It always gets worse before it gets better. Right?

We had a busy day here today, folks. First, I had the day off because my parents were coming to pick up the boys for their annual Camp Mim and Pip, which my brave parents do the first week of August every year. I leave tomorrow on a week-long trip to Vancouver for a conference, so the boys headed to Mim and Pip's house to enjoy a week of fun and craziness.

Our morning together started out with our Dumpster being delivered at 8am on the dot. Too bad we'd asked to have it dropped off between 4pm and 5pm.



Then the excavation/masonry crew showed up. We started out the morning with the project looking like this:


The crew worked gracefully around the Dumpster that was blocking the dump truck's access to the driveway. The truck driver, Al, as his name turns out to be, was very gracious about it and said they deal with tight spaces all the time. He hauled the dirt out of the back yard one load at a time with a bucket loader. And midmorning he took a quick break and took the boys for a spin inside its cab. I really wish I could've gotten a photo of that experience, but it was an impromptu thing and I didn't have time to run inside and grab the camera. Trust me when I say they had a blast.

Then Mim and Pip and Aunt Malinda showed up, and we came inside to have lunch. Just a quick lunch since Mom and Dad wanted to get on the road back home so they'd miss the heaviest traffic on the PA turnpike around rushhour. Once they had packed up and left, the noisiest part of the job started: concrete saws cutting through the exposed foundation of our house to finish carving out the space for our new basement. Malinda and I had to leave the house because of the overwhelming noise and smell of gasoline. Whew! We ran some errands to stay out of the house and get ready for tomorrow's flight to Vancouver. She gets to be a tourist while I work. Lucky her.

The crew worked hard and made lots of noise, and ultimately their work led to this:


Let's take a closer look:

That's our gas furnace you can see off to the left in the hole. That is our crawl space fully exposed to the elements. And somehow we actually meant for that to happen.

Don't worry; Ken and the neighbors tarped it so critters can't get into the house overnight, but it is quite a mess out there and there is a HOLE IN MY HOUSE. And this we call progress.

This weekend is a big work weekend for Ken and a bunch of buddies he recruited as workers. With luck (I say that with a touch of sarcasm), they'll get the roof of the lower side of the house ripped off so when the lumber and trusses arrive next week (we hope, we hope--the trusses have gotten delayed on the production line) he can have another work weekend where he and the guys frame out the new master suite and kitchen. Malinda and I will be here Thurs night after arriving home from Vancouver, but we will skedaddle on Friday sometime, and I will spend next weekend at my parents' house with the boys so we can miss out on all the noisy, messy fun.

Since I leave first thing tomorrow for Vancouver, the blog might not get updated daily, but Ken will try to send me pictures so I can do my best while away from home. Stay tuned!

Excavation--days 4 and 5

Yesterday the crew undercut our house's foundation, which is a little creepy. The dining room is now being held up by the chunk of earth left in the middle of this picture:


Before Sonny the excavator guy left yesterday, he laid the rebar into the trough he'd cut for the footer. But it doesn't show up in photos well since it's nearly the same color as the dirt. So just trust me on that one.

Then today they poured the footer:





If the rain stays away tomorrow (please!), they will start laying the block on the footer. If that part gets done, and Ken gets delivery of the materials from 84 Lumber, and the place Ken ordered a Dumpster from drops their huge metal container off, then he is good to go for framing the new second story this weekend. It's looking like the kitchen part will have to wait till the following weekend, though. Not a big deal since the boys and I will be out of the house for both weekends. On purpose. Cuz it's gonna be loud and messy.

The BFH

That's the Big Fat Hole, according to Padraic. Close enough.






The excavators worked all day today and will be back tomorrow. We certainly didn't try to measure it or anything, but we don't think the hole is actually at full depth yet. They've done a great job with carting off the dirt, though, thank goodness. They'll leave enough for the backfilling but take everything else out in a dump truck. So no enormous piles of dirt leftover like we had with the garage project. And to be honest, the first thing I thought when I saw the work they'd done today was how very neat they'd been about it all. Really, not much of the lawn is torn up compared to what I thought would be. So far.

Tomorrow I work from home w/Padraic here with me so we'll be able to watch the progress on Day 2.

Special delivery

Our new weight-loss program

First, let me just show you this because it's a thing of beauty:


Now, with that out of the way, sit back and I'll tell you the tale of our Sunday. It was hot. The end.

OK, just kidding, but not about the part where I said it was hot. I showered three times just to get rid of the soaked clothing and inch-thick medley of sunscreen and Deet on my skin. Ken lost 5lbs and I lost 3lbs. Take that, Weight Watchers. We didn't even have to count any points. We just had to work our keesters off in mid-90s temps for roughly 10hrs.

