House to Home, Volume 9 - The Start of Something New

It's amazing how we went from tearing it down to putting it back up, practically on the same day.  Recap:  Troy showed up with his excavator to start demo on Monday, October 19th.  Two days later, on Wednesday the 21st, here is the only picture I have, which my mom took before heading home with Roxie:

Troy is marking out where he needs to dig the trench for the footings.  I was at my sister's house out of town all day so didn't see it in person again until the next day when I met Bryan to finalize the window package.  So this is mid-day on the 22nd:

There was a lot of measuring and leveling and checking right angles and probably a whole bunch of swearing about the amount of tree roots.  And rocks.  And more rocks.  Did I mention the tree roots?  The plumber was also there on Thursday installing a Rennai heater in the living room and I brought him a new kitchen faucet - the old one, which I loved dearly, was wrecked somehow when they worked on the water line switcheroo.  I'm a little vague on what happened.  The old pressure tank that I'm still using temporarily needed to be relocated because it was in the trailer, and the water line may have been replaced/re-routed/whatevered, but somewhere in the whole on/off, pressure/no pressure process the faucet suffered an internal explosion.  Or something.  A sediment issue?  I don't know, but it was fatal.

My next view of the progress was Friday the 23rd, after work.  I thought StanLee and I were just home for the weekend, but we ended up staying.  It was the beginning of the Hurry Up and Wait period.  Here's the guest room window view:

And here's the reverse of that view:

It's crazy how much this landscape changed over the course of a mere five days.

I had about a week to get used to all the open space (that last picture was taken from the road on Sunday the 25th) - there was no more activity until the following Thursday when concrete guys showed up to pour the footings.  Here are the obligatory guest room window views from 8:30 in the morning and again after work:

They were back again the next morning:

Time to put up the forms for the walls!  This is what I found when I got home from work on Friday the 30th:

(That one was taken hanging out the window at the top of my stairs - sort of above my kitchen door.  The window in this next picture.)

Subtle changes to the view from my thinking chair.

It took me a little while to notice that my garden fence was destroyed.  See those red metal things a few pictures back?  That's what they use to cart around all the wood forms, and someone dropped a full one on my fence.  Smashed it.

So far there have been a few things that have unwittingly been sacrificed, and this fence is not going to be one of them.  I don't particularly care for it, but it serves a purpose - all my daylilies are in that garden, and just a couple of weeks ago I spent half an afternoon planting 75 daffodil bulbs in there.  Without the fence as a visual barrier I'm 100% sure construction vehicles will drive right over the whole bed.  I'm leaving the bits and pieces there as a reminder and yes, the concrete guy is going to fix it later.

We ended October with this portrait of my house on Halloween.  I call it "Still Life With Buckets."