Hammer, Saw, Drill, Hammer, Saw, Drill

Plenty of activity around The Cardboard Box today.

In the new bedroom/bathroom area, the guys from Jim's Bunch have demolished some of the existing framing that separated the old bathroom from the family room, and they have installed a post to hold up the ceiling/roof in preparation for rebuilding the walls.


(The new bedroom starts to take shape.)

Out front, a couple of Latino guys are crawling around over and under the new floor joists of the bedroom addition, hammering, drilling and generally making construction noise which I presume has some overall purpose.

In the office/laundry addition, Azmir (who is Bosnian) and Senmet (who is Egyptian) are installing floor joists under the supervision of the framing subcontractor (who seems to be from Texas). In the kitchen, a plumber and a gas engineer are working together to move our washer and dryer into the garage. There is currently a large man lying on the kitchen floor with his head, arms and shoulders dangling down into the crawl space through the hole that Azmir cut a couple of weeks ago.

Much drilling and sawing and hammering noise throughout the house.

Yesterday afternoon I got a call from the Site Supervisor saying we need to have selected our new washer and dryer by the end of the weekend, so that they know where to put the dryer vents etc. So that's on the list for the weekend, along with making a final decision on the medicine cabinets for the new bathroom (do we want them custom made so they are flush with the wall, or do we want to buy ready made from Restoration Hardware which will stick out a bit).

Over the weekend we will also need to make some decisions about the landscaping. I had a good meeting with the Landscape Designer yesterday. She proposed raising the sides of the pool by three inches so that the grade of the lot can be altered, with the effect that water would drain away from the house instead of towards it, as it does at the moment. (Hm, does that sound expensive to you?) Also, she brought estimates for the work to put the pool cover box under ground instead of on top, which would allow the cover to have runners under the coping and thus hidden out of the way, instead of on the surface so that they run along the coping. (Are you keeping up?) The estimates for that specific piece of work run around $40,000. Hubby swallowed quite hard when I told him that. He was thinking, maybe $10,000...