What A Mess

Well, the renovation project has started for real. The excavator was at work yesterday (Monday, November 26) and the back yard now contains huge mounds of dirt and stacks of cinder block and brick for the foundation walls (see pictures at right). Of course, it also rained a little so it was muddy as well.

The foundation footers and walls for the new bedroom addition and new access to the basement are task #1. Hopefully, this part will be over in a couple of weeks and it won't be such a mess in the back yard. We needed to create a new access to the basement since the new bedroom addition will basically be built over the old cement stairs that led down to the basement door so we needed a new access point to the basement. The new basement entrance will be centrally located along the rear of the house and once the job is complete I'll make the entryway (inside the basement) into a nice mudroom. We'll use this entrance a lot---using the basement access to the house after trail-runs and working in the yard, when our clothes and shoes are muddy.

The new addition, as seen in the plans rear elevation, should look like this when all is finished. There will be (left to right), the bedroom with bay window, a "courtyard area" with steps up to the screened breezeway and steps down to the basement, and the screened in porch. The "courtyard area" between the bedroom additon and screened porch will look nice when we put flagstone down and landscaped. Of course, we'll have to do the landscaping ourselves, so.............