Destruction happening so fast....

That's meant to be said is a Captain Kirk overacting sort of voice, but really, I can't keep up with those guys. Everyday I have less and less house, there are about 50 million pictures on Flickr, some of them with captions, and some of them waiting for captions, but if you want to see what a house looks like when it's been attacked with hideous vengeance, crowbars and demo saws, it's all there.But Bob's optimistic about the whole thing so I guess I am too.

Now some sayers of nay have raised the question "why didn't you just bulldoze it and start from scratch. Partially this is because we have to have it classified as a rebuild in order to play nice with the city. If it's new construction is falls into all sorts of other pitfalls, like the fact that our site is so small that a house doesn't really fit on it. But if it's a rebuild in the same foot print, then we don't have to reapply for all the variances etc. Partially it's a philosophy that Eli and I share. What can be saved should be saved, and in spite of all the nasty things I've said about my house, the leaky roofs, the shoddily installed windows, I actually really like my house and I'm sort of sentimental about it.

That being said, everyday I am told of more things that we thought we might be able to save, but turns out that we can't. Like today it was the first floor. We had been hoping to save the floor joists and "sister" them (that means nail another board to them) where needed for support. Turns out there's not enough worth sistering and they're all just coming out. But the outside walls are still okay to save, which adds a new level of complexity.

I don't know, what do you say Bob? Can we cut the floor out from under the walls and build a new floor and reattach the walls to it?

Apparently, yes we can. It's hard to tell from this photo, but look at the bottom of the wall, on the left side. See that yellowish stripey stuff that looks like clapboard siding? Well it is! It's the neighbors porch...through a foot wide hole cut in the bottom of the wall.

I only get nervous about this when Joe, he of the huge saw, stands inside the house and wobbles the wall by pushing on it from the inside. It's sort of like watching a play at a small community theater, where the sets are cheaply constructed. The villain sweeps in and slams the door , and the scenery sort of trembles. Up until this point I've been thrilled to show up and document everything with my leetle camera, but I am now officially nervous.

There is a silver lining though, because new building materials have begun to show up on site. This is so very exciting that I can almost forget about the fact that the whole south wall of my house is basically floating in mid air.

See, floor joists. New ones. Like from the store. Ready to become the new and improved first floor floor.

Now that's a beautiful thing.