Demolition underway

So there was a saga around the permit...thank you Fairfax County! Someone warned us that the building permit workers sometimes ask for very minor changes with the only discernable purpose to justify their existence.  I'm a bureaucrat myself so I don't want to be so cynical, but it was really hard to see the rationale in the modifications they asked for. Further, they wrote done one request for change and then when we completed that, they notified us of a completely different request for change.   A structural engineer, a contractor visit and 4 hours of the architect's time and pleading later, we finally had our permit!

Ok, so even though the work is going on around us we still haven't packed up everything in our house that we intend to put away while the work is going on.  Spouse may disagree with me, but it is clear to me that we have way too much stuff. I've done a fair amount of purging, but it still seems like we have too much.  Clearly we have been blessed so the charity trucks are doing overtime at my front door.  We are also going to try and salvage cabinets, windows and anything else we can save from a landfilby passing things on to a reuse facility or Freecycle.

Going through the kitchen though was interesting. I distinctly remember ribbing my mom just this past summer for having cans and jars of food that expired back in the early 2000s. And while I may not have been quite that bad, I did find more than a few food items that dated back to 2007 and 2008.  There are also multiple bottles and jars of things that I never use...like Browning.  I mean, I do cook Jamaican food every once in a while but I am not going to attempt a blackcake or bun so why would I keep the preservative???

This weekend we are to tackle packing up the upstairs bedrooms and bathrooms and finally taking up full time residence in the lower two levels along with the kids.  Our contractor joked (I think) to us by saying "I hope you two have a strong marriage."  Not LOL. This will be tough but we'll make the most of it.  

In the meantime, the contractors have made steady work of demo'ing the kitchen nook.  We found quite a lot of wood rot under the siding, so I'm glad that stuff is gone.   We also have a very pleasant dumpster and port a potty in the driveway to join our Pack Rat pod, so it really feels like progress :)