Friday Night Photos: House Renovations v. 2.0.7 (The first glimpse of a floor . . .)

Work is progressing nicely on the house renovations and new addition, and I’m getting excited thinking about how fun it will be to have the new office and photo studio space. Of course, after the big dig was done, and the fittings and foundation were completed, the hole had to be filled in. Truthfully, I have a hard time getting excited about this part of the project, but the little boy across the street has loved coming over and sitting on the “digger.” Notice how the pile of dirt is covered with snow, but the work must go on!

I’m including this shot because people are still worrying that I’m filling up my entire back yard with house, but truly there *is* still a lot of lawn and garden back there. Next to the neighbor’s garage you can see some yellowish looking dead plants, which are last year’s tomatoes that I never got cleared away, and farther back is my veggie garden, with plenty of lawn left under the pile of dirt.

This enormous pile of gravel got dumped onto the neighbor’s driveway, and if you look on the left side of the photo you can see that a bunch of lumber also was delivered. Most of the lumber had been moved to the porch by the time I took this photo, but seeing all that lumber was nice confirmation that some actual building was about to commence!

It was great to come home from work and see floor joists appearing over the foundation. (And in case anyone is surprised at my construction knowledge, I had to rely on Google to find exactly what those floor supports are called.)

Finally, this photo won’t impress anyone who never went down into my dirt basement which houses the furnace and hot water heater, but I was thrilled with the way the contractors have improved it. This entrance to the basement used to be outside, a major pain in Utah winters if you ever had to go down there. Now the entrance will be inside the new addition, with a trap-door over the greatly-improved stairs. There’s now a cinder-block wall on both sides of those stairs, and the wall turns a corner on each side to make a cinder-block wall along the south end of my basement. It’s cleaner, looks nicer, and also gives more support for the nearly 100-year-old foundation in that part of the house.