Construction - The saga continues

Here is what I arrived home to after work last night:

Well, that doesn't look too bad, does it? It's all closed in up there, it has a roof...it's looking pretty darn spectacular. Let's see it closer up:

Wow - that is really taking shape! Except...wait a minute...it's after Five PM, and does that look like my dining room in there? Let's get a closer look...

HOLY CRAP! That IS my dining room! And it is exposed to the whole world...just like the rest of my house!!! WHAT THE....????

So...from the time I left for work around noon, until the time I got home around 5:15, they turned this:

into this:

And as day turned to night, and it got chillier and chillier in my open air villa, I realized one thing with horror: They would not have time to get finished and close the walls before it was dark, and they would not be back until Friday.

:-O

So, when it got to be 7:00-ish, this was their great plan to keep us safe and warm for the next three days:

Ta Da! Just quick nail some plywood up there! And those three ginormous windows at the top? Cover them with garbage bags! Easy peasy, y'all!

Did I mention this face?

:-O

So, after sticking up plywood, garbage bagging the windows and laying the biggest tarp I've ever seen in my whole life ever on the entire section of new construction, Ben came in behind them and after finishing his electrical work for the evening, hung his own tarp wall - because that floor up there? It's just porch floor. Slats that open to the crawl space below the house. No nothing to keep cold air from coming up and giving us a major headache when the gas bill comes due next month.

And I gotta tell ya - despite the nosey pets needing to be all, "WHAT IS BACK THERE BEHIND THIS SHINY DUCTTAPE LOOKING THING OOOOO!" it is not a terrible set up. The house feels warm and toasty with the thermostat set on 65, and in 3 days, (hopefully) the work done by the construction crew will be all finished and we'll have a closed in house with a floor again.

After that, we have an HVAC man come out to install a "two-zone" system so that we don't WASTE energy heating/cooling a room not in use, and then Ben and my daddy will start to dry wall all the things that need drywalling after that. Then we go into crazy insane clean, patch, paint mode. Then it's move move move the guest room and office stuff upstairs, move stuff from the storage building into it's rightful place in the "upstairs" storage closet (like off-season clothes and the Christmas stuff), and then it's make a baby room out of our former guest room so that Miss Lilah will have a place to put all her cutesy-wootsy little clothes and toys and butt for changes and sleeps.

It's a lot to do. My weekends between now and Christmas will not be spent with leisure, they will be spent with horror and paint drips and tarps and blue tape and probably the occasional big yelling bout or two with Ben. But in the end, we'll hopefully have all the space we can imagine to make our house into the neat little home we have always hoped it could be. And then we'll have a baby and let her tear it all up for a couple of years.

And then we'll get started on that nasty kitchen...