dream of a two sink vanity!  Expectations adjusted.

On a positive note, we were able to catch a mistake we made in the plans. In our second bedroom, the opening to the closet follows the plans exactly but we realized that there is about  one to two feet of space on either side. We thought about how annoying it would be to dig in the side of the closet to reach stuff. Our architect suggested we use part of that space for shelving and move the doors over and re-center them. Hopefully we will be able to offset the cost of this oversight by finding areas that we can cut that save the contractor work.

They also started the framing for the parlor floor hallway.  This will be where we separate our duplex from the rental unit.  The first plan was to try and save the original railing in case some day we, or another owner, wants to turn the house back into a one family home.  The contractor put up the framing to see how it would look.

We decided that the gap between the wall and the stairs would be too weird and went with option number two–the wall right up against the stairs.  It will look a little institutional but at least it won’t look wonky.

View from the 3rd floor