Photopalooza!

You can't fight mother nature.

Like most of the eastern half of the country we enjoyed a tasty snowfall last week. Lovely, to be sure -- but not exactly conducive to building our house.   I had pretty much resigned myself to a net gain of no progress for the week (I find this helps minimize disappointment), but was pleasantly surprised yesterday to find some work done on the inside that I didn't expect.

First, the old, unstable, sagging floor joists from the second floor bath were removed and replaced. Some of you may recall that the old bathroom floor's joists had been cut to accommodate plumbing (!) and then were supporting not only a cast iron tub but porcelain mosaic floor tile set in concrete. The result? The floor sloped about two inches. Add to this the fact that it shared a common wall with one of the bedrooms and, well...





...this is the result. Because they also need to elevate the shared wall, the crew is slowly jacking up the new joists to make everything level.  So now we have a nice new crack in the stairwell and, as you can see, the bedroom door isn't exactly "square" anymore. Evidently there was a whole lot of settling going on! 

On other fronts, I have snow in my house.





One can only hope that this won't be the case next January.

That second picture shows where the closet was in Sara's (and my brother's, and my) old bedroom.  It had suffered some pretty bad water damage. OK, really bad water damage: all the plaster had fallen off and it reeked of mold.  I put a child door latch on it and a bookcase in front of it to keep Sara out of there.  And I discovered yesterday that this wasn't the only place in the room with water damage.  Behold, the stud supporting the southeast corner of the roof:





I'm (obviously) no expert, but I wonder if that is just water damage.  Thoughts?

Onward and upward!  Here are some shots I took from the second floor, showing the old exterior walls (the first picture), then the expansions -- our room/master bath first, then Sara's room. The girl is going to have space! We may not see her for weeks.







And one more change of note, the studs are now up that separate the south wall of the kitchen from the hall that will lead downstairs. Skip is planning on coming back out next week to drop that section where the hall will be (to make it level with the new family room floor.  Don't try to visualize it, it will only confuse you).  Perhaps once he finds out how freaking cold it is he will change his mind.



Just a couple more random shots, illustrating just how very classy we really are... the neighbors simply have to love us.





And finally, a shot of our back yard from the second floor. It's not much right now, but it's our little kingdom. One of these days it will be filled with flower beds and vegetable gardens and neighborhood kids playing in the sun.

One of these days...