Construction Zone

My parents have been doing a 6 month split between where I live and where my brother and his family live.  This left them just making drive by stops in there motor home back at their old house between trips.  They love getting away from the snow in the winter and the cooler summers out east with my brother, so it has worked out great for the last 3 years. So my parents decided last January to sell their home and build a smaller home in our backyard and rent a condo by my bother for the other half of the year.  After much talk and lively debate it was decided that we would also build a detached garage to store their motor home and our toy hauler as well and because that didn't seem like enough construction we also decided to put an apartment above our garage for Kyle.  

February and into March were the months of blue prints and painting dirt and then painting more dirt and then when everything changed we got to cover that dirt and paint new dirt.  All the work is going through Alex's company, so we know all the crew and teams very well that are contracted through for various projects.  Knowing my parents and how challenging this could become Alex decided to pick one of the teams that attends church with us.  His theory is that they would some day forgive us for contracting them in the first place and validate all the "parent" stories we have told in our bible study group over the years.  :0)

Our first clue that things were going to be fun, was trying to watch my mom read the blue prints.  Now if you have never had the joy of watching a older couple argue over which set of glasses to use before they even pick up the prints, you just haven't lived a full life!  

So after they picked a set of cheaters that would probably work but had a second pair on standby just in case, they started following Dave (he is the lead contractor on the project and a very brave and patient man who has really become part of the family after all this!) as he walked them through the front entry of the home.  He got past maybe two sentences before my mother raised her hand (we don't exactly know why she feels she must raise her hand to speak but she does this with Dave and the other crew and we haven't talked her out of it yet.) Once Dave told her she didn't need to raise her hand just go on ahead and shout out your questions.  We then had to listen to my dad explain why that wasn't a very good offer to put on the table for this particular woman.  (Can you see why we just knew this was going to be a fun project?)

About ten minutes later Dave had tried to explain what all the different layers of papers meant and that the fine print on the sides were for his team and they didn't need to worry about those details and was looking to Alex for some help.  Alex jumped in and had them going back over the blue print once again only to have my mom decide that none of it made sense to her and they were just going to have to make this easier for her to see what they were talking about.  Poor Dave took his blue prints and downloaded all the details into a special application and built a 3D version that my parents could view on the computer.  So now my parents were able to do a virtual walk through several times over and that was very helpful to get them past walls and room placement.   Or so we thought at the time...

My parents wanted to have a smaller version of what their old house was, very open floor plan and the master bedroom downstairs.  They both agreed they no longer needed three bedrooms upstairs but thought a loft with and extra bedroom and bathroom might be nice if they have friends come visit they can stay with them.  Dave had taken all their ideas into consideration and put together a floor plan that more than covered all of their wants and needs.  Knowing my parents I did offer to get the floor plan to the old house for them, as I didn't think they would go too far off that plan.   Alex told me that the crew was magical and to let them work the process.  So I decided to stay on the sidelines and enjoy the entertainment and let the "crew" work their magic.

I am going to say about 6 weeks later the blue print layout matched the floor plan of their old house just about 95%, they just had a half bath instead of a full.  The loft was now two bedrooms with a shared full bath.  But the downstairs was flipped exactly backwards from their old home, so the kitchen was to the right and that opened into the living space.  This surprised me that my mom was going along with that much change, but sticking to the sidelines I just cheered they were now able to break ground.  So the next week was waking up to very loud tractors and guys yelling at each other and just chaos from all sides of my house.  This woke up a very annoyed teenager who has let us know daily that she is losing precious hours of beauty sleep and we should all be very sorry about it.  Ugh.  

So after the crew played in the dirt for what seemed forever they started to get large amounts of wood dropped off and large trucks with cement started rolling in making our world even more noisy.   I was about to lose my mind when I was pulled into the planning of the apartment over the garage for Kyle and my entire outlook changed immediately.  This was fun and it was exciting to watch Kyle start making decisions based on how he planned to use the space to live.  What amazed me the most was the discussion he had over the flow of his kitchen area, the boy has been playing me like a fiddle.  He just knows way more than he ever let on since having mom and Kaylee do all the cooking worked just fine for him.  Grrrrrr... Well I know better now!

Push forward several weeks and we have a framed house in our backyard that our fearless crew is walking my parents through....  Two hours later they are knocking walls back down and Alex is holding his head in our bedroom praying for patients he doesn't have.  They were now going to need to flip the entire downstairs back to the same layout of my parents current house because my mother is just beside herself that she can't see herself sleeping on the left and cooking on the right it just didn't seem right in her mind.  Sigh...   I didn't think offering up a "I told you so" at that moment would help, so I gave him a back rub and told him I would sleep on the left and cook on the right for him if that helped any.  :0)

I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving!!!