As I may have mentioned previously, our house renovation is being done by Le and Sons.  Mr. Le has been our contractor/handyman since we moved into our house in 1996.  He has finished our basement and renovated our kitchen as well as done many fixit jobs over the years (since Jim Jim and I are SO handy…not!).  Our arrangement with Mr. Le with respect to the house renovation is that we have left the design and finishing of the renovation completely in his hands.  We blessed the architectural plans, and we have asked him to make sure that there is lots of light and lots of storage, but, other than that, the specific design items, the color schemes, the fixtures, etc. are all his decisions.  Some of our friends are envious of this arrangement.  Others are completely appalled that we do this, and our response is that we have neither the time nor the inclination to make those decisions.  (I would rather have my head shaved than look at 30 shades of off-white tile to decide which shade would be best for the bathroom.)  Mr. Le has excellent taste and why would we second-guess that?

One of the (many) advantages of this approach is that when we walk through the house, we occasionally are pleasantly surprised.  This happened the other week when we walked through the master bedroom and noticed that framing for a coffered ceiling had been done.  Did we know that the master bedroom was going to have a coffered ceiling?  Of course not!  Do we like coffered ceilings?  Yes, we do, and it’ll be a nice touch.  I had not realized before now how much work it is to do the framing of a coffered ceiling, which is surprisingly intricate.  Here’s a photo of what it looks like right now:

The other big development in the renovation is that the exterior of the additions is being bricked.  And the picture window in the new 2-story entryway has been installed and is square.  I had no idea that picture windows could be square, but you can see by these photos that they certainly can be.

You can also see that the new brick is not a match for the weathered brick of the original house.  The plan is to paint the brick since it proved impossible to find brick to match the original.  It should brighten up the exterior of the house considerably.

The renovation continues to be on schedule (knock on wood).  It passed a major structural inspection, but, obviously, there is still the plumbing and electrical inspections to pass when the time comes.  We continue to be impressed at how rapidly the house is taking shape (it’s only been 2 ½ months since they’ve started), and we look forward to ending our Mole Family existence in another few months!