Closet framing continues.

One of the messiest (but strangely fun) jobs upstairs.  We used cellulose insulation to fill in all the joist cavities prior to putting the subfloors down in the new closet areas.

It was definitely a two person job, as you really need someone to run the machine and keep jamming the chunks of insulation into the hopper.  But once you get a good routing going, it really goes quickly.  The only catch is that it blows so much dust that you can’t even see what you’re doing!

We had a couple of areas upstairs that were completely sealed off. I don’t think that’s ever a good idea, since you can’t get in to check on things.  Like the piles of raccoon poop that we found in this area.  After screening off the entry points, we started framing out walls for a closet.  Why close the space off and waste it?

Part of our upstairs plan was to add a 1/2 bath, since it would make things much easier on everyone in the house.  To do this, we removed the original bedroom wall (see left pic), moved it further back and built a new wall that integrated with the existing wall of the main room.  Nothing has been plumbed yet, but the plan is to run the pipes up through the unused stairwell in the back of the house.

This is one of the craziest ideas we had. It started with an innocent question…”I wonder if we could raise the ceiling upstairs?” Well, the answer was ‘yes,’ but not by much. Julio carefully dismantled each roofing truss and moved up or replaced each board to give a height 3″ higher than before. That 3″ is key when you’re going from a finished height of about 6′1″ to 6′4″. That means that most people can now walk up there without stooping, which made the 5 long days of work worth the effort. An added bonus is that the ceiling is now more level than before, because a few of the old rafters were undersized and had sagged a bit.