Updates and the Addition

Things are moving along! The addition to the back of the house has been framed and siding and window installation is complete. The first floor of the addition is the single-car garage, the second floor is the kitchen (a change I’ll discuss below), and the 3rd floor is the second master bath and closet.

Why the addition? It started with the need for a garage. Street parking in Savannah is limited so when it’s a busy time, as it often is in Savannah, a parking spaces can be difficult to find. Plus, there is the additional but needed hassle of moving your car twice-weekly for night-time street sweeping. Residents have to make sure their car(s) is/are parked on the correct side of the street to allow for street sweeping or incur a city ticket. It’s often quite a hassle to find a parking space within a block of your home on the correct side of the street when you arrive home after 7:00 p.m. and find all the spaces on the non-sweep side taken!

After you build the foundation and garage, why not keep going up! You already have the infrastructure in. And believe it or not, we needed the extra rooms. OK, I’m probably hearkening back to the “are you crazy?” thoughts on that comment. This home already has about 4500 square feet. But really, there are only three rooms, albeit large rooms, on each floor and to keep as much integrity of the original design, we did not want to cut all of them up into smaller spaces. We did do this to one space on the third floor that I’ll describe in a future post but most rooms are laid out as the original space was designed. Plus, there were no bathrooms, closets, or kitchens in the original home as was normal in a house built in the 1800s.

I did make a major change in our plans - luckily before any work started in the area. Originally the kitchen was going to be in a room between the dining room and addition. The addition was going to be kind of a morning room – a comfortable space to sit and have morning coffee and maybe watch the morning news. See the plans below as they were originally drawn with kitchen details. The addition is the room denoted with the dark gray walls. After considerable thought and discussion with our builder, we switched the kitchen and morning room spaces. This is turning out to be just what I wanted. So glad I made the switch and can’t wait to see the finished kitchen!

Some photographs as the addition work was being done:

The garage part of the addition will be covered in the same stucco as the rest of the house. The top two floors will be painted a light cream color similar to the bay in the front of the house. We tried to pick up some of the detail from the front bay addition to emulate on the new addition. The back of the addition has false windows, that will be covered with shutters, for a couple of reasons. One, there wouldn’t be much to look at through the windows and second, the closest false window will be a bathroom sink vanity wall.

So right now, the property is buzzing with contractors. The rough carpentry team is helping the heating and air conditioning team (HVAC) build any soffits needed to hide units and ducting.

HVAC guys are working to place infrastructure without making too many changes to the visible look of each room. The Garden level will take the biggest hit as we have to run the materials somewhere and we don’t have a crawl space. They’re doing their best to run it above closets or above kitchen cabinets. The ceiling in the garden level has original exposed beams. We’re working on trying to leave as much of those exposed as possible. The parlor (second) level will remain as pristine as possible and HVAC will feed up from the Garden Level. The third-floor bedroom level will also be minimally compromised. The team is doing a great job.

The brick masons are filling in openings that were once cut out of interior brick walls for doorways and also working on exterior walls between the carriage house and the main house. They were weak and needed rebuilding.

In the next week we’ll have scaffolding going up so stucco work can begin on the exterior of the carriage house. As soon as the electricians, the next team to start after HVAC, complete their work, stucco will begin on the main house. Electricians will have to bore some holes through the exterior so that needs to be finished first.

Another big change is in the carriage house. We have drywall! And the wood floors are down where it was just plywood. Next they will be refinishing the existing floors. We’ve also been discussing the baseboards, stair railings and pickets, and doorway moldings. We had some leeway with the carriage house remodel because we aren't going for tax credits on that piece of the property. It's actually a separate parcel on the county maps so we could separate it out.

One other thing that is in the works are the cabinets being built for all the spaces. The carriage house has a kitchen and will be used as a future long-term rental. The garden level has a galley kitchen for potential rental but mostly for guests use, and then the main kitchen is on the second floor. I’m also having some cabinets built in the morning room for a sort of butler’s pantry/bar area.

I haven't said how much I appreciate our neighbors and their patience in all this. As you can see, it's quite a mess. Plus, we're taking up coveted parking spaces! I hope everyone thinks it's worth it in the end!