Project Underway

Last weekend, the kids and I spent Fri. night at my parents' house, and took Saturday to run errands, etc. We were simply making ourselves scarce while Mark undertook the first step in a lengthy project.

We have a storage room off the side of our house that, in our house's previous life, held the furnace. In our scheming of how to best handle all of the snow that comes our way, we decided to turn the storage room into the arctic entry, build a carport off the side of the shed that's on that end of the house, and re-do the driveways.

Almost all of the houses around here have a driveway loop, which is a much nicer arrangement for plow trucks or loaders to just swoop in one end of the driveway and out the other. Again revisiting our house's previous life, it also had a loop driveway. Prior to putting this house on the market, the owners made the effort to create "curb appeal,"a slightly hysterical phrase for a small-town Alaskan neighborhood. In the process, they did away with the loop driveway, and instead added a quaint cobblestone pathway and planted sunflowers along the front of the house. As I have pointed out before on this blog, ad nauseum, we get a ridiculous amount of snow. Said cobblestone pathway is covered in not only the 5-6 feet of snow that has fallen, but also the 5-6 feet that has fallen on our roof and eventually slides off on top of the rest of the snow in a nice huge heap that blocks my front window. Since quaint pathway and sunflowers will be visible for, at best, 5 months of the year, we decided to forego "curb appeal" and instead go with "practical." If we put the loop driveway back in, the plow will be able to clear the dump of snow off the roof, thus maintaining the ability to see out the window most of the winter.

So, we're starting with the entryway. It was also home to the well's pressure tank, which Mark very handily relocated to the crawlspace, which required both the disconnect of water and electricity on Saturday...hence the making scarce of ourselves. I know, I know...what in the world do these pictures of the kids have to do with our renovation project? I obviously wasn't here to take pictures of my man at work, so instead took pictures of the kids at my parents'. I suppose a more appropriate picture for a post of this nature would have been a "before" picture of the storage room. Instead, you get Anna with a chicken-less bone, and corn-less cob, and the boys being read to by flashlight since we needed to turn down the lights for Anna to get some sleep.

And if you have any other table scraps, I'm sure my baby would love to gnaw on them for a while...