Anyway, for those who are interested in reading about what's been going on without visual aids, here it is (as understood by Denise):
After figuring out the intricacies of his saws, Ryan used them to remove the walls from the house - that is he cut down the wood that had been used to hold up the sheetrock that makes walls. Until we started this process, I was under the impression that the sheetrock - the part that gets painted and where pictures are hung - were the actual walls. Apparently, "walls" are actually the wood framing. Who knew?
So there are now far fewer walls, and, strangely enough, the house looks smaller. We also spent a couple weeks cutting out all the old wires that were running everywhere and pulling nails out of the wood that is left holding the house up. There are an unbelievable number of nails stuck in the wood, and some of those nails are ginormous! I had no idea that they even made nails as long as the ones that have been coming out. Wish I could find those pictures...
Finally, the last big thing that has happened is that our contractor's crew started demolishing parts of the concrete slab on the ground floor in order to reinforce the wall that is essentially holding up the upper floor. It involves putting in new posts that are bolted into the concrete, or something like that. Understanding the details of these things is clearly not my strong point. It also turns out that we are not going to be able to drop the floors on the ground floor, so our downstairs will have 7' 6" ceilings. Very womb-like and cozy, no? But our ceilings upstairs are going to be a whopping 16 feet high! That makes a very nice average height for the ceilings in our house.
So I realize that this is a bit rambly and un-organized, but a lot has happened in the last few weeks and it's difficult for me to tell y'all about it concisely. I know that pictures would probably help, and they will be posted as soon as I find out where Ryan hid them.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
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