Yet Another Small Town Moment: Da roof, da roof, da roof is...5-feet higher!

Sometime between 1895 (pictured above, the earliest known image of our house was published in a special edition of the local newspaper) and 1947 (the year the family whom my in-laws are friends with moved into the house and provided us with valuable information on how the house was laid-out mid-last century), the owners of our home added on.

The addition included a side entry covered porch, a long spacious room (27'x17') and a small bedroom (17'x10') which had an identical sized room built above it as a screened-in sleeping porch.

When we moved in, the larger room had been broken up into a laundry room, bathroom, side entrance hallway and coat closet. Only recently has this room been completely gutted to the studs and has become our mudroom/laundry room/kiddie art studio.

Last year, the low-ceilinged (7') small bedroom became our downstairs bathroom, complete with 8' ceilings, separate shower, vintage clawfoot tub (restored by moi) and multi-media viewing room (don't ask).

Still with me? Okay then, located above the just mentioned downstairs bathroom was a low-ceilinged (7') sleeping porch-turned storage area that has now become an 8' ceilinged space-soon to be upstairs bathroom, complete with a 3' crawl space between it and the bathroom directly below it.

How then, did we turn two stories with a total of 14' vertical feet between them into two 8' tall rooms with 3' of crawlspace between them (do the math...) for a grand total of 19 vertical feet?

We raised the roof of course.

Well, first off, we raised the ceiling in the downstairs room just over 1'.

Then we floored in a 3' section above that room to run plumbing, electrical and heat/ac ducting. That left us with just over 3' for the top floor room as pictured below.

And since even a fully grown Hobbit would have trouble bathing, showering, and applying make-up in an upstairs bathroom with 3' ceilings, our only option was to do this...

I'll not bore you with the particulars and play-by-play analysis of just how my F-i-Law and I accomplished this task, but I will say it involved many hours of planning, four manually-operated mechanical farm jacks, oodles of lumber, massive amounts of sweat, hundreds of 3 1/2 inch air gun inserted nails and a ton of my F-i-Law's good 'ol Okie guts and gumption.

Oh, and a couple of hefty guide poles that made our neighbors and passers-by wonder if we were indeed filming Children of the Corn Part 8 (yes, there have been 7 CotC flicks).

There's more to this epic that includes a goodly amount of wind, daily rainfall accumulation, my fear of falling from ladders above 19' in the air, exhaustion, hammer-hand fatigue, an air nail gun that kept losing it's trigger, and my F-i-Law's first taste of VitaminWater ("This water tastes kinda funny..."), but after a very long day and anticipating some rain and wind overnight, we arrived here...