Days 16-20

Tasks: Clean up and reframing
Hours: About 30
Who: Dan and Ilana
We have spent the last three weekends cleaning up the house and beginning reframing. For clean up, we've been removing all of the nails that used to hold up the drywall on the ceiling and other hard-to-reach places. Needless to say, I'm very sore.

I also vacuum the leftover insulation from the walls, and all the icky stuff that falls out of it. My goal today was to make the house poo-free. While I think I got rid of all the rodent droppings, there is still some cricket stuff, as it is very small. I'll get it all, though. At one point today, a cricket jumped out at me. I yelled, "Oh no you don't!" and whapped his little butt out the front door with the vacuum. Haha, cricket! Score one for the Reeves!

We also had a company come in to remove the nuisance trees around the house (including the one with the huge bough on the roof). We found we had a gorgeous flower bush (no idea what kind) in the backyard. The picture shows dan standing next to it, as well as some close-ups of one of the flowers.

Dan has been reframing, moving walls to configure the house as we like. Yes, I married a man who can move walls...yay! So far, we have combined two small closets upstairs into one big one, removed a small closet to create a hallway space to go to the addition, and removed overhangs in the kitchen space that will be replaced with tall cabinets.

We are also both spending a lot of time on research and design. Sulli helped Dan out with some CAD drawings, and I've been researching green technologies that we can actually use in the house. I was disappointed that the way our house is situated rules out solar power for now, but we are looking at energy-efficient windows, insulation, and toilets, as well as cisterns.