Exciting Things Are Happening!

Earlier this week, while I was working at my desk, I looked up and saw this:

The digger is back!

Whoa.  Now that’s a view!  It kind of scared me.  But, the good news is that this view means we are cleaning up the old driveway, and the “palm” trees, so that we can have our new driveway put in.  Once the driveway is in it will look like we have an entirely new house.  I hope.  Here are some more pictures of the old asphalt going bye-bye:

Here’s the view out of the front door

Another picture from my desk

And, while work is going on in the front (or, the street side – we can never figure out what is the front and what is the back), work is also going on in the back – or lake side.

Deck beginnings

We have finally decided to go ahead and have the deck built with a composite material.  After going back and forth between the cost of building an 850 square foot deck out of composite, and building it the way we really want it and the way that will last the longest, we said the heck with it and went for it.  Might as well do things right the first time, right?  Now instead of cleaning and sealing the deck every spring we will be enjoying it.

Soon the planks will be in place.

Monday was a busy day.  People were swarming.  Along with the front and the back being worked on, we also had people working on the inside.  The plumbers were back and now we have this in the basement:

The “tank less” water heater is a tank!

Let there be hot water.

We did lose something.  The trim guys finished up last week, packed up their trailer, and, poof!, they’re gone.  Here are a few pictures of what they left behind:

Here are the windows in the sun room, all trimmed out

These are the pocket doors between the sun room and bedroom

This is the bedroom door and trim

And, some of the doors are painted. The trim will be painted the same color, as will all of the baseboard

And here is the railing around the stairs. This is special because the first house we lived in, and where we were living when both of the kids were born, had a combination of painted and stained stair rails.

And, although most of the floors are covered with cardboard right now, here’s a peak.

If you noticed, in the picture above, we have our dining room table in our dining room! We ate our first dinner there over the weekend – hot dogs and baked beans! In closing, here are the pictures I’ll leave you with.  Hopefully the first picture in the next post will be the completed driveway!

From the street

And, from the front door