It's Day One.It's official. The re-build has begun. As you may know, our home was destroyed by an electrical fire on Halloween Night, 2008. It was determined to be unsalvageable. This means we have to re-build a new one. So that's what we are doing .....
(If you want to see photos of the fire itself, captured by the brave fire fighters who helped fight the fire that evening, see here: http://www.ottawafirefighters.org/drupal/index.php?q=13_morris_streetoctober_08/13_morris_sthotshots
Warning that the photos will not be for everyone; they are rather sad.)
This blog is meant to document the whole process from tear down to our eventual rockin' house warming party. It's for our friends, family, neighbours, and other interested folks who will be asking "How is the new house going..?" It will, hopefully, be a bit of a testament to our project management skills, and eventually a memorable account of this life changing event. It's all been quite an adventure, really. I hope to post a new post and a photo or two each week to mark progress. I am still getting the hang of the blogging thing, so I'll be getting better as we move along. Feel free to leave your comments and questions.
In our rental home, we have a small wooden sign with the words "Renewal". That's what this whole year is about for us - renewal. A tragic and frightening thing happened to us. Everyone was ok, we got through it, and now it's all about the future. We've have learned a tremendous amount from this experience - about ourselves, each other, our community of friends and about the art of being optimistic. Oh, and patience. We've learned a lot about patience.
Up to now, there has been a whole lotta waiting. For the insurance details and settlement, for the design, then some re-design, then pricing, permits, revisions for permits, for all the little details that go into building a new home and demolishing an old one. Seven months of waiting, worrying, researching, revising, discussing. It's much more complicated than you would think.
This week the house house comes down. The hole gets dug. A large backhoe is doing most of the
work, with help from a line of dumptrucks.
The kids saw the whole business from the curb early this morning and were neither bothered nor particularly excited about it.
The four year old, told everybody at kindergarten that his house was being torn down. He likes the big tractor. The ten year old spent most of her time on the site practicing her airband routine. The husband watched everything from the curb, and was on site at seven am and, I suspect, for most of the day.
I get a text from the husband at 4 pm - "The house is down". It all gets carted away tomorrow.
We now have a nice, clean pit from which we will build our new home. Ok. Here we go.
Kellie
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