Where'd my house go?

Written by Barry Warsaw in house on Tue 13 January 2009.

Well, we woke up this morning to find most of our house gone. Actually, we'd sort of expected it since the county approved our plans on Friday. We've been in our house in suburban Washington DC for more than 6 years and always planned on doing a renovation project. It's taken this long for us to get off our butts and finish the plans, line up a builder, arrange financing, and so on. Given the sorry state of the housing market, this is either the smartest thing we've done, or the dumbest.

Anyway, we were expecting to break ground tomorrow, but Jane had to go up to the school this morning and saw the project manager on her way. He asked her if she'd seen the house -- which she hadn't yet. So we went over there and by noon, they had ripped off the crappy addition, taken off the awning and the concrete slab underneath, and nearly completely stripped the interior. Kitchen? Gone. Basement? Gone. Upstairs walls? Gone. Unbelievable.

By the time school had let out, the concrete to the front door was gone as was the huge azalea bush that Max and his friends had used as a secret fort. The bobcat and backhoe were hard at work digging out the big hole which will soon be the new part of our basement.

It's only the first day, but it was a good, exciting, freakout kind of day. I can say one thing though: I am so glad we decided to move out while the construction was under way! We took lots of pictures, which I'll be posting to Flickr as soon as possible.