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Week 2 of the demolition. Of course, summer and the heat wave arrived just in time for the demo. Poor guys. They brought in the heavy artillery, and in a few short days they were able to tear down what took months, over the course of years, to build. By now we have became the cautionary tale of the whole neighborhood and beyond:this brought us lots of sympathy from neighbors and workers alike, but it still does not change the situation.

So we are trying to smile about it…This month, our calendar shows the following page:

“Mistakes: it could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others”.

How appropriate is that? By the way, the calendar is from the awesome site despair.com. So, these are a few snapshots of what our demolition derby looked like these past two weeks.

pool walls stacked on the front yard

Miscellaneous pool elements, Keegan’s toys and walls wiring

pool demo: the beginning. Concrete chunks filling the pool and burying my plants

Today, they moved in the big trucks. Unfortunately Keegan missed the excitement, but they did leave one dirt mover parked on our property for the weekend.

The funny thing is that the head demo guy, the one that never does any work and supervise, today had the balls to ask me:”so, what do you think?”, with this proud tone. What do YOU think, YOU MORON! It sucks, and I am very bitter about it. And how do you expect me to feel good about you destroying my back yard??? Then again, this comes from the guy who gave me attitude when I asked him to keep the area safe for Keegan.

Fortunately, most of the stuff will be gone soon: we rented a storage container, and we hope to fill it in this weekend. So, for a few months it will be out of sight out of mind.

On the positive side, construction continues: we have now wrapped the house, and once we have finished the demo we can start with the stucco. I have a long list of design decisions to make before my trip, and then I can “forget” about this for two full weeks.

Now, just for ending on a happy note, a couple of pictures of our little guy, goofing around.

It was Far West week at school, and all the kids were supposed to dress up as cowboys for a day. Of course the outfit lasted the time of the picture only, but it was still worth capturing. It was also the same week they had a real pony at school, and we will post the pictures soon.

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Construction …and destruction continue. We are making progress, even if it is difficult to tell if we are on track or not. The good news is we see people working almost everyday, without having to call them. This is a nice change from some other contractors we worked with. It is also nice to notice that they try to keep everything as clean as possible, and to make it as easy as possible for us to live in a construction zone.

Two months in this is where we are:

• The basic framing is basically complete.
• We have a roof, almost completely shingled.

Keegan’s room

• We have windows, which is really weird, because we still don’t have walls, so they look like they are floating. Of course, the first day they installed the windows, it rained…in July! No biggie, as they are getting dirty anyway, but still.

• The house is starting to look like a real house, and we even have some compliments on the architectural details. They did made sure the addition would blend with existing house well.

• We also have most of the plumbing done, and the soaking tub installed. We decided to go with a full house tankless water heater, and it was installed, even if it is still not connected. it will be nice to get rid of that monster tank in the garage. And it is amazing how small the tankless is, and how stylish it looks.

• We have most of the electrical connections  in place and we have upgraded our electrical panel. We do have now recessed lighting in the living room. It is so amazing to be actually able to read at night!

We are now ordering our front door and passed one part of the huge inspection of all the plumbing, electrical and heating. This means we can soon start to wrap the house.

I guess, and I only speak for myself now, living in a construction zone has not been as horrible as I thought. maybe I am just relieved that we are actually building instead of waiting on the City, that I tolerate everything else better. Amazingly enough, the messy garage (which by now is our main entry) is what bothers me the most. Of course it will be great to be able to go from the kitchen to the bedroom using the hallway, but since we can use the kitchen, most of the living room, the sun room and all the bedrooms, construction is for the most part livable.

In the meantime, however, we started the demo of our backyard. We are still bitter and heartbroken, but mainly numb, and really want to get it over with. The deck has been truncated and the trellis has started coming down (and my plants are already suffering). The tiles stairs and the pool surround is a huge pile of concrete chunks. We have boards and debris everywhere outside. The pool is in pieces in our front yard. For the time being it will be in storage.

This definitely added some stress to the process, since we can’t really utilize the patio much, but we try to stay focused on the positive. Before my trip, we have to make many decisions (the fun kind, the design kind) so we can try to finish this project on time.

It will be interesting to see what progress will happen when I will be in Italy in September. I am sure Matt will keep me informed, but still, hopefully I will see a big change and I will be happily surprised.

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