My triumphant return!!!

So for those of you that don't know I had to leave the job here for about ten days because I missed my family so much and also because I had a work commitment that required me to travel to Africa.  The trip home was fantastic and made me realize even more how much I miss everybody.  It is a very weird thing to feel how much I miss them but to also be anxious to get back to the renovations to see how things are progressing here so we can all move on to the next phase of our lives together.  Soooooo enough rambling on about all of that good stuff I will get on the reason that most of you are likely reading this, what is happening with the house???  In the time leading up to my departure we were furiously attempting to get everything ready for the drywall guys to come in and close everything up.  The night before I left was an all nighter for me with two separate crews also working here until about 1:30 in the morning.  Of course as these things go we did not finish everything that we needed to finish to have the drywall guys come in and do what they needed to do.  Consequently we had to delay them by a couple of days and thanks to some amazing people here (Dev and Robert) the remaining work was completed and the drywall guys got in here a week ago.

We have not had a chance to see anything that has happened since I left so we were very anxious to see the progress that had been made while I was away.  While it is still a huge mess I think we are finally starting to see some real progress and are finally on the path of putting things back to together vs. tearing them apart.  :)  It was huge day catching up with all of the various contractors, but I don't think I will bore you all with that tonight... well maybe later.  For now I am going to attach some photos of what things currently look like, and leave it at that!

Of course this will now represent a real challenge to my newly acquired blogging skills to see if I can successfully incorporate some pictures...

 This is the inside kitchen wall, this wall will have the 60" Dual fuel, Dual Oven and cook top centered on the wall with banks of cabinets on either side (about 44" each side).  It doesn't look like much but I am particularly proud of this wall, we had to move all of the plumbing from upstairs out of this space to allow for a clean wall.  We also had to run the new electrical service for the ovens and we had to run the new vent for the hood fan which is a 12" round duct (you can see it in the top of the pic).  One of my goals is to create a post for each major area showing the full evolution so hopefully you will all get to see the huge changes here.  :)

This is also the kitchen, this will be where the sink is looking out the window over the pool.  No huge changes here, some minor electrical and plumbing clean up.  

This is another view of the kitchen looking towards the eating area (for reference the whole kitchen used to be the yellow and white stripes so you have some idea how much of the kitchen we demolished... down to the studs everywhere)

This is a picture of the revised family room.  Where the small wall is on the left of the picture used to be a load bearing wall that extended across the entire room.  We knew we wanted to take this wall out from the get go, but it was a huge undertaking.  We had to put in a 16' 6" 14" triple laminated beam that is about 8" thick.  You can't see the beam because we also dropped the entire ceiling in the room by about 4" to cover the beam so now it is a flat ceiling in the room.  This is a huge improvement and has totally changed the feel of this part of the house.  

This is also the family room looking back towards the kitchen (the wall is shared with the kitchen).  If you look at the pictures of this room from before there was a bar on the left hand side of the room beside the door that you can see there now.  

LOL, this one is really exciting... it's a hallway, cool hey?  :)  For some unknown reason it used to be offset and open to the laundry room on the right hand side.  We straightened the hallway and added a wall to the laundry room, additionally we demolished and reconfigured the bathroom on the left hand side of the hallway. I will try to get some pictures of the laundry room and bathroom tomorrow.  They are not that exciting right now as they are just empty boxes.

I had to take this one for all you geeks out there... this is all of the cable that we have installed for home networking and AV (well not all of it but a good chunk of it... terminating all this is going to take some time...) You can also see the new on demand water heater on the right...  the whole utility room is in fact new.

This is Elliot's new room with the walk in closet on the right.  Previously this room was two smaller rooms and a hallway.  You can see the division in the ceiling where part of it is finished and part of it is new.   

This is another view of Elliot's new room.

This is Elliot's new walk-in closet.

This is the sunken living room on the main floor.  You can see we have removed the old fire place and are awaiting the new unit.

 That should give everybody some small idea of what has been going on... :)  I am off to do some work but I am hoping to get at least one other update done on here tonight so wish me luck!