First, you need to know that one upstairs bedroom has direct access into the upstairs bathroom, but it's about 9 feet shorter than the other one and is 4 feet narrower than the other one. The other one, of course, is about 9 feet longer and 4 feet wider, but you have to cross the loft to enter the bathroom from the loft entrance.
Now, with that background, I'll show you some pictures and tell you about the decision we need to make in the next day or so.
So, here is a picture of the narrow bedroom (that I'll call bedroom A) and specifically a picture of the end where the roof comes down to floor level. As you can see, there will be several feet (the drawings show that there is only a 5 foot head clearance 6 feet away from the end of the room) that are not useable as far as walking around usefulness is concerned.
If I walk under the rafters at that end of the room my head hits them until I get about 8 feet out from the end instead of the 6, I believe, that they estimate.
Here is a shot out where the window will be. Note that the low head room area is on both sides.
Below is a picture from the other end of the bedroom so you can see both sides of the window in the narrower bedroom (the one with the bathroom where I'm standing). This bedroom will be only about 10 feet wide even though it's about 26 feet long. So, it's a long, narrow bedroom!
Here's the other bedroom below that I'll call bedroom B. It's 13 feet 6 inches wide from wall to wall inside and it's 33 feet 6 inches long (since there's no bathroom at the front end of it as there is in the other one). So, the areas under the roof on the end that has the low ceilings are a good bit wider in this bedroom than the other one. It's about 4 feet wide on the left side and 4 feet 8 inches on the right side.
So, according to Steve, he just needs to know whether we want to wall off these areas that do not have ceilings tall enough to walk under (or at least the 5 feet high that the architects or draftsmen or whatever they are at Heritage consider to be unusable) or do we want to leave them open? He needs to know soon.
The more narrow bedroom with the bathroom attached (A) could be done one way and the wider bedroom (B) done a different way or they could both be done the same way whichever way we choose.
In bedroom A the areas under the low roof are narrow and aren't wide enough to put small doors in to access anything in there should we choose to wall them off so they wouldn't be of any use as storage space.
In bedroom B they are wide enough that we could put a small access door in them so that we could use them as storage areas if we want to do so. Of course, we could wall them all off and not put doors in at all and not use them as storage. Or, we could not wall off any of them and just leave both bedrooms as "open" as possible.
We haven't decided for sure yet, but until I do some more calculations tomorrow we may be leaning toward leaving the walls out in bedroom A and putting them in for bedroom B.
Bedroom A is smaller and may need the feeling of being larger even though it may not be all as useful as it could be. It may make the view easier to see too since you wouldn't have to be looking as directly toward the window if the walls are not there to obscure your vision.
Bedroom B is large enough that the areas could provide some added storage and it might not need the extra "feeling" of openness that bedroom A might.
Below you can see down on top of the walls on the first floor and see the tops of several of the bolts that go through the log walls with the nut on top with the heavy springs compressed in order to keep constant pressure on the log wall to prevent spaces when the logs shrink as they dry out with time. You've seen these before, but this is the first time from above.
Below you can see (from my vantage point on top of the roof that is above the outside of the dining room area) back toward the valley rafters (with the ridge beam above) and the ceilings being put up today. The jack rafters that you saw being put up yesterday are now under these boards.
This is just a view (dark though it is!) from the loft toward the windows. By the way, before long there will be more beams (collar beams?) that will go across from left to right in this photo and will connect the rafters to give them more strength and keep them from moving that direction. We talked with Kathy Pearson and also Steve on the job site today about putting track lighting of some kind on top of these beams to light up the ceiling area in the loft. No amount of light down below from ceiling fan light or floor lamps, etc could get light up to the top of this thing! With track lights we can do that.
Below you can see them working on the dormer across the way. I got the camera a little bit "out of level" here, so don't worry about it not being vertical!
As I was leaving I took the picture below to show you the appearance of the roof from the side down in the driveway. The dormer at the front is a shed dormer and goes all the way across the house from one side to the other. The other dormers (on the right) are small and are just for windows. The shed dormer allows normal ceiling height across the front. That helps just with normal room to provide more room, but particularly in our house since we need the wall across the front to be normal height since the elevator must have room for the car to go up to the loft and still have room for the top of the elevator to have enough clearance between it and the roof.
If anyone has any words of wisdom that we might not have considered with the "do we put walls up or not" decision feel free to put your 2-cents in on the subject!
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