Our new home is moving right along . . .

Our friends are busy laying our new laminate floor, and the contractor reports good progress with the modifications we're making to our new home.  Courtesy of Old NFO we received some pictures yesterday and today.  (Click each one for a larger view.)

This shows the rear of our new home.  The room under construction on the left, with the incomplete siding, used to be a small open porch at the corner of the house.  A previous owner enclosed it very shoddily, mainly as a sheltered place for the family dogs (who peed all over it and left an unmistakable [and unwelcome] odor behind) and for smokers (ditto on the odor, although hopefully not on the pee!).  Our contractor ripped out the old enclosure and chemically cleaned the porch to remove the smell;  then he re-framed it, with proper siding on the exterior.  We needed a new rear door to replace the one that had led onto the porch, so he removed a set of double windows from the brick wall and replaced them with a set of French doors.  The windows have been 'recycled' into the newly enclosed porch, as you can see above.

This shows the interior of the former porch, now being insulated and lined with drywall in preparation for painting.  It'll be my office and 'man-cave' when it's finished.  It's a relatively small room (just under 100 square feet), but that should be sufficient for a desk, my reloading/gunsmithing bench, and some storage cupboards and lockers for ammo and other supplies.  To insulate the floor and make it warmer in winter, I'm putting down gym-type flooring.  I'm looking forward to moving in - Volume 5 of the Maxwell Saga is well under way, and I want to finish it as fast as possible.  I also have the third volume of the Laredo Trilogy to write, and I'm halfway through my first fantasy novel, which I hope to finish in the next couple of months.  If that proves up to scratch, there may be interesting developments concerning it.  Watch this space for details!

This shows our new laminate floor in the master bedroom, along with boxes of flooring waiting to be installed in other rooms.  (You can see how the bare concrete floor looked in this post by Old NFO.)  Lawdog, NFO and another friend have clearly been hard at work on our behalf.  Miss D. and I will be going shopping tomorrow for suitable bottles of "Thank you!", which we'll take down with us.

Miss D.'s been hard at work today, packing the contents of our kitchen into boxes.  I'll get stuck into our library tomorrow and over the weekend, then tackle our shared office next week.  God willing, we'll be ready in time for the truck and our loading help on Thursday . . . then it's hi-ho for Texas!

Peter