Garage + b = Garbage

Finally, I have caught up to the present day! The Comcast guy came this morning to set up our cable and internet access, and after several calls to Verizon, our phone eventually started working. I managed to get a little bit of work done (I work from home for the Discovery Channel, so I can't do much without a phone, cable TV, or internet access...), and it was nice to be sitting in my comfy desk chair for a change after several days of nonstop packing and hauling stuff up and down stairs. I got an email from a neighbor informing me that a port-a-john had appeared on our front lawn, so the work must have officially started already.

Marta called in the afternoon to remind me that I needed to pick up our plans and building permit from the county offices, so I ventured out to take care of that and run some errands. I ended up having to pay over $2700 in fees for the building permit -- and I'm sure that's just one of the many "unanticipated expenses" that people have warned me about with a renovation project.

On my way to Safeway, I stopped by the house to see for myself. New additions: the port-a-john on the lawn, and a huge dumpster in the driveway. Missing: the garage! They had already torn it down less than 10 hours after getting the key to the house.

I peeked in the living room window and saw that they had also made significant progress inside the house. There was a pile of all the interior doors we wanted to re-use, as well as several other items we asked them to save. Even if this wasn't a 'green' project, we would still want to maintain as much of the original character of the house, so we are trying to re-use as many of the architectural elements as we can.

From the porch I could see that the garage wasn't exactly gone. It was just in the dumpster.
Actually, it's not so much a dumpster as it is a giant recycling bin. This stuff is all going to be sorted and recycled (including the Coke cans), so it won't end up in a landfill.

Moving Day

The movers arrived at 9 am yesterday. It took 3 burly guys about 5 hours to move everything out of our house, into their truck, and then into our apartment (which is only half a mile away). While getting stuff out of our 1-story house wasn't too challenging -- only a few steps down from the front porch -- they had to get everything up 1.5 flights of stairs and around some pretty tight corners at the apartment. There were a couple things -- including our sofa and my desk -- that we were afraid were not going to make it through the door. But these guys were miracle workers -- they got everything where it needed to go, and even set up all the rugs for us. If you are moving in the DC area, I was pretty happy with All Star Movers.

The other bright spot of an otherwise exhausting day is that it was 61 degrees on Sunday and 57 yesterday, so most of the ice that was coating stairs, sidewalks, driveways, etc. had melted away. If that hadn't happened, it could have been disastrous! And just to bring the point home, it snowed all morning today. Fortunately, it didn't last long -- it cleared up in the afternoon and most of it melted away.

After the movers had come and gone, we still had to finish clearing all the random odds and ends from the house so the builders could take over the next day. We stashed some of the stuff from our garage with a couple different neighbors (one of the reasons we are renovating rather than moving -- we have fabulous neighbors!) but there were still some things in the basement to deal with, not to mention the entire contents of our refrigerator. I was so exhausted I finally called for reinforcements. Our friends Rob & Diana came over in the evening with Chinese food and helped us clear out the house and unpack a few things in the apartment. They rock!

Moving Out

Renovating your house can be exciting, but moving is just plan miserable. We had less than a month to find a place to live and move EVERYTHING out of the house, basement, and garage. Since we aren't going to have a lot of spare cash to blow on rent, we focused on finding a place that would meet our basic needs and decided we'd put most of our stuff in storage.

Looking for temporary housing on Craigslist in January was impossible. Every single listing was for inauguration rentals. Even when I searched for "Arlington -inauguration", 99% of the posts were still just for the period around Jan 20 -- they just spelled it wrong. We looked into some rental houses in our neighborhood, but we couldn't afford upwards of $3200/month on rent. A realtor showed us some condos in the area, but we couldn't stomach paying $1900/month for a teeny 1-bedroom with a bunch of amenities we'd rarely use (pool, fitness center, concierge, putting green!?).

