New Pictures

Here are a few sample shots of the latest progress. It's hard to tell what's what, but I'll try to explain what we're looking at anyway.



This is our kitchen area. We're going to have the leaking skylights removed along with the huge window directly to your left. The back wall (where our favorite cabinet choice is set up) is going to be the back wall of a pantry. The pantry will span the width of the kitchen, moving the whole kitchen towards the dining area, which is directly behind where I was standing. Jeremy and his weekend helpers (Thanks Adriel & David :-) ended up having to pull up the subfloor in the old kitchen, so he'll have to replace that subfloor. Then he'll move the smaller kitchen window a few feet towards the dining room. He'll frame in the near wall of the pantry and reframe openings on the right for our new hallway entrance. Then he'll just have to put the walls up, replace and move all the plumbing, assemble and install cabinets/countertop/flooring, and the kitchen will be about done. :-)



This shows our master bedroom. I'm standing about where our bed will go looking at our new master closet area / Ascha's nursery. :-) On the left we had two big old sliding glass doors going out to a deck that was not safe. The deck is gone, so we of course needed to fill in the second story doors. We wanted to keep the option of someday being able to add back in a deck and door, so we had the closet stop short of the old doorframe. We put in two square windows for now to let in the morning light without blinding us. We're really happy with the way this room is turning out.




These last two pictures are of our beautiful (or previously beautiful) yard. It's actually not all that bad now that everything's said and done. We have a LOT of mud, but we mostly just have to replant grass - we didn't lose a ton of our landscaping, and Jeremy replanted a number of the plants that ended up getting torn out by all the earthmoving, so hopefully they'll survive and we won't have to replace a lot of trees or bushes. This is the front yard - we had an excavator parked there for about a week as they dug around the basement area, waited for a sunny day, then backfilled over the new drain pipe and gravel after the waterproofing was applied to the foundation. The hard part is that every area of the yard has been affected by the mud, so there's no large, clean, grassy area for the boys to play. Hopefully the grass will grow well this spring and we'll have our yard somewhat rehabilitated by this summer.



Here is our backyard. There is a patch of grass that's big enough to play on here, but it's hard to get to without getting muddy. The mud completely encircles the deck, then goes all the way around the house and takes up the entire yard out by the road (towards the front of this picture).