Vacation Series – Wrap Up

I’ve been back at work for a week now and until now haven’t sat down to end the Vacation series I started. It seems like vacation was such a long time ago!

We went to Madison for Thanksgiving with my family and had a great time. I finally got to see the tree house my sister is building for her kids, and it is nothing short of amazing. You may recall that Jesse made a guest post a couple months back about her project, and I’ve been bugging her to write a second installment. To give you an idea of what she’s done, check out these pictures:

Yes, that’s right, this tree house has more character than most normal houses in my own neighborhood.

I spent my last day of vacation (as well as yesterday, which was a week later) working on the soffits in the living room. These soffits serve a couple of purposes. First, they add a bit of character to the place. I’m hoping that as people enter through the front door, the soffits will help “draw people into the living room” by the pure virtue that they make the ceiling look interesting. Second, they make the coffered ceiling much easier to design and build, since the ceiling area where they’ll be can be rectangular rather than L shaped.

Here’s a schematic of the first floor, showing the coffered ceiling, and the soffit. The soffit is the lighter-shaded L-shaped element in the drawing.

And, here are pics of the soffits actually framed in.

Today I need to get out of this chair and attack my list, which is designed to ultimately get us some insulation in here…