I finally lucked out the Friday before the inauguration. I found a posting on Craigslist for a 2BR/2BA not far from our house for $1800/month, which was our upper limit. I called the management office and was told that unit had already been rented, but when I explained my situation, she suggested I look at a smaller 2BR apartment in a neighboring building that they also managed. The tenant was relocating for work and needed someone to take over the last 4 months of her lease -- starting Feb 1 -- and then we could go month-to-month after that. The best part: $1260/month! The apartment was eerily reminiscent of our old place in Rosslyn, but lacked the spectacular view. Still, when I told Josh about it, he was so excited about the rent that he was willing to take it sight unseen. It was strange having to fill out an application after owning a home for 5 years (Current landlord?), but it was mostly just a formality. We were accepted by the end of the day.

Then came the onerous task of deciding what to bring with us and what to put in storage. Josh arranged for 3 storage pods to be delivered to our house on Jan 28, and I hired movers to come on the 30th to load the pods and then come back on Feb 2 to move the rest of our stuff to the apartment. (I figured trying to move on Super Bowl Sunday was a bad idea.) The storage company would also retrieve their pods on Feb 2 and take them to a climate-controlled warehouse out in the suburbs. That gave us the weekend to stash any remaining storage items in the pods before we moved.

The next task: boxes. These came from several sources, including Safeway, liquor stores, and Craigslist. Why pay for boxes when you can drive all over town picking them up for free? By the time the pods arrived, we could have built a well-fortified castle out of all the stuff we had boxed up for storage (mostly books).
The only drawback was that the pods filled up our driveway for 3 days, so we had to park around the corner. Oh yeah, and we had several inches of snow and ice on the ground...

Missing pieces

OK, I realize that my first post leaves you hanging in March 2008, but it's a daunting task to recap all the events of the past 11 months, so in the words of Inigo Montoya, "let me sum up..."

We spent about 6 months working with Marta on the plans for our house, which gradually evolved from trying to preserve as much of the existing floor plan as possible to making several major changes to improve the room sizes and flow without completely gutting the house or rearranging all the rooms.

When we were happy with the plans, we had to hire structural and geotechnical engineers to assess the house and foundation, and a surveyor to draw up a plat of our lot. Then Marta had to integrate the results into the plans.

Once we had a good set of working drawings, we started meeting with builders to get estimates. I won't go into the gory details of that endeavor, but we soon realized that we were going to need to invest a significant amount of money into this project to get what we wanted. We bid the project out to 3 'green' builders as well as Paige's guy, 'John,' who didn't have any green building experience but was interested to work on a green project. In the end, we decided to go with SAI Contractors. They were recommended by a rep from Nature Neutral, a green building supply company, and all the references I called were positively gushing about what a great job they did for them. SAI invited us to tour a house they were working on, and the homeowner later told me that one of them came over and cooked dinner for them the night they moved back in. Wow. We signed a contract with them on Jan 4.

Meanwhile, we submitted our plans to the county for a building permit on Oct 31. Because it is a green project, the county was supposed to speed our plans through the process, and sure enough, we got our first set of comments back the following week. The major issue is that our house is only 4 feet from the property line on one side, which means that -- according to the building codes -- we have to have a 1-hour fire-rated wall on that side of the house. Trying to integrate that with the green aspects of the project has been a big challenge for our architect! Our permit was finally approved last week, and I just picked it up today. Now it's official...

McMansion

Here is the aforementioned 'McMansion' that was built two doors down from us in 2008. It's still on the market, if you have a spare $2.1 million.

When our renovation is complete, our house will be about half the square footage of this 5,400-sf monster. While I am actually a big fan of craftman-style homes, this one is completely out of scale with the rest of the homes on our street. And, with 4 full levels, has no business being called a 'bungalow'...

