Our House on Broadway: Making Jamie's Workshop Habitable

Saturday, May 31, 2014

Making Jamie's Workshop Habitable

Over October and November 2012, we made a lot of progress on Jamie's workshop. His workshop is the attic of the garage building, about 20 x 35 feet in size. Like any attic, it got very hot, to the point that it was virtually unusable in the summer. There is a window unit, but it is not strong enough to deal with Galveston summer heat. So in October, we hired a company, Champion Insulation out of Houston, to put in expanding foam "open cell" insulation. After that was done, the ceiling was a mass of yellowish-white globby stuff. Jamie quickly got to work nailing up sheets of Luan plywood on the ceiling. Here is how it looked by Thanksgiving:

(That's Jamie's niece on the left and ELISSA's bosun on the right.)

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The Purpose of this Blog

We are using this blog to document (with photos) some of the many changes our house has gone through. We think the house dates from around 1880, though it was smaller then. It was moved from its original site (one street over, on Sealy) to its current site on Broadway after the prior house at our address was destroyed by Galveston's 1900 Storm. The house has had at least three additions from what we can tell, probably all before 1930. At one point a larger roof had to be put on to accommodate the wider plan, and the old roof was left in place and can be seen in the attic. The siding is cypress and is probably original and is still in good shape. We have been told that some of the structural wood under the house was probably salvaged from debris remaining from wrecked houses after the 1900 Storm. The house was owned by the Boddeker family as far back as we know, probably back to when it was built. It stayed in their family for generations and we are apparently the first non-Boddekers to live in the house.

The house has three bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen, breakfast room, dining room, living room, and central hall going from the front door to the kitchen at the back of the house. We use one of the bedrooms as an office. Out back there is a two-car garage with an adjacent office that we have converted into a studio. We have converted the attic of the garage building into a workshop.