This is a photo journal of the transformations happening to my house. The most recent events are added at the bottom of the page.

Why add to a perfectly wonderful house? Well, that's a good question. The precipitating reason (this is going to be a pun) is that the roof leaks. Also, because we live in an isolated area, we don't get casual visitors. Visitors tend to stay here for days, weeks, or even months at a time. And I find that my studio space is much too small to store the mixed media that I use, or to handle large canvases. We just got tired of living in each other's laps with each other's stuff inhabiting the common areas.

There is the nervous hint that this might be justification for mere grandiosity. Might could be.

The enabler for this exciting venture is Wayne, an art history major turned carpenter/contractor.

Assistant Steve takes the siding off the area where the new floor will go. He and Wayne measure the old floor's tilt so they can match up the new floor to it. I take the siding off up to the kitchen window. Maybe boric acid will kill the carpenter ants we're finding.

Overgrown sheep pasture collects lumber.

David and I replace the kitchen greenhouse window with plastic. The old back porch is removed. David reroutes part of the rain gutter but can't find the correct part to finish the job.

Each concrete footing gets a 4x4 block, cut so that the beams will sit level. The beams sit in the metal housing on the blocks. The beams are held to each other with straps and to the blocks with other straps. In these photos, the carpenters are working on plywood trapezoids to keep the house from twisting. A couple of joists are laid on, but most were the wrong size so we're waiting for a new order. The main house does judder when the boys galumph upstairs, so all this bracing is not just paranoia.

Also, they rerouted the washing machine drain into the orchard.

The joists for the utility part of the addition are strapped in.

All of the braces are glued and screwed on.

David finishes rerouting the gutter, and I do some more cleaning under the house. After lots of erasing and fussing with graph paper, we decide to run the stairs inside the old structure rather than in the addition to make the north room wider. I dig out the rest of the ivy that was under the old porch.

Now all the ground floor joists are on and strapped in.

Boards are nailed up all around the joists to trim them and hold the insulation in. Last week, we glued and screwed 8' x 4' sheets of OPB onto the joists to make a subfloor. OPB is "Oriented Particle Board," with no orientation to speak of. The particles are chunks of trash wood glued together into something pretty durable.

I cut out butcher paper in the shape of a shower stall, a sink, and so on so that we can decide on exact window and door placement. Wayne goes around the rim boards he clamped onto the edges of the floor, scribbling and drawing lines to mark stud locations.

Then we check 8' and 10' 2 x 6's to make sure the ends are square and the wood is decent enough to use (about 10% is so poor in quality that we have to set it aside for making short pieces from). Wayne drills a hole in the wall to see where the upstairs floor is, and we work out how high the studs have to be with a sight level. I spend this morning measuring 93 3/4 inch king studs, 86 3/4 inch jack studs, and 37 inch cripple studs while Wayne magics them together to form the south wall. We measure the two diagonals to make it square and he screws an OPB on it to hold the square.

I teased him about his handwriting. His "K" for "king" looks like a 1 with a shallow c next to it. His "J" for "jack" and "C" for "cripple" look like mirror images, shallow enough so that all three letters are pretty much the same. I modeled elaborate handwriting letters on the labels I put on the various measured stacks. He shook his head and said that on his last mainland job, the guys would have given him a really hard time for drawing fancy letters. They took the safety guards off their power tools and painted tiger stripes on them.

In the last few days, David cuts a 17 foot length out of a tree and I bark it. With the boys, we haul that sucker over to the job site, lever it up to the platform, and heave it on.

Just in time. I measure and cut studs while Wayne nails them together and we tip the finished sections upright. The day ends with all the first floor walls up and most of them leveled and square.

After the headiness of yesterday when all the walls went up, today was an anticlimax. I whittled out a corner of the house where the posts supporting the ceiling beam will go. Wayne and Steven (not the same Steven as before) leveled and shimmed and filled in sill gaps. The big question is how to put a two-stair-high landing outside of the existing house while running the stairs up inside the existing house. At two stairs high, David's head would crash into the ceiling joists. But since it's a major wall division, we can't just cut out the supports running along the side of the wall. The solution will be to put a post on either side of the stair opening and run supports up about a foot higher than the rest of the ceiling supports. This will make the floor a foot higher upstairs in that area, but it will be inside a closet so that's okay.