The Back Story

How it all began

It all started with the kitchen. When my husband, Josh, and I purchased our little 1925 Spanish Colonial bungalow just outside Washington, DC in 2003, we loved just about everything about it -- except the kitchen. It was small, with very little storage or counter space, and three different types of countertops. Half the room was taken up by the stairs to the basement. Every time we saw one of our new neighbors, a prominent realtor, she would ask us if we had remodeled the kitchen.

OK, the rest of the house was a little odd as well, but we learned to live with it. Despite being only 1300 square feet -- plus a semi-finished basement -- the house had three bedrooms, two full baths, and separate family and living rooms. However, the rooms were all very small, one of the bathrooms was in the basement, and one of the bedrooms opened onto the living room. The house lacked linen and coat closets, and two of the bedrooms shared a closet – you could walk right through the closet's "Narnia door" from one bedroom to the other. But the house was plenty big enough for the two of us and we grew to love – or at least ignore – its quirks.

Except for the kitchen. We really wanted to remodel the kitchen, but it seemed like the best way to do that would be to reclaim all the space taken up by the basement stairs – which would mean moving them somewhere else in the house. Our house's ultra-efficient floor plan did not lend itself to an obvious solution to that problem, and after hearing horror stories about major home renovation projects from friends and family, we were a bit daunted by the thought of finding an architect and contractor that we would be happy working with. So, we did what all the previous owners of the house had done: nothing.

It took a fallen tree to finally get the ball rolling for us. After a particularly rainy week in early 2008, a 75-foot oak tree lost its footing and toppled onto the back of a close friend's house, completely demolishing their brand-new deck and screened porch. Rather than hiring the original builders to rebuild it, they chose another builder who had been recommended by a neighbor. Even before the project was finished, my friend called me to rave about how great this guy was, and suggested I have him take a look at our kitchen. Now, this particular friend has had dozens of small renovation projects on her own house, so I figured she would know a good thing when she saw it.

'John' came over a couple weeks later (March 12). He was friendly and chatty, but professional. He took a look at our basement stairs and pointed out that moving them would likely involve reconfiguring the plumbing/radiator pipes that crisscross the basement ceiling, which would be pretty expensive if we were just planning a kitchen renovation. He suggested we either update the kitchen within its current configuration, or move the stairs as part of a larger-scale home renovation.

Josh had been making noises about adding a second story to our house for some time, so when I told him about John's assessment, we decided maybe it was time to take the plunge and embark on a full-scale home renovation. Yikes!


Greening it up

While we certainly wouldn't consider ourselves extremists, Josh and I have always been environmentally conscious. Our one car – a hybrid Toyota Prius – spends most weekdays in the driveway while he bikes to work and I telecommute or take the Metro. We recycle, compost our kitchen scraps, use CFL bulbs, and keep our programmable thermostat set at 68 in the wintertime, even though I work from home, and, being from California, have a rather low tolerance for cold. So, when we decided to renovate our house, it made sense for us to go green. We might end up spending a little more up front, but we knew it would be worth it in terms of energy savings, improved indoor air quality, and maybe a teeny bit of smugness that the finished product would be far superior to the energy-hogging, super-sized McMansions that were going up at an alarming rate in our neighborhood.

Since we didn't have the know-how to manage a green renovation ourselves, we decided the best course of action would be to find a green architect. Fortunately, Arlington County has a program that encourages homeowners and businesses to go green, and we decided to attend their Green Home Renovation seminar on March 24 to learn more and get some ideas. At the seminar, a local architect and a homeowner gave a presentation about a renovation project they had done a couple years ago.

We were impressed with Marta, the architect, and she seemed to meet our initial criteria – works independently, has local experience and a background in sustainable architecture – so we set up a meeting with her a couple weeks later. We liked the fact that the first words out of her mouth were dismay at the size of the McMansion going up two doors down, and I was especially pleased to learn that she had spent some time in the Southwest, so she was familiar with the unusual architectural style of our house. We chatted with her for a couple hours, and after she left, we decided we had dragged our feet long enough and let her know she was hired. Now there was nowhere to go but forward…