There’s been lots of progress at the house this week, but instead of being excited I have been mostly annoyed with the lack of attention to detail. It’s all getting done, it’s all passing inspection, but it would be twice as fast if it was done right the first time.
I won’t go into all the details, but one of the biggest issues is that they left all the windows and doors out of the foundation rebar. My contractor caught it pretty quickly, but when I stopped by the house at lunch the other day I noticed they were leaving out a window where they had a form and had to point it out and they had to redo the entire section. It’s truly a blessing and a curse that we are there.
They’ve also made way for new plumbing into the addition by cutting out the basement concrete.
Lola isn’t concerned about waiting for the addition to be complete, she has already moved back in. I find her lounging down there often.
The forms are mostly up on the south side so now all we need is a little concrete. Or a lot of concrete. 
This will eventually be the stairwell down to the new outside entrance to the basement. We don’t intend to finish it as a mother-in-law now, but it will be nice to have it as an option in the future. For resale it’s also a valuable part of the addition since many people run businesses out of their houses down where we are since the lots are large.
In order to not have to remove part of the existing patio, they’ve used cinder block on part of the foundation. It is not my favorite solution and it looks terrible, but I’ve been promised it is not only structurally sound, I won’t be able to see any of it when we are done. Notice that this side of the house also has no windows… it should have 2 down there in the foundation.
This is our third dumpster, or maybe even the fourth. The lawn is still littered with things that will need to get hauled out like window wells that were ripped out and some of the demo is still not done on the inside. It’s an amazingly large amount of material that is being taken out even with reusing as much as we can.
My lawn is dead, my entire yard is a pile of dirt. This is a summer I want to forget in terms of enjoying our house, yard, and lot. I feel the worst for our poor dog who is used to roaming around, chasing chickens, and harassing goats through the back fence. This, too, shall pass Luna- I promise!
