The Carriage House Project Phase 1, The Plan And Demolition

I mentioned in my last post about living in a hotel for a period of time after the fire.  Right away we had to decide what the long term plan was since the restoration is projected to take 2 years.  Hearing that number was a total gut buster, especially since it started at 1 year and then crept up every time a new professional would come to look at the house.  My oldest was not keen on the idea of being a teen before we'd be moving back in. Funny/not funny story, when we first found out about the fire she was so sweet trying to comfort me, telling me that things would be ok.  That was fine until she found out that the fire did not spare her personal things.  Then she lost it. 

This is the before of the front and side of our carriage house.  On the side view you can see the original placement of the stairs.

This is the drawing of the new and improved carriage house.  Unfortunately city zoning wouldn't allow exterior stairs so the plan had to be tweaked to make them interior stairs. I don't have the updated drawing so you'll have to use your imagination.  That change meant it would eat into our already tiny backyard but it was for the best in the end. 

I don't have great before pictures of the carriage house interior, unfortunately, but here's a couple of pictures during the demo.

This is the front window facing our driveway. The left wall had already had some demo started.

This is the opposite wall.  The left door is to a tiny corner closet and the right went to the bathroom.  The far right opening is a small hall leading to the stairs.  So this is it.  Teeny tiny. Not amazing but fine for what it was.  Truth be told It was a huge dump before we bought the house and we did a super quick DIY reno to make it livable the first time around.  That space was not going to cut it for the second go.  We had an architect and our contractor come up with a design for the new and improved carriage house which meant extending the space onto the other half of the garage and changing the stairs around to make it more functional and free up some space. I'll spare you the details of that process but the new interior layout would look like this.

The right half with the bedrooms is part of the existing structure.  It's bigger than the original since the stairs have been moved on the plan to the left and not in the back.  The left half that includes the kitchen/living area is what would be built onto the flat roof of the garage.

We had a very tight timeline to get in (long story), roughly 3 months.  The demolition process was interesting to say the least. Turned out a giant bird's nest stuffed with babies was above the ceiling and there was about 8 trash bags worth of leaves that some squirrel had carried up under the eaves.  More interesting was the two wine bottles from 1909 that we found in the walls.  The most interesting thing though was that the whole structure was being held up by a mystery and a prayer.  Seriously, it looked like it was days away from just crumbling to the ground. Nothing was attached to anything and what was there was rotted and had serious old termite damage.  It wasn't in the plan to fix it up but it's actually a good thing we did...#silverlinings.

We planned on trying to capture some of that height to make the rooms look a little larger.

Here's the bathroom minus the wall.

In the meantime, we rented a house in our neighborhood for 3 months.  We were very lucky that this opportunity presented itself and that the owners were willing to rent it to us for such a short period of time.  That's where my thanks ends.  OMG! The day we moved in we were told that the air conditioning didn't work so the owner proceeded to sit in the tv room all day with her dog (that had pooped on the carpet) while the air conditioning people did their thing.  Oh and she showed the property to another couple who were interested in renting after we left....the day we were trying to move in! After being in a hotel room for a couple of months all I wanted to do was settle in and sit my fat butt on a couch and relax.  Nope.  She didn't leave until 7pm that night. Unbelievable.  The next day I went to microwave something and I found a steak in a plastic bag in the Montgomery Ward microwave.  I can't make this stuff up.  And how old is that microwave?  I could go on about how dirty the place was and how they didn't completely move out so I had to look at pictures of them everywhere I turned.  I guess I'm not really over it.  At least some good stories came out of it!

More demo pictures.  This was a great day seeing how much bigger the space would eventually be.

So this was the start of a roughly 3 month project.  I'll be showing pictures of the reconstruction/remodel phase in the next post. Until then...