Half A House

Week 1

7am, Tuesday, Sept. 7

Ask me how excited I am that our builder, Jim Wright-Kaiser, has his crew start their work day at 7am!!! I guess if there is one good thing about my hormone chaos right now, it is that I am usually awake at 5am anyway, so the coffey pot just goes on then :o)

As the sun came up, the dumpster arrived (we suspect our neighbors are loving us more than they already do!)

Jim's crew of 6 strong young men landed on the house like a swarm of flies and took no time at all raising the front porch. It took them about 3 hours to remove it. This brought us great pleasure as we have wanted that eye sore removed since we bought this house.

You can see why this porch needed to come down now before it fell down. YUCK! We expect the porch was added about 25-30 years ago and wasn't built very well. It has always leaked since we have lived here (9 years now).

We are having the crew remove the original cedar siding so that we can reuse most of it to re-side the new addition. This house was built in 1953 and the siding is in fantastic condition. They just don't build houses today like they used to. The quality materials used in 'the old days' last a lifetime.

Wow! The house already looks so different without the porch.

This is our friend Josh who is also on the crew. He used to live in one of our rental houses. He is the one who introduced us to our builder Jim (who is his step-dad).

The crew quickly moved on to raising the garage after the porch came down.

This is our builder Jim. A really wonderful guy and a great builder. He helped us remodel the roof and add on a new front porch to one of our rental houses a few years ago. Please take note of this friends if any of you have any building needs. And, yes, that was a plug for Jim :o)

Once the siding was removed from the garage we noticed what perfect shape the original douglas fir framing was in, so we decided to salvage most of the lumber to reuse in the construction of the addition (ching, ching! I can hear the savings). That cedar siding really has protected the framing for the last 57 years. Absolutely no bug or water damage anywhere. Not even on the roof.

This is Chris, our youngest member of the crew at 20 years old. He is a solid ball of testosterone. He attacks every task with gusto and wasn't even asked to take this sledge hammer to the concrete porch slab. He just wanted to do it for fun! Just couldn't wait until tomorrow when the jack hammer shows up to help out with that task.

It is amazing how they got the porch and garage raised in one day. They are certainly moving right along.

At the end of the first day, we now have about half a house.

Can't wait to see what happens tomorrow :o)