We ended the drought!

Yes, yes, yes. Anyone from the southeast who has been worried about the lack of rain, you can rest easy – we have fixed it. Western NC has been in a bit of a drought lately, running 6 ½ inches behind normal. But have no fear, no less than seven minutes after we pulled the last truss off of our roof on Saturday, torrential rains began falling. According to our local paper “Heavy rains over the weekend brought needed relief to drought conditions in Henderson County, but torrential rainfall Saturday and again on Sunday dumped up to two inches in some parts of the county in a 24-hour period.” Heavy rain expected through Tuesday and no roof on the house… go figure. But we did manage to get the roof off and get our ever evolving living situation organized in the garage this weekend.The last truss coming down just before the rain


Our new garage basecamp

Before and After

We must admit there is some level of insanity involved when deciding to rip down a perfectly good house. Aside from size, Matt and I had very few complaints about our house. The further we get into tearing it down, the more we recognize just how well built the thing is... But, there is just no way around the fact that 840 sq. ft. of living space is just not going to be enough for the long haul. So for the time being, we have set up camp on our deck, plumbed a temporary outdoor shower (we do still have to get cleaned up and go to work:)), and moved all necessities into rubber bins. Thanks to the Stierwalts, we have a tent that rivals the original size of our house - we've got a queen size bed and a tv/dvd player in there! So, in the spirt of good fun, we are posting some "before and after" pictures.



















Before . . . . . . . . . . . . . After

Before and After (part 2)

Before pic of our bathroom...

Our bathroom after... This is actually my favorite temporary change. The outdoor shower rocks, and I even did all the plumbing myself thanks to our friend Matt Brown, who came up with the idea and sent helpful emails.

Before (notice the windows, floor, walls, door, electricity, etc.)

After - not bad considering its a tent. We've even got a queen size inflatable bed!

Our living room before we decided to whip out a sledge hammer

After... You'll notice that we are using our new bedroom as our living room, it all depends on what end of the bed you situate yourself on. And yes, that is a TV in a tent.

Demolition

The weekend after Memorial Day we packed up everything in the house and moved it into a storage unit, set up camp in the guest bedroom and got ready for demolition. This weekend we were able to gut our bedroom and the living room/kitchen. We even got one of our new kitchen walls reframed.

Our former bedroom torn to pieces... I love blown insulation:)

And Matty loves brick

Indy making a dumpster run. I must find him a tool-belt. Don't be fooled by any of the other pictures. Indy is the one who is really building our house, we just couldn't put him on the permit application as the General Contractor.

The new framing on the right is for the kitchen. Three new windows to look out at the creek and the hemlock.

These two pictures are what our house looked like this morning when we went to work...