Up, out, and back!

The house is growing all over all at once. From the front of the house, it is a bit difficult to miss the brand new third floor, where only air, and often fog, lived before. Of course, the entire third floor is not there yet, just the framing for the deck and the front windows, but it's still very exciting.

And here is what it looks like from inside the house:

OK, I admit it's not much right now, but it is still very exciting to see it start and to grow.

At the same time the vertical growth spurt was in progress, the house also grew back towards the back yard. This the framing for the new part of the house on the first floor that defines the new part of the house that will extend to the rear patio. This particular wall with form one wall of the kitchen and the back of the family room.



In the meantime, the back yard, also known as the concrete ocean, also advanced from a deep muddy pit, to a deep muddy pit with lots of rebar and wooden forms to hold concrete in place long enough to turn into two massive walls.



Believe or not, just last week, this edifice of rebar and wood forms was nothing but a hand-dug pit near the top of the hill:




With any luck, and some good weather, we will soon have the massive concrete walls holding this hill back for the next 100 years.

Even the grotto got into the action this week. A temporary wooden wall transformed it into a storage enclosure, perfect to store all the dirt being excavated off the hill and waiting for shipment to a hole in need of filling, somewhere nearby.



I am still waiting for the steel beams to show up. Without the steel, the house is like boneless chicken: a tasty treat, but structurally unsound. They are also very massive and very, very cool (the steel beams, not the boneless chickens).