Footings and mudscreen are down!

The weather cooperated and we were able to break ground today.
Here is my dad doing making sure everything is good for the footings.

By the 12:30 the excavation was complete, the moisture barrier was down, and we were ready for the inspector.
After the inspector signed off on everything, it was time for the concrete pour.
Here's what it looked like at the end of today once the concrete was smoothed out.
Tomorrow we'll be laying the block.

Excavation starts Friday (if the weather cooperates)

The orange lines on the ground in the picture above shows where we will be excavating for the foundation. If the weather cooperates (so far the forecast looks promising), excavation should begin bright and early Friday morning. As you can also see, the siding is gone from the gable end of the house, as are most of the shrubs and bushes. There are three lonely Azaleas left that I'm hoping to donate to Sayen Gardens, however their naturalist has not been by to remove them and I haven't been able to get a hold of him. I'm still hoping that he'll get here before Friday to take them, but if we have to rip them out I will.

[Mentally] skipping ahead to the new master bathroom

I happily skipped ahead to what I think will be one of the most fun parts of our renovation and visited a local kitchen and bath showroom this past week. I cannot wait to pick out all the tile, fixtures, etc. for the new master bathroom. There is an endless array of rain head showers, water tiles, colorful sinks, and faucet styles/finishes.

Sometime between admiring the rain head shower that was the size of a small tabletop and realizing that there are about a million different choices for a glass shower doors, I remembered that there is a downside to this process. I will need to make decisions and hopefully strike a nice balance between quality, functionality, and aesthetics. And let's not forget about practicality (since I haven't won or inherited an obscene sum of money and it doesn't look like I will anytime soon).

So I'll probably be forgoing the lovely Carrera marble tiles that require a lot of resealing in favor of a more practical porcelain (maybe with some glass accent tiles). I'll be sucking it up and buying the epoxy grout because despite that fact that it's expensive and much less forgiving to put in, it is impervious to mildew. I'll be shamelessly frequenting the expensive and lovely showrooms, and then hunting for bargains on the items I loved (how did we manage before the internet?).

Weather Delay

We've decided to move the groundbreaking from next Monday to next Friday. The forecast is calling for rain on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of next week. If you have any sway with the weather spirits, hope that the rain doesn't linger and clears out of here by Thursday at the latest.

Beware idle talk about an addition... you might end up doing one

How exactly did we end up ready to do an addition? I was in the backyard the first summer after we bought our house, talking about ideas of home renovations for the future. In my head, they were for the very far future (and some were probably things that would never come to fruition).

I mentioned turning the sunroom into a fully functioning, heated and air-conditioned part of the house. Then I made a comment about how it would be nice if we could do an addition that would create a laundry room and a full master bathroom. I proceeded to walk over the the end of the house that we will soon be expanding and start to envision how it would work. After some thought I came up with a decent plan that would also provide additional closet space, and the idea took off.

Although we haven't broken ground yet, the process has already had some bumps. I worked with my Dad and he used my ideas to draw up building plans, only to find out that the current setback requirements wouldn't work with that. We ended up appealing to the town zoning board for a variance and got it (after a small mountain of paperwork, hand-delivering notices to 30 or 40 neighbors, running an announcement in the paper, and showing up at a board meeting to plead our case). After that we had to go through the standard permit approval process (more bureaucracy), and now we just have to hope we can hang on to our sanity.

The addition begins...

If the weather and everything else goes according to plan, we'll be breaking ground on a 240 square foot addition to our 1950's ranch house next Monday. I've rearranged many things since we bought our home a little over two years ago, but this will be the first time it involves actually moving and the walls (not to mention constructing a new foundation, roof, etc.).

Thankfully my father is on-hand to help. He has many years of construction experience and built the house I grew up in from the ground up. I mean that in the most literal sense. He didn't hire people to build a house; he actually built it himself.

We're planning to do most of the work ourselves (in addition to doing our regular jobs and hanging on to our sanity). This siding has been removed from the gable wall that's being moved out eight feet, and most of the shrubs on that end of the house are done as well.