So the original intent of the post was to show you before and after photos of our driveway and front yard as the final items to have been renovated before winter set in.  Here they are:

“before” driveway

“before” front yard

“after” driveway

“after” front yard

The more entertaining photo, however, is of a tree that crashed into our backyard yesterday morning, after what was a fairly minor rainstorm.  Fortunately, no one was hurt.  (Evidently, our renovations are not yet at an end.  <sigh>)

aftermath of rainstorm

I put up a photo of this on Facebook and a story thread began, with contributions from many people.  I may put the story (as it currently exists) up on the blog later (with the names of the contributors redacted, of course, in order to protect the guilty).

There is flooring (and paint)!  So, lots of exciting things have been happening inside our house (lots of exciting things have been happening outside our house, too, but that’s not the subject of this blog post).  First, this is a photo of the master bedroom sitting room, and you will note that there is wood flooring laid down and paint color decided.

Next is a picture of a sky tunnel.  For rooms with no external windows, our contractor decided to snake a large hose (kind of like the type that preschool kids crawl through for fun) from a hole in the roof to the internal room in question to provide natural lighting.  To our amazement, it really works!  This is from one of the kids’ bathrooms.

This is the tiling in our laundry room, which will be upstairs on the bedroom floor.  We found the walk all the way downstairs with dirty laundry to be SO fatiguing!

And, finally, the tiling for the master bathroom shower.

Currently, the hope is that we will be able to move into our bedrooms by the end of the month.  Fingers crossed!

The entertaining thing about the renovations (if living in the basement for 5 months and counting can be called entertaining) is that there are surprises every time we go upstairs and look at the progress.  Of course, this is primarily because we have no idea what any of the colors or tile or flooring is going to look like.  (Clearly, no one can ever accuse us of being micromanagers!)  So, on the latest exploration of the house, we discovered a few things:

First, the coffered ceiling in the master bedroom now looks like a ceiling as opposed to the assembly of sticks pictured in an earlier blog post:

Second, the shower in the 13 year old’s bathroom is tiled:

So is the shower in the 10 year old’s bathroom:

But the master bathroom shower is not:

And the main floor is still a total disaster:

An end of June completion date?  We shall see.  And that concludes the update for today.

We have drywall on both floors!  We have paint on the upper floor!  I will post photos soon, but one dry-walled room looks very much like any other dry-walled room, so unless you have dry wall obsession, it’s not that interesting.

Most importantly, we have tentative move-back-in date(s)!!  It looks like we will be able to move back into the 2nd floor some time in late May.  Bedrooms (rooms with doors)!! Closets!!  Separate bedtimes!!  (In case you couldn’t tell, I am very excited.)

Kitchen cabinets (or, more accurately, the lack thereof) are holding up the main floor move-in date, but we are still hopeful that it will be some time in June, in keeping with our original internal date.

Happy dance of excitement may now commence!!

We have drywall!  Well, on the 2^nd floor, we have drywall in all of the bedrooms.  (The main floor still looks like marauding hordes of Vikings have gone through it.)  I have been told by those who know these things that once drywalling starts, everything else falls into place very quickly (painting, flooring, etc.).  I certainly hope that’s true because the large spiders that have been invading our basement recently may be enough to drive me from the premises.  I am not fond of spiders to begin with (they give me serious heebie-jeebies), but I do think it is reasonable for anyone to dislike spiders that are 2-3 inches in diameter.  And the kids are no help whatsoever, although the 10 year old will assist in spider-killing.  (The 13 year old will just run in screeching terror from them.)  What good are having children if they won’t kill spiders for you?  I am seriously thinking of asking for a refund since neither child came with a spider-killing gene.

But I digress.  Here are some photos of the newly drywalled upper floor.  These 2 photos are of the master bedroom and sitting room:

And here are the kids’ rooms:

Progress!!

We were evicted from our basement in mid-March as Mr. Le needed to work on the HVAC and electrical systems and have them inspected.  (You know that you have sunk to a new low in home renovation when you can’t even stay in your own basement.)

The eviction was originally scheduled to be for 2 weeks.  We jiggled slightly with the schedule so that the 2^nd week of the eviction was during our spring break.  Because our 7^th grader was doing a community service project at Children’s National Medical Center, during the 1^st week of our eviction, we stayed near Potomac so that we could carpool with the other family whose children were also doing their service project at Children’s.  We then left for Paris for spring break and had a marvelous time.  (See previous post.)

About halfway through our stay in Paris, we received an email from Mr. Le saying that our eviction would have to be extended by a week.  So we threw ourselves upon the mercy of some friends who live in Chevy Chase and who were about to go out of town on their spring break.  As they said, we replaced 2 adults, 1 girl, 1 boy, and 1 bullmastiff in their house with 2 adults, 1 girl, 1 boy, and 1 bullmastiff.  It was incredibly generous of our friends to let us stay at their house for the week.  And as much as I love our house, it was lovely to be 10 minutes away from the school and walking distance from downtown Bethesda.  We are very grateful to them for giving the homeless Mole Family a place to stay.

We finally moved back in after Easter.  Who knew you could miss living in a basement so much? But it was good to be back, even if it meant that there was no longer any excuse not to do the 10 loads of laundry that had accumulated during our wanderings.

The main floor and upper floor are still only framed as they finish up the wiring and other internal renovations.  They have started painting the exterior brick a very nice shade of taupe/gray.

Barring a miracle, it is highly unlikely that we will be able to move back into the rest of the house at the end of April (as originally projected), but we are still hopeful that we can move in by the end of June (our internal projection).  We’d feel more optimistic if there weren’t so many gigantic holes in the house!

Brick for the new additions laid.  Siding for the new additions in progress.  New-fangled windows installed in the addition.  Replacement of old-fangled windows by the new-fangled windows almost complete.  The exterior is in good shape.

The work is mainly focused now on the interior, starting with the HVAC and electrical systems.  The geek in me makes me think that the HVAC tubes look like those worms from the Dune series.  (Not that I’ve read any of the series beyond the first one.  I realize that I am probably in a minority of one, but I was both bored and frustrated with the first Dune book and stopped after that, but I digress.)  I have no similar analogy for the wiring for the electrical system.  I guess I could say that the wiring reminds me of the antennae on the Andorians, but that would just identify me as a total geek.

Anyway, here is a photo of what the Dune worms and the Andorian antennae look like.