The House has not consumed us...

So, some of our friends have called asking if we have disappeared into the abyss of our 1790 house...not so exciting. We took a bit of time off because we had to move out of our apartment in Salem and into a new place in West Newbury so that we could be closer to the construction site.

Over the last week, we've been able to make some significant progress. In a nutshell: we've finished most of the demo on the house, removed a sill on the right side of the house and replaced it with a new one, installed a new floor system in the library and in the entry, taken out the floorboards in the attic (as can be seen in the photo to the right), installed a mailbox and started to install a new sill on the front left of the house.

The work is going relatively slowly, which is somewhat frustrating. However, we recognize that a antique house restoration is more of an art than a science and art takes time. We'll add more specific blog entries with more photos including some photos of the very very wide pine boards that we've taken down from the attic that we hope to reuse as kitchen floors and an island counter top.

In our time away from the house, we've visited Home Depot and East Coat Lumber to layout the kitchen. We've also been doing tile research for the bathrooms and the kitchen back splash. Hopeful with some luck, we'll have our full building permit by Friday or early next week and then we can start in earnest.