Ready to Build!

     I realize that it has been a while since my last post, so I will try to catch everyone up on what we have been doing.  First, and most importantly, WE HAVE OUR BUILDING PERMITS.  We received our building permits right before we headed out to the Cape for a week.  We also have a builder that is ready to start work as well as a foundation form guy and I just squared everything away with the excavators.  The excavators are ready to go, but because we are supposed to get a slight rain storm this weekend (or hurricane) they thought it would be better to wait until next week to start digging.  Hopefully, by the end of next week we should have the foundation for the addition dug out, the gravel placed in the hole, and the footings for the basement walls.  The excavators are also going to remove some stumps and help me fix some of the stone walls around the barn.

     The permits came with some changes to our original plans and some compromises.  The biggest change we made was deciding to only do the addition off the back of the house replacing the old addition that we already removed (i.e. Phase 1). We have decided not to even finish the design work on the second phase of the project that included adding a sun room to the first floor and a master bedroom to the second floor.  Fixing all of the little things that need fixing in the house and adding a new kitchen seemed like enough of project for now.  Plus, the more time we spend over at the farm house, the more we realize just how much we love being there.  We want to be done with everything sooner rather than later and move in as soon as we can.
      The other major decision revolved around the fireplaces and hearth in the center of the house.  We really want the house to have a centrally located flue and we want each room in the original first floor of the house to have a fireplace, just like it would have hundreds of years ago.  The old hearth of the house, however, is not in very good shape.  The foundation of the chimney is all hand stacked field stones, and the fireplace system has been modified so many times, that there is not much left of the old system.  In order to keep the old system the engineers were going to require that we spray cement the old field stone foundation and redo all of the masonry work from the basement to the roof above the third floor.  We were told that this work, if we could get anyone to do it right, would cost us in excess of $80,000-$90,000.  We would, in the end, have a system that would be almost all new, and not the same as the old system.  I really wanted to keep the old hearth, but it started to seem like we were not really saving anything original to the house, and it was going to cost us so much that we would not be able to do a lot of the other things to the house that we wanted to do. We ended up deciding to remove the old stones and the crumbling chimney system and replace them with an engineered system of fireplaces.  By doing this, we will end up with one big, wood burning fireplace in the main room of the house, and two gas fireplaces, one in the living room and one in the office.
   This solved every other problem that we were having in the rest of the house.  We no longer need to fit a full sized chimney through the middle of the house, so we were able to move the stairs going from the second floor to the third floor, creating a large walk-in closet for the master bedroom.  We also decided to switch the huge hallway bathroom with the tiny fourth bedroom, so that we will end up with a decent sized guest room and a full sized bathroom on the second floor.
      I did some demo work on the first floor during all of this, and found some beautiful beams above the drop ceiling in the living room.  Here is a picture:

We will post more as the digging starts next week!