Given our property’s four 19th century buildings, today’s sunken living room post will likely remain my one and only Rosslyn reference to mid-century modern.
That said, my first draft of today’s post was titled “Bottomless Living Room”. I liked that. It captured the prevailing sentiment of those early days. A bottomless pit. A giant sinkhole! A yawning, gaping void right in the middle of our house swallowing up hopes, resources, time, deadlines, and any hope of completing the project within our original timeline or budget. Those were anxious times. With each successive deconstruction, we discovered more problems. Setbacks and recalculations had become the familiar refrain. The scope of work mushroomed. We began to lose all perspective.
That preliminary title invited a counterpoint title, “Topless Living Room” since it wasn’t only the floor that demanded reengineering… Clickbait?! I sidestepped the temptation and settled on this more entertaining alternative since its implied incongruity (in a home built in the early 1800s with Federal, Georgian, and Greek Revival elements) amused me. And humor has always served me well in times of angsty unease.
Back to Rosslyn’s sunken living room eighteen years ago today. And briefly back to yesterday’s post in case you missed the preview.
Rosslyn’s living room today is a warm and welcoming space, the heart and soul of our entertaining at this time of year.
Now let’s rewind the clock to December 19, 2006, exactly eighteen years ago today. (Source: Living Room South Elevation, Now & Then)
The existing floor had proven to be unsalvageable. The photographs in yesterday’s post document the first phase, as we began to demo the floor on the south side of the room.
Almost all of joists had rotted away from the masonry foundation. Several attempts had evidently been made to support the failed floor from underneath by stacking makeshift piers made from stone and blocks of wood. But the rot was pervasive, and even these structural Band-Aids were insufficient.
[…]
And so,… the original floor was 100% replaced. And that story (with plenty of photos to document the agonizing transformation) for another day… (Source: Living Room South Elevation, Now & Then)
Today we fast forward to the next chapter in that story of transformation. Welcome to our sunken living room!
The incredible excitement and optimism of our early months had begun to fade by this point. Struggles to get approval from the planning board had been challenging and taxing. And though our inspection had given us a sobering sense for just how many major hurdles lay ahead, our worst case scenarios kept getting worse. As we began to dig in, to explore and analyze and learn what secrets Rosslyn was concealing, our anxieties grew.
The yawning void in these photographs, our (hopefully only short term) sunken living room, revealed just how structurally compromised the western ell of the building had been. But it also welcomed new brainstorms, new possibilities for the space that we would be able to recover underneath the living room and underneath the morning room. Because we had to rebuild this space, we actually were beginning to conceive of a silver lining… But I’m getting ahead of myself! 
What do you think?