Ditch digging, and thankfully, it's not me this time.

The foundation crew arrived today, right on schedule. They started spraying orange lines on everything and by afternoon started trenching for the enlarged foundation. Good to see some progress in the reconstruction direction, though we do have a while to go before all the foundation work is done.

Trenching where the front porch used to be. For the new front porch, about 3 feet further out.

We are also expanding the first floor toward the South by about 5 feet, to line up with the side of the old house and to make use of the side yard that was used for the bike shed.

Cathy and I spent a good part of Labor Day weekend poring over the plans and scratching our heads over our Blomberg shop drawings for the windows + few exterior doors. We had to get this right as the doors and windows are about $35K and you can't send them back.

We also spent way too many hours trying to figure out which range hood and exhaust blower to use in the kitchen. Cathy has chosen a Blue Star range - which has enough BTUs to double as an iron smelter. It turns out that we have a very tricky framing situation which really complicates the duct routing and requires us to use a chimney style hood. We found a combination that we really like and cracked code for framing the vent. We think.

I think we're going to see a lot more of this in our rental house for the next 10 months:

Pretty dark outside for 1:36...oh wait...