And there was Light!

I was just thinking yesterday how nothing seems to happen on schedule and feeling discouraged about that when Lonnie showed up to mark off the addition for excavating. I was under the impression the escavating was happening the end of this week, but now we're told it's scheduled for next week. Framing is planned for the first week of August; we are creeping closer & closer to school starting before the real work gets under way. Not good.

Meanwhile the roof is gone from the patio and we are amazed at the amount of light that now streams into the kitchen! When I get up in the morning I have an urge to pull the shades because it's so bright. I can hardly comprehend how light our house will be with a large kitchen window, patio doors off the dining room and only a knee wall seperating the living room from the kitchen & dining room! Glorious, cheerful light! That patio has been here longer than we have and we never realized how much light it cut off. The trade-off was it absorbed the heat in the summer. I hope our new kitchen won't run up our a/c bill without that protection.

I was hoping to post our floor plan, but a few items are back on the drawing board so I'll wait until we get those settled. One thing is the bay window in the kitchen. I always thought I want a bay window when we remodel. That turns out to be a pricy item and we've discussed different option for cutting the cost. My reason for wanting a deep window is for houseplants - currently we have 0 window sills and very few places sunny enough for plants to thrive. I think the compromise between function & cost is going to be a boxed out (extra deep) sill above the kitchen sink and glass shelves mounted across that window. Another item that is being re-drawn is the Master Bath -possibly allowing access to the walk-in closet from the bath instead of the bedroom. Any comments? We've gotten such valuable advice on other details- maybe someone can point us in the right direction on this one, too.

A detail of glowing debate is whether we should have doors on the locker-style closet inside the back door; I am anti-door, Richard is pro-door. I think it would look odd to have a whole row of doors like that -like an institution! and think the children can learn to keep their space neat. I also intend to dress up the front entrance and keep the back entrance by the garage non-descript so visitors do not use that entrance, thus our guests won't enter right where clutter might accummulate. Richard tends to think that is pipe dream- people are in a habit of entering our house at the back door and old habits are hard to break, ditto on the children learning to be neat. At this point I am asking for the closet to be built in such a way that doors can be added later if my ideals don't work out. I don't want to be 6 months down the road (from completion) and deeply regretting the day I spied the first picture of locker closets!