The house story begins...

Well, these posts are long overdue, but life has been hectic, as you'll see! We are now well on our way with the house addition- although most of what we've done so far (well, most of what SAM has done so far) has been demolition and house removal! What I don't have any pictures of is all the prep-work Sam did, cleaning out EVERYTHING (and there were a lot of things!) from the garage. He built overhead storage for two of our neighbors, and moved a bunch of our stuff there. He moved a lot more stuff to a garage we're renting from a friend. He took apart his workbench, put some surf-board storage in the living-room, unhooked the washer and dryer (come to think of it I don't even know where those are!), took down the cabinets in the garage... in other words did a whole lot of work before the actual 'work' even began. You'll just have to take my word for that part!

Then, he started "small", taking out the part of the path to the back where the gas meter needed to be moved....

We donated all that concrete to help fill Michelle's 'pool':


Sam dug a huge trench so that the SDG&E guys could mosey on in and do their job (let's just say that it didn't seem like they did $800 dollars worth of work- and that they didn't make it easy to give them their $800 dollars... don't get us started on THAT story!).

But, the happy ending was that we have a new gas meter, located in the proper place! (Oh, yeah, Sam tore out that bush, too!)


Meanwhile, it all started very innocently with a delicate little hole in the drywall right above the door that leads from the garage to the kitchen...



Then things got more serious as Sam took a sledgehammer to the wall between the garage and the house.





Then, suddenly, walls were being torn out of the inside of the garage and workshop...

...as well as the outside...



The stucco walls were really remarkable- once Sam sledgehammered the stucco, they just swayed like very heavy fabric on the chicken-wire. I sledgehammered a teeny tiny bit, mostly so I could say that I had. Gallantly, Sam said I was "very helpful". Hah!