We Begin Again

Ted is back and the boys are going great guns. Now, that the first floor has had its face lift, the second floor is the recipient of a new girder as shown in this link:

The Second Floor Gets a Girder

We work from the ground floor up.  Ted replaced all the windows in the basement, and then the mason came.  He pointed all the windows, filled in all the cracks in the foundation,  and bricked up the old bulk head.

A little Edgar Allen Poe going on here?

Ted also went to work on the basement stairs.  He was calling himself a dummy because he cut the stairway before checking to see if the local code had changed.  Since he was trying to fit the stairs in a tight space, he cut them for 8" risers, which was the maximum height under the old code.  It's now 7 and 3/4".  Can you stand it?  Two hours lost.  Tragedy.

The stairs do add to a dilemma we have.  I had the downstairs floorplan designed around the placement of the mosaic:

The idea is that when we walk in the front door, we face this just as we did in the Asheville house.  The mosaic is big--about 48" across.  It needs a 5' wall.  Martha designed the wall to be 4'.  Once we moved the fireplace farther into the living room and off the line of the wall, we created more space to make the wall 5' and still have sufficient pathways around the fireplace into the dining room and kitchen.  Now, the problem is that there may not be sufficient headroom in the basement for the staircase.  While the basement isn't living space, Ted wants to check with the housing inspector about how low the ceiling above the stairs can be.  The way to increase the headroom is to bring the staircase to the second floor farther into the front hall, possibly obstructing a full view of the mosaic. 

THIS CANNOT STAND. ART BEFORE HEADBANGING PREVENTION.