We were in Austin Grill, and the sunlight coming in the window behind Lyra really showed off her crazy wispy hair and I had to get some photos. I think the smiles between clicks of the shutter were better than what I actually caught on 'film', but you can still tell she is pretty cute. 
Lyra, aka "Binky" was looking at Cathleen when this was taken. It may not show up on the blog photo, but in the original you can just make out her ~hazel eyes. We are not certain what color they are, except not brown and not blue.
This is taken looking north from the kitchen to the dining room. The horizontal plywood in the far bottom of the photo is an attempt at cat proofing the black plastic which separates the part of the house under construction from the front section where we are living. The cats broke through the plastic very quickly. Since this photo was taken we have put up more plywood to keep the cats from going under the plastic then over the wood.
It may seem like we have a lot of photos that look the same, but there really is progress. This is taken looking south from the dining room to the kitchen through the new arches. Both these rooms are built on a concrete slab, and the trench running down the middle of the photo is the result of several days of jackhammer work. The trench will accomodate new electrical conduit and plumbing.
Both arches are framed and the jack hammered area is for a new electrical conduit to the kitchen. Because of the noise, I haven't been around much during the week. Because my cellphone is a piece of you-know-what, I haven't even been able to return phone calls, so I apologize to all of you who are wondering why I haven't called back. But I will call soon now that I got my phone to recharge.
I am standing in the kitchen and looking out towards the dining room. Josh's crew from Old Dominion Trim Specialists started the framing work this past week. There will be another arch in the doorway just behind where Bill is standing. It looks like there used to be a transom above thata old doorway there. It must have been filled in a very long time ago because it was filled in with lath and plaster. That toilet there on the left is waiting to be thrown away. There will be a built-in desk and file area on the left and a powder room on the right.
This was the kitchen. You can see that previous owners had painted it a red-orange color with a gold ceiling. There were a couple of rooms in our house with that color scheme when we moved in. Then, when they redid the kitchen in the 80s, they added those metal joists and lowered the ceiling a bit.
This is what our garden looks like now. Lots of trash has been removed but not all of it. There is a lot of lumber here for the framing work. And a portapotty. And if you look very carefully at the bottom of the picture, you can see where they've started pulling up the bricks from the patio.
We make fairly regular dinner plans to go out to Austin Grill with Kaspar and his mom and sister. Kaspar and Eva really like each other!
It's blurry but I still like it! At 9 months and 3 weeks, Lyra finally has her first tooth. Maybe there are two in there, I do not know. She will not let me look. I had been wondering if her driver's license picture would look just like this one.
Look at all this trash in the garden! This part of the renovation is always so exciting. There's lots of noise, movement, big piles of stuff. It provides instant gratification.
We will have the kitchen sink until a temporary one can be installed in the dining room. But what I am discovering is that it may actually be easier to use an upstairs bathroom sink.
The bathroom is gutted except for the toilet which can't come out until the Porta-John is put in the garden. I didn't know until now that the bathroom used to be that red-orange color. The library was that color when we moved in and the kitchen was that color some time in the past. I like that color but do not think I would have wanted to be so comopletely surrounded by it in my home.
Here is the dining room. The black plastic has a zipper in it so we can get in here without having to go outside and around back. The door to my office is walled off. That is our range there wrapped in black plastic. We hope this room will be beautiful and elegant in 3 or 4 months but it is hard to imagine that right now!
Today was our contractor's first day here to start our project. There are a couple of "before" pictures below. Somehow, I got the kitchen cleaned out. Pablo and Miguel moved the large kitchen sideboard into my front hall so I could put our food and dishes on it. The refrigerator is now in the living room.
We are getting ready to do a big renovation on the first floor. The renovation includes our kitchen, downstairs bathroom, dining room and refinishing the floors in the living room and library. We put a lot of stuff in storage. The pack and move effort has been a source of great fascination for the cats. They've checked out every box but that didn't stop our crock pot and dustbuster from accidentally getting packed and sent away just when we need them most!