Our shift began around 8am when we headed out to the backyard to let the kids and dogs run wild while we cleaned up. I'd show you some "before" pictures, but let's just say that I learned a very important blogger lesson yesterday: Put your memory card back in the camera before taking more pictures. Otherwise, you're not really taking pictures; you're just carrying a camera around and making clicky sounds.

My first task was to cut up and bundle the large pile of dead branches that had accumulated along the eastern side of our yard. Every time a storm blows through, the two pines, one oak, and one maple on that side of the yard lose branches like it's their job. You'd see a picture of the pile now, but I hadn't yet noticed that the card wasn't in the camera. But here's what resulted hours later:


Trust me; it's a lot better than it looked before. Plus, Ken added some fresh dirt from his initial task of the day--yanking out all the railroad ties that formed the planting beds between the backyard and the driveway. The excavator is going to need a clear path into the yard with his equipment, so we had to make away with any obstacles. Again, the "before" photo is missing, but here's a snippet of "during":


We often reuse things, so we'll hang on to the railroad ties and see what comes up later that we can use them for. Maybe caber tossing. Those things are heavy!

With the railroad ties out of the way, Ken moved on to his next masterful engineering feat of raising our airborne power and phone cables out of the way so the excavating equipment will have plenty of clearance. Again, "before" picture is missing, but feast your eyes on this marvel of engineering prowess:


Astounding, am I right? Here's a closeup:

Note how the power cable rests gently in the cradle at the top of the PVC pipe, while the phone cable nestles beside the pipe on a screw covered with rubber tubing. Couldn't have done it better myself.

Anyway, the day was moving along and became time to tackle the most undesirable but most important project left--taking down the deck. For this I have a "before" picture:


We cleared all the junk off of it and my biker/pirate husband got to work, first on the rails:




Then on the decking:


At that point we started taking turns inside with the kids. It was too stinking hot to keep them outside to suffer with us. So Ken would pry up a handful of boards, and I would switch with him and go outside to bash the nails flat against the underside of each board with a small sledgehammer. What fun! I didn't even hit my own feet or ankles one single time.

I didn't think any pictures of my bashing existed, but lucky for me (urgh) Ken snuck this picture when I wasn't paying attention:


Slowly, the deck started to disappear (except if you look in our side yard, where all the wood is piled). I forgot to take pictures of the later stages, so let's just skip to the end:


TA DA! What's deceiving about this picture is that it makes it look like we finished dismantling the deck while it was still light out. Ha! We finished with battered bodies around 10pm and then fell asleep, so this picture was taken today instead. But at least we got the job done. That weird piece of railing that's affixed to the side of the house in front of the slider is to keep dogs and children (and even sleepy adults) from opening the door and stepping out onto the missing deck. It will be even more important once the excavator has dug out the full basement below where the new kitchen will be. That drop will be a doozy.

And so ends another installment of our home addition project. Now we wait for the excavator to finish another job and haul his stuff over here to get started. We never thought we'd say it, but we're glad the weekend is over so we can go to work. And rest.

Murderers

We've killed a lot of plant and tree life on our property in the last eight years. It's not that we're cold blooded, just that circumstances required it. For example, the previous homeowner, who was maniacal about landscaping and privacy, planted juniper bushes along the right-hand side of the driveway. Besides the fact that junipers smell funny and make us itchy, they were encroaching on the driveway and scratching our cars. So we pulled them out the first or second year we were here. Goodbye, junipers (except for one, but I'll get to that later).

Then we built the garage and an awesome tree ended up having to come down. For that I continue to be very, very sorry. Next to it was/is a much less healthy and attractive tree that got to live on only because its trunk was lucky enough to be a few feet further from where the corner of the garage needed to be. I wish their positions had been reversed.

Years later we collaborated with our neighbors to take down a couple pine trees on the eastern property line because they seemed dangerously close to falling over during wind or ice storms. We've been seasoning the wood, which is good for outdoor fireplaces, and one piece that's a large, flat circle may even become the neighbor's new outdoor bar table some day. If we can figure out how to do it and they still want to by then.

Today we worked on removing the enormous rhododendron that was growing next to our front door.


The rhodo had to be moved because it is where a set of stairs down to the driveway will ultimately be. I chopped around the base with a shovel to loosen it from the ground, and then Ken took over for the fun part. Here's what happens to a rhodo after it's tied to a truck and the maniac driver hits the gas:


And here's the path of destruction leading to the rhodo's new home along the western property line (that's the rhodo in the right-hand quarter of the picture; Ken gave it a good trimming to fit it in its new spot):


Assuming it takes well to its new home, this is one lucky plant that won't have died at our hands. And thankfully our neighbors are OK with it's new location right next to their decorative grasses (thanks, J&T!).

Then Ken moved on to a juniper that has been sitting at the corner of the house (you can see it in the picture above) since we bought it, and he has always hated it. Now that that corner needs to be accessed in order to put new siding on the house, he was able to fulfill his vendetta:


The new gaping hole where it used to be:


Now we are officially juniper-free. If anyone wants this thing, come and get it quick!

