Matt and Ron did the final grade with a load of topsoil (that's a future firepit area on the back corner).


We had a sod laying party with some helpful neighbors.

The boys tested out the new lawn with a wrestling match.

The retaining wall was the finishing touch - Matt gathered the boulders himself from the Bountiful bench. We love it!

If you can tile the floor, why not try the wall? That's what we thought, at least. Many of these projects were all-nighters...this was one of them. This was about 2 or 3 a.m. We continued on and tiled the area in front of the fireplace, too. Finished a little after 4 a.m. So happy those days are behind us :)

With Home Depot as your friend you, too, can learn to build arches. These were another proud moment, as you might have guessed. We widened the entry to the eating area and put matching arches there and in the passage between the kitchen and living room that is pictured here.

The moment of truth: once you take the window out, you're committed to getting the new one in. This was our first. We were quite proud. Oh, you see those lights up there? We put those in too!

NOVEMBER 2005 - Molding and everything else you can think of came down.
The kitchen/dining room wall came down - believe it or not, the microwave took took longer to unhook than it did to bust the wall down.

Bill helped provide more of a view by getting rid of trees, bushes, etc. that were in the way.




After ripping up as much we could of the subfloor and two layers of linoleum we began to lay the 500+ sq ft of tile. Let me tell you, that's a lot of tile for people who've never done it before.

Matt and Bill amazed us all by widening the staircases which helped open up the entryway. It made getting up and down the stairs interesting for a few days.

Jake and Matt installed a new floor in Ava's room - the previous owners leased to animal-loving folks who gave Ava's room to their cats, dogs, and birds.....it neede a new floor.




The demo continues. We knocked out the wall dividing the kitchen and dining room. This made one large kitchen with plans to build a pantry in the corner of the "old dining room" by the window. We also rearranged existing cabinetry and added a few more units to round it out.








October 2005 - We put the kids to work right away - demolition crew, what a dream.