The Next Project: God is good and God is great... He can't be one without the other!

First, let me start by thanking the Lord for all of His blessings. (God is good!) After a year of patiently waiting on financing and having a guy who was interested in buying the place come out to take a look, I decided to give it one last shot with the credit union. After praying, "Lord, if this is your will, you have to do this because it is definitely out of my control," the credit union had my loan approval and closing within three weeks. (God is great!) For those of you who know anything about banking... this is miraculous and definitely something God did. And He continues to do things that I utterly cannot explain in any other way except... He did it.

So since you last heard from me, I had the house surveyed, my loan closing and we began work. I have some "good ol' boy" contractors working for me and they are great. Cole is the skinny one and he is the boss who has the license. :) We have totally reconfigured the front wall as per the structural engineer. We have also framed in and framed out some things that I wanted changed. We have house-wrapped the house and put some build-outs on the corners that were trouble spots. We also jacked the house back up where the previous owner had put a post with no support... DUH!! And the guys have installed the soffit.

I have also purchased my cedar siding; we unloaded it by hand at 9:00 PM one Friday night... only took me and three students 45 min.! Yeah!! That was a delivery mess up but it all came together in the end. I will be installing my windows for the front of the house this week and the plumber will start Thursday. The electricians have started their work to finish what the previous owner had started and I spent four hours in Lowes yesterday designing my kitchen. We also took out the insulation in the ceiling that was the wrong R-value and put the bolts through the LVLs we installed last fall. We also put some concrete block piers in under the house as per the structural engineer. Here are some pics of the progress:

These are the surveyors at work.

here's one corner of my property after the survey :)

this is Patrick. One of my students who has been working for me. Here we're drilling the holes through the LVL to insert the bolts. We almost started a fire a few times the drill bit got so hot. Ha Ha Ha!

100+ bolts installed :)

Took the insulation out of the ceiling... we'll re-use it under the house in the floor.

gas, water, cable, phone are all marked so they can bring gas to the house :)

starting our piers under the house...

Cole and his guys are tearing the front wall apart so we can reconfigure it. Can't see it well in this pic, but the center beam has been replaced with an LVL beam.

taking off some old molding.

front wall is reconfigured and house wrap is tacked up... waiting on windows

the front wall from the inside... you can see the new configuration from this view.

this is an LVL that we had to install and wrapped a beam with 2x 6s for support

you can see the bottle jack at the bottom. we had to jack the top floor of the house up because the beam next to the bottle jack beam was not sitting on the correct support and it was sagging.