Renovation Nation

Since we bought our house in 2009, the front has looked kind of like the picture below.  OK, so we re-did the roof, and it's a bit darker now.  We've also gotten rid of most of the small bushes around the front, and the large tree limb hanging down across the front yard was cut down to let in some sunshine.

Even with these minor changes, the front of our house leaves a lot to be desired.  Honestly, I have never been a fan of our screened in porch.  Some people (ie. my in-laws and my grandmother) seemed pretty fond of it - and tried convincing me more than once to consider keeping it intact.  But the awkwardly large roman-esque columns seemed very out of place for our small, relatively simple bungalow-style house, and if I was taking those down, I was definitely NOT going to keep the screen.  Yes, it can be argued that screens are good for deterring critters, but really, all it did for me the past three years was make hanging Christmas lights on the house a challenge (which I won by simply cutting an access hole in the screen, therefore rendering the critter shield pretty much useless).  But I digress (as usual).

Ever since we moved in I've been telling Greg that we need to renovate the front completely, open up the porch, and give our home a little bit of curb appeal.
Well, renovations officially started last weekend (of course I was away, and Greg was home alone.  Thankfully, he had the assistance of a very kind and helpful friend).  Here's what the front of our house looked like up until yesterday:

Greg took a day off from work yesterday and all the decking is now removed, leaving just a pile of dirt, the old cinderblock footings, and the DIY roof supports left in front of our house.  (There's also an impressively large groundhog burrow right up against our house foundation - yippee!)  I don't have a picture of what the front currently looks like, but I'm going to take some this weekend to keep posting.

This weekend we'll be hanging the ledger board, and figuring out what to do with our footings (either keep them the same and bulking them up or demolishing those and building new ones - which is considerably more work, money, and permitting hassel, but will ensure we have a finished product that we are comfortable with).

I have a feeling we'll be buying lots of our friends beer and food (at a minimum) to help us out with this project.  I know it's going to be amazing in the end...but getting there is going to take a lot of patience on my part, and probably Greg's since I'll be hasseling him about getting it done.

Hopefully nobody loses a finger...but at least we're really close to a fantastic hospital!