Surprises

Came home to see some quite unexpected things for the past two days in a row. First we find that our porch is finished. Yaaaay!

Although, I'm sure you can see, I forgot to take pictures yesterday. But two days ago, we came home to this and were very happy too. The only thing left will be the staining and priming. So... actually I guess we aren't really done but whatever.

We saw the boards on the porch platform as we pulled in front of our house, still on the street, but then when we got up the driveway, we saw our garage had been struck too! See the progress made in the last two days:

Now look closely, they removed all the roofing material. And you can see below, the siding on the back of the garage was completely gone too... or well, on the ground around the yard. But I didn't see piles and piles of roofing material so that made me happy. At least they disposed of some things. Not like last time...

The piles were bigger when we got home yesterday though. BUT the big difference this time is that I know they're reusing the siding - most of the siding - after they re-frame the garage.

And of course, the garage was storing some of the debris now around the yard. Apparently they put all our gardening stuff under the house and porch for safekeeping - except for the mower and chipper which may be too big for the door. We'll have to try and get those inside though... don't want the mower to go missing. The chipper turned out to be pretty crappy so that's okay.

As if these surprises weren't enough to make us happy, they also did this!

From an ugly cracked patio

To lots of grey rubble! Isn't it wonderful. Well, not easy to walk on anymore but great progress.

Isn't it funny how the lines of grass that were in the cracks of the patio are still there now that the concrete is gone.

Also, you can see in the picture above that these guys don't understand how to transplant something. The hole they dug around the rose there would have made me really mad... if I had in any way meant to save it. Luckily, there had been two roses in front of the garage and the one that I thought was healthiest I decided to remove in preparation of their work on the garage. The other one I cut all the way down and figured they wouldn't care about it. For some reason they thought that I had wanted to save the nub though, and had attempted to dig it out.... I have no idea what they were thinking, where would they have put it? but in any case, they seemed to have given up on it.

Anyway, in case there is any doubt as to why we have to have the garage rebuilt from scratch, here is an average picture of on of the timbers holding up the current shell.