Day 1

Sept 15 - Construction has begun!!!
As some of you may know, we have a "special" tree. This wonderfully large deodora cedar tree is a protected tree in our town, thus we had to have an arborist come out to provide special instructions on how to work with a large root that just so happens to extend right where we want to add the extension to the house. Needless to say, it's been a real pain in our foundation. :-) Our contractor's workers need to excavate a lot of the foundation by hand so that they can save the root. The engineers designed a foundation that will utilize special foam and rebar to that we can have the root go safely through our foundation wall and under the house, w/o damaging the root/tree or harming the structural integrity of the foundation. This work took the contractor several days to complete, but that didn't slow him down from making changes on the inside.

Here are some pictures after the first day of construction. Remember - we are still living in the house at this point.

Note below - the have also removed most of the stucco from the back of the house.

Here you can see in the first day they already cut through our existing concrete and started tearing about our back stair.

Here's where they are carefully unearthing the root.