Lisa, the boys, and I stopped by Maxine on the way to her mom's for dinner, and what we saw was astounding. Not only was the debris pretty much gone from the front...
I open the front door to find that it was missing for the house as well...
I move around the outside of the house...
and notice that the east dining room wall is gone.
The corner with the circuit breaker box is still there, but other than that the north and east walls are gone:
The kitchen is a clean slate with no walls... I can almost see how it will look with the island to the right and the cabinetry to the left and the booth/breakfast nook at the far end...
Moving across the house, I can completely see how the great room will look...
It's weird... without the walls, the house almost looks smaller... not what we expected. We figured without the walls, it would seem huge, expansive... but maybe you need the walls, the boundaries, to see how much space you really have. Notice that the subfloor has been put down in the living room.
And the supports from the footings are ready to bear the load of a second story!
Moving up a little, the wall separating the garage from the house is exposed... this area will be the downstairs bedroom #2 as well as the laundry room...
It looks so clean...
A peak into the garage reveals storage for the windows and the debris from pulling up the hardwood floor...
Moving down the hall, the guest bath is now completely gutted...
The showerhead (upper left corner) looks so out of place. And here, the subfloor isn't yet complete...
Yep, the master bedroom and its adjacent areas don't have all the subfloor complete...
but the closet is gutted...
To the east of this, we can see where the new dining room will be...
So I climb on the roof of the garage to take a look down:
And it no longer looks like hurricane/tornado damage... it looks like something to work with...
It's funny to see the front walls still standing (in stark relief to the emptiness behind)...
And it's great to see smiling faces...
The last few days have been hard. A month out of our home, and Lisa's feeling homesick, I'm feeling displaced, and Jack hasn't been able to enter the house (except for the quick marking of the foundation) since we moved out...
There's still some clean-up to do (debris in the backyard, the pulled up hardwood flooring, more junk off to the side of the house)... so we'll need another emptying of the dumpster soon.
From the front, it still looks normal (kinda)...
But we know better. A few more pieces of subflooring, and I think Fred will be ready to start framing (which means another check... this one for 70K [the first of two at that amount, the largest checks we'll write in this endeavor])... and the canvas will be completely clean... and time to build our masterpiece.
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