Garage + b = Garbage

Finally, I have caught up to the present day! The Comcast guy came this morning to set up our cable and internet access, and after several calls to Verizon, our phone eventually started working. I managed to get a little bit of work done (I work from home for the Discovery Channel, so I can't do much without a phone, cable TV, or internet access...), and it was nice to be sitting in my comfy desk chair for a change after several days of nonstop packing and hauling stuff up and down stairs. I got an email from a neighbor informing me that a port-a-john had appeared on our front lawn, so the work must have officially started already.

Marta called in the afternoon to remind me that I needed to pick up our plans and building permit from the county offices, so I ventured out to take care of that and run some errands. I ended up having to pay over $2700 in fees for the building permit -- and I'm sure that's just one of the many "unanticipated expenses" that people have warned me about with a renovation project.

On my way to Safeway, I stopped by the house to see for myself. New additions: the port-a-john on the lawn, and a huge dumpster in the driveway. Missing: the garage! They had already torn it down less than 10 hours after getting the key to the house.

I peeked in the living room window and saw that they had also made significant progress inside the house. There was a pile of all the interior doors we wanted to re-use, as well as several other items we asked them to save. Even if this wasn't a 'green' project, we would still want to maintain as much of the original character of the house, so we are trying to re-use as many of the architectural elements as we can.

From the porch I could see that the garage wasn't exactly gone. It was just in the dumpster.
Actually, it's not so much a dumpster as it is a giant recycling bin. This stuff is all going to be sorted and recycled (including the Coke cans), so it won't end up in a landfill.