Setbacks. And I don't mean "from the road" kind...

I don't have any pictures to accompany this post because a lot of what is going on at the house this week deals with interior structural support and more electrical wiring.  We did experience another "challenge" late last week, though.  After Steve met with the new codes enforcement officer and learned that we needed to change/add to some of our load bearing beams, he brought in an engineer to get recommendations on how to properly support the yoga room roof and the spanse from the kitchen to the dining room.  While we await the formal report we have been considering all of our options.  The best fit for upstairs seems to be removing the entire roof and changing the pitch on the west side to bring it flush with the bedroom roof line.  (unfortunately, this work cannot be done until the spring)  This will allow Steve to install new trusses, vault the ceiling, and prep for the upstairs deck.  In a way, I see this major structural change as a blessing in disguise because it will increase the height of our closet wall making it more usable.  It will also allow us to move the upstairs sliding glass door more to the center of the space situating it above (or very close to above!) the slider below.  The current off-kilter placement is really messing with my feng shui!! Actually, I will share a picture of what I am talking about...

see what I mean??

The downside to the impending raising of the roof is that we lose a whole bank of windows in our bedroom:(  Our plan was to place 4 non-venting, square windows up both sides of the peak.  We can still do this on the east side, but no longer on the west because we will be losing our view due to the change in pitch.  Perhaps we can find a new home for these windows on the back or side of the house. 

Steve has some cool ideas on how to reinforce the kitchen/dining room ceiling.  The magnificent fireplace in the center of both rooms will play an important supporting role once we figure out how much we want to wall it back up after Lenny comes in and cleans up the brickwork.  Joel completely opened up the space surrounding the fireplace in preparation for the masonry touch-up.  Check back tomorrow for some photographs of this neat bit of history!