You know how you have a baby and it is exhausting and hard and messy, and then a little time passes and you are all like, "Remember how cute that little baby was? Let's do that again."
That is exactly how I am with remodeling.
After four years of remodeling almost every square inch of the interior of our home, we finally had to tackle the big purple elephant in the yard. That elephant being the exterior of our house. And why the heck did nobody tell me my house was purple? I always thought it was gray. It wasn't.
I probably cannot list everything we are doing on this phase of the remodel because it often makes me feel light headed and a bit nauseous. But I will try...garage with a guest house above it, connected to our current house by a breeze way and an outdoor shower, replacing every piece of vinyl on the exterior with hardy plank, all new soffets and fascia, all new windows and doors, new columns, new porches and walks, new driveway, new deck, add on a screened in porch, new lighting, new shutters and anything else that could be replaced on an exterior. Phew. A LOT.
So September 14th the piles were driven into the ground (what you see above). For those of you that have visited, that is beside the room we currently enter the house (you are looking at the dog fence in the picture). This is the garage structure, which is really a screened carport because we cannot enclose anything at our elevation. The guest house is above that at 23 feet above sea level. (The standard in which you have to build post-Katrina).
A few days later the demo began. Wow! That was crazy to see how fast our house could be tore up from the floor up. Literally. We often joke our house looks like the house in the movie "Money Pit" with Tom Hanks. When asked how long until they finished the contractors always yelled, "two weeks!" I have been through so much remodel, I know better than to even ask that question.
Those are my old columns, lying in my front yard which were not structural! They ended up being hollow! Yikes!
The new columns are much more substantial and are now structural as well. Thank goodness. We also added that large header beam to balance everything out. It looks so much better.
Framing began on the guest house!
The columns and header beam add so much to the exterior, it is beautiful.
Looking at the dormer windows in the guest house.
Finished columns and header beam, also the new windows are in.
You can see the new paint color, a very pretty, soft gray. If you look to the right, you can see the old color, definitely a bit on the lavender side. Yuck.
The new lights will still be added and the new front door and the entire porch and steps and walk will be redone.
The guest house is moving along too and cement is being poured in the next couple of days, followed by the stairs being built. Which is good so I can visit my own guest house. I went up once on the ladder and had an anxiety attack at the top when I was forced to come back down the ladder. I threatened that I was staying up there until they built the stairs. I hate heights.
This is my blue room. Where we lovingly had "doors to nowhere" as you can see from the above picture. I have been dying to get rid of these since we bought the house. And this week we finally did! Hooray.
They now are windows as they should be. We also got rid of the random octagon window in that room. It was always weird.
So our house is going through some MAJOR changes and it is messy and crazy and busy but it is also super exciting and fun and I love seeing the progress everyday.
I will do another update soon!
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