The Story of Pepper (aka Pep Man, Pepster, Peptasticle, and Peppy)

Surprise blog post! Maybe this will start to make up for the two we missed last week...

Last weekend I put together a video telling the story of Pepper's rescue, illness, recovery, and ultimate adoption with us. The video is mostly intended to help advertise for Poodle Rescue of Vermont, but it obviously tells a great story as well.

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psrBn-UiSQU

It's so sad to look back and see how small, helpless, and obviously yucky feeling our poor little Peppy was when he first joined Poodle Rescue of Vermont. If it hadn't been for PRVT's dedication and the great vets at PEAK Veterinary Referal Center, Pepper would have died from his Blastomycosis infection. We are so glad that he pulled through and can spend the rest of his years with us!

We love you Pepper.

From a 2.5 story home to a 3 story (more or less) home

One of the major things we always knew we wanted to do to the upstairs unit is to put a dormer on the 3rd floor to add a bathroom. A 4 bedroom/1bathroom unit is a little "under bathroomed" in a modern house, and having a 2nd bathroom in the unit would raise rental income as well as be nicer to move up in to if the time ever comes. However nice it was going to be, we thought that this would be a project reserved for a few years off when we were able to save a bit and things had "settled down". Well, exceptional mortgage rates resulted in us refinancing and all of a sudden making this summer the "right" time to upgrade the rental unit!

All of the 3rd floor rooms are on the right side of the house

This picture is pre initial renovation (2 years ago), but the only thing that has changed is that we removed the carpet. This view is in the same orientation as the picture of the house above (rooms are on the right, standing just to the left of the ridge line).

To give a quick background, our second unit consists of the 2nd and 3rd floor. The 2nd floor has one bedroom, a kitchen, living room, dining room, and a bathroom. The 3rd floor has three bedrooms, one of which has a gable dormer, and the other two which are sort of in the eaves. The bedrooms cheat a few feet across the center of the house to make them bigger (and not as squashed in the eaves), but there was still around 10 feet left between the interior hallway wall and the outside wall. Perfect for a dormer!

We got a few quotes, and eventually ended up increasing the dormer from a ~20 foot "small" extension to a 34 foot long shed dormer which goes almost the whole length of our house! The picture below shows the final layout of the dormer. What isn't shown is the fact that the stairs are off the picture next to the bathroom and are included in the dormer because the head high in both stairwells didn't meet modern code.

Other than adding a bathroom, you can see that the washer and dryer are also added to the dormer. Previously the washer and dryer were in the basement, and with three of the bedrooms on the 3rd floor, it meant a long walk down twisty stairs in to the dirty (for now) basement. Not the best for anyone. Now they are right across from all of the bedrooms!

Demolition started in August, and started with a bang! The first activity was gutting the area as well as removing the roof. Removing all of the walls on that side of the house really made it start to feel larger!

When gutted, you can see how little of the floor was actually used previously. You can see the painted floorboards; this is the only space that we were able to use before the renovation.

With everything cleared out, the crew started to frame in the space. You can even get an idea of what the dormer is going to look like

After all of this happened in the first week, progress seemed to slow down massively. There were permit inspections and other things that prevented significant progress. That said, after the second week everything was framed in and the roof was on.

Week three was probably one of the most interesting, with the rough plumbing going in along with the rough electrical. In addition, Steve's crew started working on the making the exterior weather tight. Yes, the siding is the wrong color. 

After this, the next most exciting thing was getting the blueboard and durarock (cement board) installed. It REALLY started to look like we were headed in the right direction when everything was closed up.

After this we had about two weeks of plasterers, tiling, finish electrical and plumbing, as well as a bunch of finish work. There was also a decent amount of last minute fixing, as I noticed several workmanship errors which I wanted fixed. Once everything was "up to snuff", Caroline and I (with some help from my mom, Caroline's brother, Sam, and his wife, Katie, and Caroline's sister, Christine) painted everything and put on the finishing touches. All in all, I think it came out pretty well!

