Oh my goodness I am tired.  Bone weary, deep down tired.  And the thing is?  I didn't work that hard today.

This is the front of our house.Well, it was the way it looked last Thursday.  Today it looks quite different.   See the tarp on the left side?  That flat roof has to be replaced and this weekend was the one that we chose to do it. 

It was just the beginning of a rennovation adventure.  Thursday, Pk tore down the sheetrock and insulation from the inside.  What a mess!  El and I bagged it up and put it into the dumpster that is sitting in our driveway.

It was yucky and messy and hard work.  Friday was more of the same but worse.  Pk went up onto the roof to tear off the shingles and sheeting so we could have the new pitched roof put on.  Parts of the roof were soft and he had to be really careful so he didn't fall through.

He got about half of it done and on Saturday morning, the roofers came in and took the rest off.  In the process, they discovered that the back wall wasn't strong enough to support a new roof.  It seems that our siding was not installed properly and water has been getting down the back wall of the house.  The wood was rotted in places so the whole back wall had to come out. This was the view from my living room through the back of the house.  Literally.  It's such an eerie feeling to be standing next to walls without a roof or ceiling. 

Our roof was an angled roof- 9feet in the front and 7 feet in the back.  If you look at the photo, you can see where the wall on the left ends and the new ceiling will begin.  We are gaining almost 2 feet of room.  The back wall has been rebuilt and has some osb sheets on it.  It'll get wrapped with tyvek and the siding will be put back.

See how the new roof angles up?  It will make it harder for it to leak.  At this point, the roof is installed and has tar paper on it but no shingles yet.  The guy may be back tomorrow to finish it or he may not be able to come back until Saturday.  Either way, it'll be done by next weekend.

The upshot of all of this is that the ceiling has been raised by several inches and we got a chance to see which interior walls we really wanted to keep.  The answer?  None.  We got rid of the closet that Pk built when we first moved in and will replace it with an island that has storage space.  It makes for an open area with the kitchen on one end and the living/dining room on the other.

So far, I love it.  It's not nearly finished and we'll have a ton of work to do but it'll be a gorgeous room when it's done.  We started to make it nice when we moved in here 28 years ago but then the girls came along and it seemed more important to spend time with them than to work on the house so we lived with an unfinished house.  Redoing the roof has given us the incentive to make the space nice for us.

But it's exhausting to think about.  Having to tear out that wall cost more than I had planned and so the aesthetic parts will have to wait until the spring but that's ok.  We'll have a sound roof and some new space to play around with.  We'll take the opportunity to update the kitchen and make it more user friendly for us to cook together. 

At this point, we have to pass the framing inspection and then the final inspection (when the insulation is in place).  Then, if we're lucky, we'll get the sheetrock up before the holidays.  If not, the decorating theme this year will be the Pink Panther (he's the mascot for Owens Corning, the company who makes the insulation that will be showing).  It won't matter.  We'll be happy either way.

I'll take some more photos and try to get one of the space.  I don't know how I managed to forget that at the end of the day.  I think it's just exhaustion.  Four days of picking up debris and cleaning up and making trips to the store for things that are needed for the construction has worn me out.  Tomorrow, we're replacing the floor with some plywood until we decide what we want to put down (and then save up some money to do it!)  Our deal is whatever is finished by the 15th (inside) is what we'll live with for the holidays.  I want/need some time to pull out some decorations and put the furniture back and clean up so we can all get together and have a good time.

So, what's new in your world?