Milestones

We have reached a MAJOR milestone--Monday we start to put things back together again.  It has been a long road, close to 2 months since the fire, but we are finally at the point we have been waiting for.  I am excited to post pictures of progress!

Here is a little walk down memory lane:

This is the side of our house that was struck by lightning.  You can see the hole in the siding where it shot right through our house.  The piece of siding flew down the street into our neighbors yard, two house down.  Mother nature is a powerful lady my friends!

This is what it looks like when someone takes your roof off :)  My husband posted this picture on Facebook with the endearing caption, "Going Topless"...too funny!  This picture REALLY puts things in perspective for me.  I can't recall if I have shared this yet or not, but my husband was outside when the lightning hit.  If you look closely you can see the mark down the tree that is there.  The lightning hit the tree, was drawn in by the electrical field of our house and went horizontally across and through our house.  My husband was standing at the grill letting the dogs out before the storm rolled in.  We are so very lucky...this could have been SO much worse!  The tree is mainly on our neighbors property, but they have graciously agreed to let us take it down.  It will be nice to not have that constant reminder there.

 This is the view from the front.  Sorry neighbors for the Port-o-Potty...not attractive.

This is our sweet little girl who is stronger, smarter and braver than she will ever know.  She is wearing a sweater my Mom had made for me when I was little.  when it came back from the dry cleaners she said she wanted to wear it, so on it went.  This face is what happens when you say, "Pose, honey".  She has been AMAZING through this whole ordeal.  She is completely in tune with what is going on and will tell you that our house is being upgraded, we are living at a vacation home and her room is going to be really nice when we move back in.  She will sometimes out of nowhere say, "I want to go home".  I will ask her if she means the vacation house and she will say, "No, our real home."...then she keeps playing.  She will ask for random toys that we no longer own, but she does not fixate on them, so I think we are doing alright :)

I just had to post...random "just because" gift from my wonderful husband who, even when our stress level is through the roof (no pun intended), always reminds me to stop and smell the roses.

Megan

Absence

I have not composed a new post in several weeks because to be frank, not a lot has happened.  We finally had the roof removed and replaced, which I will say was a huge milestone in so many ways--no more fire damaged materials in our house and the official start of the rebuild process!  But, still not very exciting for me yet :)

I never realized how much I loved our house until not living in it.  I also never realized how many of my kitchen gadgets were useful!  Right now we are working with plastic utensils and plastic take-out bowls are definitely being recycled :)

All of our clothes were delivered and the prior weekend was spent going through each box, smelling each item and hoping that my self-proclaimed photographic memory was working and that everything is there.  We have discovered a few of Chris' things missing...where in the weird dry cleaning abyss do these items go exactly?!?  Most of our items are okay, but not great.  Unfortunate for the dry cleaning company, my old Sorority shirts are fine (Go Alpha Xi!), but two of my handbags and some shoes were not so lucky...they are just not designed to withstand chemical based cleaning treatments.  Some of our items have a really strange chemical smell and I have decided I will be donating all of Madeline's clothes and starting over.  I am sure they can be washed and be just fine, but since we are heading into a new season, I would be buying her a fall and winter wardrobe anyway.  I am disappointed to not be able to pass down any cute 18-24 month items to my friends and family.  The smell and feel just makes me a little nervous for sensitive little baby skin!

Most, if not all, of our selections have been made, which is a huge relief for me.  I think I am pretty good at making up my mind and sticking with it, which hopefully will give me some relief in the stress department.  I have so much confidence in our builder that he is going to knock this project out of the park and we will start to have progress galore as soon as we get it officially turned over to him.

We have decided to put an addition on our kitchen and a deck on the back of the house.  I am really excited about it, as it will give us that extra little space I have been craving in our kitchen area and a nice amount of outdoor living space.

We are looking forward to fall for so many reasons and I recognize that it is going to be Halloween and Thanksgiving before we know it.---Here's to hoping we are spending Christmas in our House 2.0 :)

Megan