Concrete Evidence

Thursday was sunny and gorgeous--the perfect day for concrete!

Yep, it finally happened! The birdies were singing just for us. I snapped these photos on my lunch break on Thursday, just a few minutes after the concrete truck left. Obviously I could only get limited angles, because it was still wet and I couldn't walk on it!

As you can see from the Before/After picture above, the foundation is finally tied into the structure itself--finally making this side of the house more structurally sound. (Part of this section was not originally built on any foundation--genius.)

This may not look very exciting to you, but we're so thrilled to have crossed this off the list. (Note: the white pipe in the middle of the floor will be a floor drain. The white square along the right hand wall is the drain for the sink.)

And even more excitement went down this weekend too: our carpenter Rick came on Saturday and gave us the rundown of lumber and supplies we need to buy. He will get started building the front wall, installing the 2nd floor joists and reinforcing the other walls in two weeks. We try to do as much of the work ourselves for this renovation, but we trust the structural stuff to experts who can do it much better and faster than we can.

I am pretty thankful that this finally happened, despite the delays. We've gotten an intense amount of rain this spring, and Thursday was the only day the concrete truck could come in basically the past two weeks. He almost didn't make it out of the yard, as these lovely tracks show:

And Saturday we had a crazy storm complete with power outages and tornadoes touching down around the neighborhood. So, though we're like a year behind schedule, I'm happy that things are moving forward despite the speed bumps along the way. Hopefully the updates will get more exciting and more frequent really soon!