When it cools off a bit tonight, we have one more job out front to tackle. We need to remove all these shrubs from in front of the bay window (yes, those are our snow shovels and the kids' sleds by the front door; so much for putting things away--they were hiding behind the rhodo all this time):


The doomed shrubs are occupying the space where the new front porch will be some day soon. We'd been planning to pull them out with the truck and offer them up to anyone local who wanted to grab them this weekend and replant them in their own yards, but then Ken wisely remembered that some of them are near the natural gas line. Not something you want to go messing with, just in case their roots have entwined around the pipe. So instead of yanking them out, Ken will have to break out the chainsaw and cut them as close to the ground as possible. Then we'll need to apply some root killer (ugh, my conscience hurts) so they don't start growing back. Whatever we can gingerly dig out without risking a collision with that natural gas line, we will remove.

It does seem wasteful to murder a handful of very healthy (ahem, overgrown) shrubs, but they are also holdovers from the previous owner, and while they've served us well for eight years, they are not part of the scheme of things to come. I don't know yet what we'll put around the new porch, but I want it to be simple, uncrowded, and easy to maintain. Ken and I don't have a whole lot of time to trim billions of shrubs, weed planting beds, or carefully weedwhack around those sorts of things. We used to try, but once we had the kids we gave up all hope of keeping up with what the previous owner had planted around here.

We murderers are currently taking a break from the heat to get some other stuff done. Tonight the row of shrubs meets its grisly fate. Mwahahahahahaha.

Generosity

I've often thought and said that my firstborn son has a heart as big as the world. This morning was yet another example. We stopped at Produce Junction to buy fruits and veggies, and in each separate line I got two quarters back in change. I gave all four quarters to him and asked if he'd like to put them in his piggy bank when we got home. "No, Mommy," he said. "I want to use them to buy you stuff for the new house. Now that I have money, I can buy you things."

Permits acquired! Supplies ordered!

Hallelujah! After what we thought was a permanent setback to our permit application process, we had a breakthrough when it turned out that the consultant who reviewed our plans (and listed numerous additional things we'd have to submit) was just a stopgap measure until the new township inspector, G, started. And G's first day was the day that Ken happened to choose to go into the office to find out what the heck all the new requirements were for. He knew many of the things the consultant had listed weren't required for residential properties in Pennsylvania. Lo and behold, G gave us a pass on almost all the notes from the consultant. The only thing we absolutely had to do was provide a structural analysis that showed the existing building can withstand the load of a second story. I guess that makes sense. I kinda want to know that, too.

Ken cracked open some structural engineering books, talked to some structural engineers at work, and found a software online that allowed him to plug in info about the house structure and then spit out the calculations he needed. It took some brain grease, but he ultimately cranked out the analysis the township wanted. And lucky for us, it said the house could withstand the second-story addition. I thought it would be cool if the software would show a video of a crumbling house if your answer was that the building couldn't handle another story, but it wasn't that cool. Just kicked out "Structure is adequate," which felt kind of, well, inadequate, but it was all we needed for the inspector's office.

When Ken went last Thursday morning to hand in that paperwork, the inspector handed him our permits. He'd had them put through since he knew Ken would ultimately submit what was needed. We left on a short vacation that morning simultaneously thinking, "We're doing this!" and "We're doing this?!" We're sort of still at the same stage right now. That point where we know we're about to get underway with an enormous mostly-DIY project, but we haven't yet begun.

Unless you count the fact that I just ordered a truckload or two of building supplies through 84 Lumber, which sort of commits us to this whole set of shenanigans, I suppose. While I'm mentioning our supplier, let me just give a shout-out to Gene O at 84 Lumber in Claymont, Delaware. He was unfailingly helpful to Ken when he needed truss diagrams and take-offs throughout our permit and budgeting processes, and since we had planned to order--and now have ordered--all our lumber, siding, and windows through them, he gave us a break on pricing. Compared to Home Depot's prices for the same items and quantities, it looks like we saved roughly 10-12%. So big thanks to Gene, who now is probably on his way to Hawai'i to retire on the commission he just made on our staggering order.

In one to three weeks all those supplies will show up at our doorstep, and we'll have piles of stuff everywhere--in the garage, in the yard, in the family room maybe. I'll be sure to get some pictures of that mess for posterity and post them here. And I'll start this weekend with taking our "before" pictures since our deck's days are numbered (3 at most). Come Monday we expect an excavator to be making a gigantic hole in the earth under where the deck currently resides, so said deck needs to vamoose, and we will help it along this weekend.

Progress, people! Progress! Now I'm off to Home Depot's nursery section to buy a few money trees so I can get those good and established before the next time we have to order stuff.