Ground Hog Day - Flight of the Fat Boy

So, we have had a pesky ground hog family living on the property for as long as we can remember. Our neighbor often uses some kind of air rifle to attempt to exterminate them one by one and Sean has tried to stink them out and gas them out with many different types of potions - yet this year, yet again, a new family of "fat boys" as we affectionately call them have popped up again.

Now that we have destroyed their playground, they are on the run and all look very confused. This one was sitting on the front ledge one day when I was home for lunch, so I grabbed my camera and tried to sneak up on him to get a pic before he ran away. Much to my surprise, he didn't move at all and I was able to take some up close and personal shots of our Fat Boy. He created a new hole at the front of the house overnight - boy is he going to be mad when the footers get poured and he will be evicted once again.

These are the views of the lovely storage pod and I think the reality of the garbage taken out of the garage and shed was much greater in person than the photo captures. It felt really good to purge and I hope we can keep up the trend of keeping the "stuff" to a minimum.

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHhh! Today was the first day I forgot to take before pictures and I am sooo mad! I am mad b/c you would be soo proud of us if you ONLY KNEW what these garage and shed spaces looked like before we started the massive clean out!! You would think some sort of miracle happened here -- well it did, and their names are Dan, Mike, Joe and Madeleine.

The Ohio Blue stone stripped from the front of the house was tackled by Joe and Mike who had them cleaned and stacked and categorized by girth, no kidding! The mortar they chipped off the stone was left in the demo area to be used as fill.

Madeleine and Dan helped Sean and I clean out 9 years of God Knows What - some goes in the garbage pile and the rest was stored into boxes and put in the storage unit in the front/side yard. In the shed photo you can see the gas line running through the ceiling that also continues into the garage rafters and then into the house. Remember, we have no basement, just slab on grade so utilities float through conduits and the HVAC ductwork is encased in the slab. The existing shed will become the new office, and the existing garage space will become the media room/family room.

Post-Sycamore

The top pic is the post sycamore pic. If you don't live here you hardly would notice it is gone, but the lack of shade throughout the day is very evident to us. It's not like we can sit on the shady patio anymore anyway, so I guess the timing is right.

Madeleine was in town this weekend and was amazed by the progress. Though she wasn't thrilled to schlep garbage and boxes on Saturday, she got excited to help Sean confirm some measurements in the backyard, especially when she was put in charge of spraying the stakes. Of course she did find time to take a break to sing Camp Rock tracks atop the majestic sycamore stump stage! Notice the huge pile of stone from the front of the house -- and check out the amazing work Mike and Joe accomplished with it. . .

Timmmm Brrrrrrr Falling the Sycamore 7/11/08

Take a good look at the top pic on this entry -- the big sycamore came down today. It took the four men about 6 hours to remove the tall tree from the backyard to make way for the new addition. We had it evaluated a few years ago because the safety cables holding the split trunks together had snapped and we wanted an update regarding the health of the giant. The arborist said it had a desease and was being eaten from the inside out by bugs - much of one of the trunks was hollow as you can see in the last picture. It was an amazing site watching it come down - Andrea, Erin and I watched from the family room as it came down limb by limb.

7/10/08 Stone Removal

Work began today on the front of the house with demolition of the bushes along the right side of the house - just outside the master bedroom windows and the brush/bushes/weeds under the two bathroom windows just to the right of the existing front door (that is hiding behind the umbrella tree. The hedge row under the bank of six windows that looks into the existing dining space was also removed because this will be where the new front door will be located and the new front foyer and covered porch. They removed all of the stone from the front of the house and dumped it into the backyard - the goal is to have Sean's dad, Joe, look at it to see if he can clean the Ohio Blue stone so we could incorporate it somehow into the new design - maybe for the hearth of the fireplace, etc.

Ground Breaking July 9, 2008

Sean and his youngest brother, Michael, surveyed the rear of the property at 7am that morning to mark the areas that would need to be hit by the demolition crew. They had it rough staked and ready before the crew arrived at the property.

The boys left for their next job site before the crew arrived. I became very emotional when they drove the machinery up the driveway - this was really for real, oh my god! No turning back at this point! The rubble in the rear demo picture is the patio being chomped up - they had the whole rear area demolished within a couple of hours.

After I took the pic of them getting started in the back, I realized I really needed to stop watching their every move and get ready for work -- so I hopped in the shower, blew dry my hair and was getting dressed when there was a vibration of the house and the power went dead. I threw the rest of my clothes on and ran to the back window to see the (3rd pic) power line that goes from the back yard pole to the house laying on top of the cage of the bobcat! It was pretty scary to look into his eyes and see the fear of being toasted so early in the morning, but luckily the backhoe driver was resourceful and used the bucket to lift the live wire off of the backhoe so that the driver could get to safety.

After a nice dinner out with conversation consisting of positive hopes of how we hope this accident on the job site on day one was not a sign of things to come. . . the very nice electrical workers managed to have the power up and running by the time we woke up the next morning.