This is just a bunch of observation I want to get down before I forget them. (Warning: Booooring)
1. Christiane just started her third trimester on Saturday. Thus, I have produced a timeline. I still think we can be in the house for the birth. We’ve had a very productive 6 weeks and all the design decisions are made. 12 weeks to go. We are ready ready ready. I accept no pessimism!

2. On Saturday I walked our neighbor, Chuck, through the house. He came over while I was Measuring Everything. It was the first tour of the house, “this the bedroom … and this is the closet…don’t fall in to the hole where the stairs will go.” You get a better sense of the scale of things with another person there. The small bedrooms did not seem so small.
3. The house was soaked with 4 inches of rain over the weekend, but it dried quickly today and the (new) foreman assured me that they would bleach the heck out of the house and spray it with antimicrobials before wrapping it up in Tyvek and siding. Weather looks good this week.
4. We have new foreman. Not sure yet what’s up with that.
5. I went up on the second floor this afternoon while the crew was working. We raised the ceiling to 9 feet at the last minute, which meant that the fold-up ladder for the attic access would go out of the closet door with about 3ft of headroom. This my recurring nightmare — stairs with impossibly low headroom or big gaps. We moved it, no big deal, but the whole time I was up there I was sure I was going to have a beam drop on my head, or get shot through the shin with a nail gun.
6. While I was up on the second floor, I looked in the direction of the chemical plant. It’s gone. Yea!
7. The 30 inch eaves mean that standard soffit material cannot be used.
8. I noticed the real wood siding that is going on the Metrohouse on Justin. It is just like the siding we took off of our house. Our house was the only one in the neighborhood that had that specific cut. So just as it was ripped off of our house, it was added to a modern house down the street. Cool. Before the old siding was pulled off, I took a close up shot of the layers of dried and chipped paint so I wouldn’t have too much nostalgia about it.

9. Today they put up the remaining roof rafters. A block of space hovering above the old house is quickly turning into private space. For a day or two, our bedroom is open to the street.