The attic conversion, before and after

Now that the workers are done and have turned the attic over to us for finishing, I thought I'd share some before and after photos. They're not exact matches, but they're close enough for French government work. What the before photos don't show is the attic floor covered with about an inch of dust, dirt, feathers, cardboard, carpet, and other debris that we cleaned out before I started taking pictures.

This is looking north. In the before photo, the window is open so it looks a little bigger that it actually is. It's the same window in both photos. The floor is not the same, however. The old floor was wide planks set directly over the joists. They are still there, but there's a layer of builder's felt, a layer of OSB (oriented strand board), and the pine finish floor over all of that.

This is the view looking northwest. You can see how we had the storage closets built into the eaves and where the Velux window was installed on the sloping roof. The chimney you see here comes up from the living room fireplace.

Here we are looking to the southeast. In the before photo you can see the old hatch and ladder access on the lower right. That's now gone, replaced by the stairwell in the center. The chimney on the left comes up from the kitchen exhaust fan; the one on the right from the boiler in the utility room two floors below.

Looking southwest, and the boiler's chimney is completely boxed in with the niche and a closet, and the second Velux attic window is in place. You can see a bare light bulb in the before and after photos, but before, it was attached to the beam. In the after photos, the new bulb is hanging from a wire over the stairwell. We'll put a fixture up there after we paint.

So that's pretty much it. We've now got to get moving on varnishing the wood floor and the stairs. After that we'll be able to sand, prime, and paint the walls. We'll be posting photos of that process as we go along.