Progress....We're Making Progress

This side of the house, except for the garage, of course, is now completely done. The contractors are working on the siding the soffits/facia of the front porch, then they can side the front of the house.

In the picture below, you can see the shake siding in the front of the dormers...the entire front of the house under the front porch will be done with the same shake siding!!! We are really getting excited on how it's all coming together.


















We will add a narrow deck on this side of the house, but that probably won't get done until after our trip to Africa.
















This next picture makes me sad. We had to cut down the maple tree because it died. All the backhoe work in adding the retaining wall against the back of the "motorcycle" garage did it's damage, and the tree could not recover. I'm sad because I love my trees...and it provided great shade on the back deck. After David cut the tree down, we realized it had already started to die; the center of the tree had started to rot.

On the adoption front --- we are exactly three weeks from our court date. I'm getting really excited....and nervous that the house won't be finished, or we'll be exhausted by the time we finish and we'll literally stumble off the plane in Addis. We've started looking into airfares...I'm very happy to say that the airfare is a tad bit cheaper than we expected. Still very expensive, considering 5 of us will be travelling, plus my girlfriend from Connecticut.