Things are moving v e r y slowly. Everyone I've talked to about my frustrations has a slow carpenter story. I guess it just goes with the territory.

Yesterday a barge came over with a truck from the lumber company. After much maneuvering, the guy dumped a shockingly expensive load onto the driveway in a cloud of dust.

In the evening, David wrenched sheetrock off of our second floor ceiling so we could see what the roof ridge looks like (not beefy enough) and how bad the leaks are (bad enough so that the insulation is black with mold and littered with carpenter ant corpses). I'll be vacuuming gypsum dust for weeks, looks like.

Today, we just fussed around in blinding heat setting up for the real action tomorrow. I tried to clean the mold off the freshly barked ceiling log with TSP. Wayne built temporary stairs to the site and showed me how to use the router to cut the sheathing off the window holes.

Things are happening both inside and outside. Inside, I took the rest of the sheetrock off the ridge, off a column from the floor to the ridge, and off a segment of the wall where the stairs will go. David removed the stove pipe and the railing that guarded the hole in the floor where the pipe went through.

This is a major leap of faith, as we're already a year over schedule. Will Wayne's momentum continue?

Last week, I ended up sanding the moldy beam instead of using TSP. Then four of us heaved it up onto its supports and I painted it with sealant. Wayne notched it on top and set the joists in. The lumber yard shorted us one and sent one that was too wanky to use so David had to make an extra freight run in the boat to get two more.

Once the joists were up, Wayne and another carpenter, Ebony, screwed on a temporary floor. They used the plywood that will eventually become the subflooring for the tiles on the first floor, while the second floor will have tongue and groove cardecking. The main house has cardecking too, and it's shrunk so that there are gaps in the flooring. If we install cardecking on the addition at the very last second, fresh from the lumber mill kilns, it might not shrink like that. But in the meantime, we need a floor on which to manufacture the second floor walls.

Back in the mists of time, we'd planned for another segment of the house to be built simultaneously with the house that we actually got. However, the carpenter had other plans for his life so he put up an exterior wall instead and left the siding off. Since the sheathing weathered ungracefully we took it off and replaced it with new plywood. It will now be an interior wall.

While Wayne and Ebony jogged up the ladder with 2 x 6s and skillsaws in their arms, I crept up shakily, grimly not looking down to the ground a very distant 10 feet away and clutching at the uprights.

They cut and arranged studs into walls, a satisfying big-feedback task. I removed the siding from the existing wall, except for one spot that required just a bit too much of a reach from the stepladder. Luckily my fear of heights is diminishing as it's challenged.

When I routed out the window openings, I couldn't stand higher than the third step on the stepladder. When I took the sheetrock off the inside walls a week later I could perch on the top of the stepladder, as long as I had a collar tie to brace against. Another sign of habituation is that I can watch Ebony stride around on top of the walls with a running chain saw without getting too creeped out.

Sheathing is up on most of the walls. We made a few adjustments on window placement once we stood around in the space to see how it would feel (feel how it would look?).

The puzzle now is how to take off the east half of the old roof and integrate a new roof silhouette extending from the old roof over the west half of the addition.

At first, Wayne thought he could beef up the existing roof beam and run a second set of rafters up along the same slant to the new ridge line. However, since the old roof beam was too flimsy, it has sagged and it wouldn't be sensible to build against it. Instead, we decided to bump the roof up a couple of feet at that point and continue up to the new ridge line from a clerestory. Poles will have to be set somewhere to support this. The existing poles will probably be sufficient up to the bottom of the clerestory. But the new ridge line will fall just about along the south side of the new stairway. Putting a pole there or near there looms in the future. When work on the roof actually starts, they'll put the new north part of the roof right over the existing one, and then tear the existing one out once the new one is weathered in.

For the part of the addition that won't share a roof with the old house, a temporary ridge pole is now in place, defining the space.

Wayne's off for a couple weeks to care for his mom. I'll sand the stains off the ceiling joists and maybe figure out some cleanup task but basically things are on hold.

It seems to be a month later. We've got rafters up over the master bedroom and David's office. Extending the roof line up over the existing ridge is posing some questions. Where will the posts go? Where will the new stovepipe go? Perhaps they've been solved. Next week, so I'm told, we'll start on that whole business.

The second floor rafters are installed. You can see that for part of the construction, the new roof line is directly above the old one.