After three years of trailer living, we decided to renovate a family home on Waverly Road in North Andover that Uncle Jeff was living in. So while we were at the Bluffs in the summer of 2020, Jacoby readied to move into the house that he had visited for his first Christmas!
We visited the construction site often (see pictures at the end of this post!), and Jacoby began enjoying the front porch where he would sit for the rest of his life!
Here are a few of the many pictures we have of Jacoby at Waverly Road.
Here is what the house looked like before we moved in!
The basement needed all new beams and supports
Here is the old kitchen, which we 100% gutted. On the left is the door to the bathroom (which became the sink area) and on the right is the hallway that led to (a) a door going downstairs into the basement (we removed those steps!) and (b) the door to the back porch. The next picture is a view into the old kitchen, which was also demolished and turned into the bathroom. And finally, there was a chimney sitting right in the middle of the kitchen as an exhaust for the furnace. We had to take down the chimney!
With the kitchen gutted, and a big hole in the roof of the kitchen, the builders discovered that the construction was not strong enough. They sent us some pictures resolving all of the problems.
Now that the kitchen was completely empty, with the chimney gone and the stairway to the basement covered over, we mapped out the plan for the kitchen layout, including the addition of a closet space when walking in the back door.
We laid out the downstairs bathroom floor plan, which doesn’t show an additional closet that would be added in between the dining room and new bathroom.
In between the living room and the staircase was a wall and a hallway. We knocked down that wall to expand the living room right up to the staircase. A new beam was put in where the wall used to be.
Underneath that stairway was a closet (shown below), which actually used to be the stairway to the basement. We had hoped that we could rebuild that stairway to the basement (because we had demolished the stairway in the kitchen!). But in the end, the new steps down into the basement, in order to comply with building codes, meant that we had to wall off that closet and relocate the top of the stairs into the office room! In addition, the stairs had to be widened with the help of a new supporting wall in the basement.
And finally, the big ticket item was that the house had never had running water upstairs. So we took one of the bedrooms and converted it into a master bath. Here is the initial framing for the shower and sink area.
Once the sheetrock was put on the studs, we started the install of the cabinets.
And after finishing the master shower tile, our builder sent us some diagrams of how the door and surround might be installed.
