We have progress!

July 26, 2012

We have made a lot of progress over the last few days!

Johnny staked out the addition. I panicked, thinking it didnt look like it was the right size. It was hard to tell true size when it looked so one dimensional!

Saturday Adam came out and dug the footer so that Johnny could have it poured on Monday. Block was delivered Tuesday and they started laying block. The block should be done today.

 

 

We also picked out our siding/shutter colors today! We are going with a slate gray siding with cedar colored shakes!

Adam and Wes dug the footer for the garage last night. This building is going to be huge! Blake enjoyed playing in the dirt after his ball game last night. (They won 12-6)

Garage Demolition

July 15, 2012
Wes has been working every night this week in getting the old garage tore down. Our neighbor, Ervin, has been helping also. We are trying to recycle as much of the materials as possible. Some of the metal roofing will be used as the roof on the building that Olin will be building at the pond. Everything else, Ervin has taken home to use to build a wood shed.

Our old garage has been on the property since before Paula's dad bought the house. Paula was telling me last night that the bank had told her dad it needed torn down in order to get the $ to buy the farm. Apparently Paul just made repairs to the garage to stabilize the structure and it's been standing ever since! (About 50 years!)

Here is the progress:

 

Blake even got in on the demo action! Love that we are teaching our kids the value of hard work throughout this project!

The Chaos Begins

July 18, 2012

We have been hard at work preparing our home for construction. There have been many simple/easy jobs, like tearing out bushes and trees or relocating plants that we want to keep.

 

We had 3 pine trees around the house and garage (we are also tearing down the current garage to build Wes' "dream garage") that had to be cut down as well as a few bushes. We relocated several hostas, daylillies, irises, and ground cover to places we thought they would do well, with the hopes we can seperate the larger plants and reuse them in new landscaping. We have left a few plants where they are for now, but those will have to be moved before our porch can be extended.

 

Some of the plants were used to make the end of our driveway look a little nicer. How did we do?

The hiccup in our plans so far has been removing this concrete slab.

7 Hours, 4 men, 2 jackhammers and 1 concrete saw reduced it to this:

 

We severly underestimated the size of this mass of concrete. Our next plan of attack was to rent a bobcat with a hydraulic ram on it. My dad, Drew, & Olin donated their time on the 4th of July to finish this for us while we were on vacation. They made a much bigger dent in the concrete, but were still unsuccessful in completly removing it. We decided to call in the big guns, and had Coblentz Equipment out to finish the job. Their track hoe made short work of the remaining concrete (all while keeping our foundation relatively undamaged)! Check out the pics below!

It is such a relief to have that out. This weekends agenda: Garage demolition & digging footer for the addition! Construction officially begins Monday!

The Plan

July 18, 2012

We are officially starting on our house addition and remodel this Saturday. In the past few weeks Wes and I (along with help from several family members & friends) have been working on getting things ready to start.

Here are a few photos of our home before. These were taken last fall. Our remodel plan is to add onto the right side of the house (right in 1st picture) as well as adding onto the upstairs above the covered porch.

We had an architect come out and create a blueprint of what we planned on adding. He was able to give us some images of what we are hoping our house will look like after.

~Danielle