We took a ton of pictures throughout the process, which can all be seen here (http://davroline.smugmug.com/Dormer). The galleries are in reverse chronological order and arranged by what work day they were taken on. Start from the beginning to see the whole process!

A review of 2013

Before we tell you about all of the new and exciting house projects we have going on / have recently finished, we wanted to look back at the big events in our lives from 2013.

• Storm Nemo. We survived a couple of big blizzards last winter, and got a lot of exercise shoveling. Nemo unfortunately shut down all of the airports and made us miss our friends wedding in Illinois. Read more about it here and here. 

• Pantry gets transformed into a laundry room, with a pantry cabinet. We decided to keep our laundry area upstairs rather than put it in the basement. To get it out of the main kitchen area, we got stackable front loading machines to put in the pantry. This reduced our storage space, but has overall been one of the best decisions we have made for this apartment. It's so convenient! Read more about it here.

 

• David renovated our kitchen. We decided it would be worthwhile for David to take a month off from work to really hunker down and get our huge kitchen project finished. We used a makeshift hallway kitchenette and the bathroom sink as a temporary kitchen while David worked. Read more here, here, here, here, here, here, here. 

• We got a temporary roommate. Christine moved in with us for a couple of months. We did fun things like spend hours at COSTCO! Christine now thinks David and I spend most of our time lost in either COSTCO or Home Depot. Sorry you always end up on long excursions with us, Christine... 

• My sister battled SJS. As many of you know, Christine was at MGH for six weeks last year fighting for her life after developing Stevens Johnson Syndrome. She made it, but has experienced both physical and mental changes that have been life altering for her. We are just thankful that she survived. You can read more about her experiences on her blog, http://christinesjs.blogspot.com/. 

• We adopted Pepper! Having two dogs was never something we expected to happen. We signed up to foster Pepper to see how Ash did with a playmate, and the next thing we knew he had been part of our family for eight months and we knew there was no way we could let him go. The adoption became official in May! Read about it here. 

• David and his buddies raced at 24 hours of Lemons. They had fun and the car didn't die - enough said! 

• We finished the backyard patio! It was great to have a place to grill and eat. Because of our fence and the massive garage, it feels nice and private back there. Since then (we have not put a post up about it yet), David has also finished the fencing such that the dogs can leave through the back door of the house and be in a totally fenced in area. It's been nice to not have to use leashes when we take them to the yard to play! Read more about the patio upgrades here.

• I defended my PhD. After Christine became more stable in the hospital I had to turn my attention to preparing for my PhD defense. I spent one month prior to the defense working essentially every waking hour of the day and then flew to Illinois to present my thesis work to my committee on July 10th. I was thrilled when Christine, Alex, and my Dad flew out to surprise me the day before the event! I had no idea and it was very nice to have them there. Oh, and I passed :) Read more about it here and here. 

• We added a dormer to our third floor.  We hired a contractor to add a dormer to the third floor of the house - this makes the hallway much more useable and gives the second apartment (on the 2nd and 3rd floors) a second bathroom, an upstairs laundry area, and a new closet. We have yet to post the completion pictures for this project, but we are happy with the results! Read more about the project here and here. 

• My family threw me a surprise bridal shower! This was awesome. Between helping Christine, renovating the house, and working on my defense I had no time or energy to think about the bridal shower so I just decided not to have one. Christine and my mother remedied that problem though by planning one for me without my knowledge! It was a great afternoon with friends (even two good friends from out of town, Diana and Viki!) and family. Read about it here. 

• We got married! Woohoo! We had an amazing wedding with close friends and family at Burke Mountain in Vermont, a fun honeymoon in Kauai, and are so excited to be married. Let's go exploring! Read more about the wedding here and the honeymoon here, here, here, and here. Oh, and how our dogs felt about our vacation here. 

• I started a postdoc at Boston University. I'm working in Jim Collins lab using network modeling to better understand antibiotic action. So far I love it! Read our post about it here. 

And that just about wraps up our big events for 2013! Thanks for reading, we love you for it! Happy 2014 everyone.