November 28th: Britton and I finished framing the walls that are separating our current living room into a hallway and 3rd bedroom. We'll be leaving the door open for now and using the smaller space as our new mini-living room untill the addition is finished. Above you can see the electrical boxes in place and the back side of the drywall. Today (the 29th) needs to be atleast somewhat of a cleaning day with our homestudy visit tomorrow (Thursday, the 30th), so we'll see how far we get with the wiring, insulation, and inner drywall before then.
Above you can see the framing completed and the sawdust mess I clean nearly every day! It is worth it for the work we're accomplishing. Soon we'll have a very nice living and dining area with a third bedroom to boot!
Here is the framing, showing the door and the new hallway, as well as the drilled holes for our wiring to run through. Time to rearrange the living room contents! Our house is quite disheveled with all the changes.
And lastly, the hallway with the new drywall in place. We aren't going to bother with trying to mud and tape by Thursday, we'd rather get the wall completed with drywall on both sides and some electrical (Maybe even lighting?) first. We are sure making progress!

November 27th: We marked the 3rd bedroom wall layout on the floor of our current living room. For now, it'll still be used as a living room untill the addition's interior is finished. Look at the lovely "matching" flooring under that carpet and pad! LOL

Here is the start of the first wall and the placement of the door. The bedroom's closet will be where you see the piano, on the far left outside wall and the current front door will become the back door with a hallway through the bedrooms.

Emma loves to "help" us build!

Britton completed the lights and electrical just before Thanksgiving, and Mark Shaw came out Friday evening to help him actually hook them up. They look great!

Then over the Thanksgiving weekend we started the work on removing the once-exterior wall that devided the exhisting house from the addition. There it is lying on the floor of the addition! Boy does it open up the kitchen.
In the words of Britton, "Now we're committed!"
The pictures, once again, didn't load in order despite my efforts. ;) Here is the "before" picture of the wall, as we started stripping it down to the bones. We'll also be tearing down the suspended, false ceiling in the kitchen and replacing the lights with recessed lighting there as well...though that may have to wait for another week.

Lastly, here is a picture of the nearly finished ceiling transition between the addition and the kitchen. It looks great! Britton spent a great deal of time and effort trying to get the framing for this section to work and also be level...hard to do when working in a confined space and matching a level wall/ceiling to a not-so-level one. Kudos to Britt!

The new windows are going in!
Look at that beautiful white vinyl... Thanks Otis, Philip, and Britton; they're great!

Here goes the sheathing!
Grandma Marion, Britton, Otis, and Philip all helped to get the wall sheathed (we'd already completed the other side of the house) and to replace windows.
Notice the black, metal-clad windows. Half of their seals were broken, some of the windows themselves were broken, and because they were metal, they sweat like crazy.

Philip, Catherine's brother, requested a "siding party" while he and his family were in town...as we started removing the old siding, we realized that wasn't going to happen!


How do you like this "exterior wall sheathing?" No wonder the living room walls seemed so cold! There were large holes, as you can see, and much of the ship-lap wasn't actually "lapped" either.

This is the wall of the exhisting living room under floor level. OY!

Yet another computer-user error: the pictures need to be rotated!

We've started mud & taping the drywall (about half-way there now) and our shipment of windows, interior doors, siding (boxes in the picture), and interior sub-floor and flooring have arrived!

Drywall Party Time! (8-18-06) The second picture should be the first; I'm still trying to figure out this computerized mumbo-jumbo. ;) A number of friends helped us out today and we got the 600 sq ft addition's drywalling completed by mid-afternoon.
JR, Otis, Anthony, and Travis all came to help --along with Grandma, Sarah, and Lisa. What great workers!
We left the old-house/new-house transition open for the stairway framing to go in first --we didn't want to be open to the addition untill it was child safe and warm. Thanks to all!

DAY...We've lost count now! I'll organize the following pages by the work that was done, as we worked on evenings and weekends and I don't have them laid out by days.
We've been preparing the room for drywalling --drilling holes for wiriting, running the electrical, attaching outlet and switch boxes, installing a false-wall to square the exhisting house, and insulating. Whew!

DAY SEVEN (Saturday): On this day the gable ends were installed, the housewrapping was finished, and we took the afternoon off before Creighton and Tipton left for home. THANKS A MILLION EVERYONE! It looks fabulous.