I love remodeling

Erik (the contractor) says we have to deal with the 2" sag where they removed a wall but didn't put in any support before we can do anything else. It really, really bothers him. This is why I love him. He doesn't cut corners, if he sees a problem it has to be fixed. So, we need to decide what we want to do to fix it. It's in the opening between the living room and dining room. It appears there used to be wall there with a small doorway and they removed the wall without building in any support so it sags really bad. We could open it up, jack it up and put in a huge beam or open it up, jack it up and put in supports posts with little half walls so it's still open but there is support. The latter is more in style with our house but we'll have to see. And, I thought, oh how nice we are going to have a break, save some money and then today Erik mentions that I should start meeting with cabinet makers to go over design for the bookcases we want on both sides of the fireplace. It's not going to be cheap by any means and I just groaned.

On the positive side, I got notice that we will be done paying for Luke's college in 4 months, so that will give us a bit more breathing room. But Randy's also talking private school so we'll see. There are very, very few he would be willing to send Luke to so we'll see.

The attic is very, very close to being done. I begged Erik to keep the dust to one side of the attic tomorrow so I could get some of the stuff out of the dining room tonight. The floors are all down and I have vacuumed over and over to get up the residual AirKrete and the sawdust but he still needs to put the boards back up on the walls. Which involves sawing and drilling and more sawdust :) Oh well, I got half the stuff back up there and we should have a lot more storage space. We don't because Erik doesn't want us putting anything down by the dining/living room since it's already sagging and we'll need to work down there anyway. Blech!

Luke has been a trooper through all of this. He no longer screams when Erik uses the circular saw (we had a long talk about that). And he's been so patient with me as I try to help Erik get stuff done. I have terrible mommy guilt. I feel like I've been so neglectful. Hopefully the project will end this week and we'll do lots of fun stuff together the rest of the month. And, he's really excited to have Little Grandma and Grandpa back from Hawaii so we'll make a couple of trips up to Woodinville this month.