No beach for us- just tons of red dirt

With everything going on over here, Greg & I sadly missed out on the annual Readling Ocean Isle beach trip this week. Dan is doing an amazing job and making great progress on the foundation. Greg finished building the corbels with the cedar from Stewarts, which we painted and are ready to go. It has been HOT here too- the beach would have been really, really nice.

The Foundation Begins

We hired the wonderful Luther Hartsfield Jr. and crew to dig and pour our footings. We ended up with 13 piers and over 150 linear feet of footing. Once the footing passed inspection, it took 12.5 yards of concrete to fill all the holes. We are now ready for our mason, Dan Henson, to work his magic with the concrete blocks. -G

Fields of Cedar Trees and Poison Ivy

Greg & I went back down to Charlotte for some more materials. This time we spent one day on Stewart & Lisa's farm cutting down cedar trees and the next day at the sawmill. We came back with a dump truck full of wood and also some pretty nasty poison ivy. Greg is making 19 structural knee braces for the roof overhang out of the cedar and our front door out of some pecan wood that came from the Davidson College campus. We had a ton of help this weekend. Thanks to Clark, Bryan and our friend George for all their hard work. Also, thanks to Stewart & Lisa for the pretty trees and the yummy waffles. Here are some videos and pictures from the weekend.

Goodbye Little House

The demolition went surprisingly fast. We reminisced as each room tumbled toward the growing pile of rubble. It's hard to not feel a little sadness-so many great memories- but there's also a whole lot of excitement too. Good things on the horizon...

Careful with that axe...

Only a couple days left until d-day. Greg, Jay & Dean are making sure our old house goes out with a bang. The last picture is actually a video I took of Dean- so make sure you hit play.

and here we go...

Greg's back from Europe and we finally got things started. G and our great friend Jay Brown worked all day long removing the asbestos. We are completely moved in next door, but Ferlin is still really, really confused (so are we though). Demolition day is set for this Tuesday.

The Blueprints

The final plans for the house are back. Our architect, Michael Booth, was able to work with us and we are really happy with what we came up with. The house will be 2244 sq. feet when completed. That's crazy huge to us- we can't even imagine.
Here are a couple pics from the set of plans.