Construction Zone

We decided a while back that we wanted to add on to our house.

For the most part our house meets our needs with a few exceptions. The biggest one being our kitchen. It is not functional for a family of our size. There is very little counterspace and few cupboards. With a family like ours that likes to bake, cook, and hang out playing games at the kitchen table, the kitchen is our hub. We needed to do something that would make our kitchen more workable for me and for our family.
So my husband, the engineer, came up with a design that would add a 14x18 addition to our kitchen. Along with that we will be bumping out our garage by 7 feet. We are taking the back 6 feet of our garage and enclosing it to make a food storage room (an expanded pantry). That will necessitate us reconfiguring the back entry. So we'll make a mudroom complete with "locker" like cubbies for the family.

No more having to climb over backpacks and coats in the laundry room to get to the laundry equipment.


We are also widening the driveway to allow us some more room to park the boat during the summer months and still have access to the garage so hopefully we can actually put cars in the garage. (What a novel concept, huh?). These 3 kids have been pretty good at staying out of the way while construction has happened. The day this picture was taken, the cement was being poured for the expanded driveway and they came out to watch "the show".

And finally, we are adding an attached storage room. Although for right now it will only have outside access. We are hoping to clean out some of the stuff from the garage and put in this place. With 9 people in a 4 bedroom house, there's got to be some place to put all the "stuff".

I've been told that the hope is to be completed by Christmas. By Christmas!! you might be saying. Well that's what happens when you have a husband who wants to do it himself. Although about a week ago, my wonderful father-in-law took 10 days to come out and help us. That's when the walls started going up and the sawdust began to fly.

Spencer loves it all!! It makes me wonder what he will be when he gets big. (I can't say grow up because his daddy says that boys don't really grow up they just get bigger.) Spencer wakes up every morning wanting to go "owside" and asking where daddy is. He's carried around the tape measure, (We're still missing one.), written notes on scrap pieces of wood with a carpenter's pencil (I saw him try to put it behind his ear the other day.), and he loves playing in the rocks and sawdust that come with the construction.

As of today, the walls are almost all up and there's only 1 more roof to put up, it finally looks like we're doing something instead of just making a mess.