Summer thunderstorms

Call me crazy, but I absolutely love a good summer thunderstorm. So that's what I began daydreaming about immediately upon arriving at the house and seeing this:

It's our covered porch - complete with some trim in the color we chose last week! I absolutely cannot wait to sit out there and watch lightning flashing over the river - although I'm sure that the porch will be a favorite hang-out spot in a wide variety of weather conditions!

You may also have noticed above that the overall shape of the house has undergone a major shift. For comparison, here is a photo from last week...

...and here it is now from the same angle:

The second floor bedroom addition that I caught in progress a couple days ago has been mostly completed! There is the small detail of the roof to finish, but here is the view from the north...

...and from the west.

(This made for such a dramatic change in the slide show sequence at the top of the page - check it out! I am so geeked about that slideshow; I can't stop watching it...)

Of course we went inside to explore, and I was pretty excited to think that the days of climbing a ladder to the loft may now be over. Here is Brandon peeking down from the second floor where we now have a fully functional staircase - yeah!!

And here are a couple shots of the second floor addition. There will be one big window looking north, which will overlook the woods out back and the meadow where our garden will be.

There are two windows looking west into another forested area - one of these will be in the new room, while the other will be at the top of the stairwell.

We are thinking of this new room as storage/overflow guest space, so not to worry - you can all visit at once!

Houston, we have a porch

I didn't do an update yesterday because the progress was mostly more impossible-to-photograph framing, but here are a few of the better shots. (I am going to work on a floor plan post next, which I will link here when it's done - that should make everything a bit easier to understand.)

Our bedroom wall now goes all the way to the ceiling!

Here is the door from our bedroom to the upstairs bathroom:

There was also more progress on the cinderblock walls of the future garage...

Today we were excited to see more progress upstairs in the loft. It now has the beginnings of the south wall, which will be helpful for not crashing out of bed into the living room.

See that window? It's actually an interior window that will be lined up with windows in the future dormer (out of this picture to the right). Another terrific idea by the designer, since it will let us see the river view from the bedroom! However, it's a bit lower than we thought, so we are going to have to make sure it's not accessible to certain overenthusiastic canines (ahem, Simon).

The carpenters had also begun work on our closets - another major upgrade for us in storage, which of course gets me all giddy (neatfreaks unite!). Here are three shots panning from my left to right showing the two big closets, and the space in between which will be a small window seat.

 

Here is Brandon pretending to hang something up in his future closet:

The grand finale for today was discovering that they'd started work on the porch! It's not quite all there yet...

 

...but that didn't stop Brandon from pulling up a chair and enjoying the view!