We passed our final inspection! We are starting to add furniture and decorate the new spaces!

The fun room:





The bathroom:





The studio / guest bedroom:

Here are a few pictures as we near the end of the project.

Our formerly lush new lawn is not looking very healthy. There is still some green in there (not apparent in the photo) but I went ahead and over-seeded with additional grass seed this weekend.



We had our kitchen patio door replaced as part of this project. We still have to paint most of our new doors.



Almost all of the contractor work is finished. Last week they installed the hand rail and we have started moving in some furniture.



The studio / guest bedroom is very nearly finished.







Kristen was hard at work today finishing the shower tile. As you can see, the hard work paid off with a beautiful finished product!








The last major piece of work for us is to complete is installing the finish flooring onto the new stairs.

The project has slowed considerably. We are now at the mercy of the sub-contractors schedules.

However, we passed some more inspections and there definitely is progress since the last update!

We have a new roof on the entire house. We chose a commercial spray-on foamy material due to the very shallow pitch of our roof. The foam adds a significant layer of insulation from the hot Florida sun. The roofers wrapped our house in plastic to keep the spray from getting on the windows. This reminded us of a scene from the movie E.T.



You can see the foam material peeking over the edge of the roofline:



The summer rains have come and we discovered a drainage issue along the drip-line. We have put in many hours of shoveling to fix the slope issues and to lay new sod.



We have also made good progress painting the exterior.



I constructed a "sand sled" out of plywood and rope to help haul the sand and sod around.




The yard next to the porch is finished and I hope to mow the new grass for the first time this weekend.




Now for the interior... plumbing, electrical, and drywall have been installed! We are now waiting for the plasterers to show up so we can take down the temporary walls.

Below are pictures before and after the drywall.

Family Room:





Bathroom:





Guest Room / Studio:






Hopefully, the next construction update will show a nearly-finished project with fresh paint and maybe even some flooring!

My family flew some kites on a recent vacation to the Outer Banks area of North Carolina.

My kite was a parafoil:



My dad flew a cool Red Baron replica:





My brother had a large and ominous kite that reminded me of the Recognizers from the movie Tron. Here you can see it about to smash a renegade program... er... I mean, kite:



Here I am enjoying the surf and watching the sky:



We enjoyed the Kitty Hawk Kites store and I found these objects flying atop the dune observation tower to be entertaining:

To save money on the addition we decided we would do the painting. We missed the fact that this meant we would have to do most of the caulking! Kristen has been busy doing that and filling the nail and screw holes.





The crew did a really good job at this corner junction between the old house and the addition. All of the trim, old and new, will be painted with a fresh color before we are finished.



A close-up of some of the very nice trim work around the porch:



We have been living without any natural light in our living room for many weeks now. The openings are cut but temporarily covered. The stairs down into the addition will be through the opening on the left.



We have primed a large portion of the new exterior and tested a few paint samples.





The new (huge) built-in shelving has been delivered but not yet installed.