More Before and After... Adjusting the Walls

On Monday, since it was a holiday and my office was closed, I had the opportunity to go by the house in the late afternoon and check out what was going on with framing and see the day's progress. I didn't take many pics because while a lot of progress (new beams, framing in the 1980 house) had been made, we were also trying to figure out things with our builder. We were able to determine where we could re-use the original 1939 doors and adjust some of the incorrect door openings in rooms before they were framed.

When we were designing the house - we were fine with the location of the "1980 stairs", but didn't like how closed off they were, so one of the things we wanted was to open up the space and take the wall down -- also if you look at the before picture, the walls beyond the stairs, sort of "stair-stepped" back:

Now we (will) have a much more open space... and instead of a wall closing off the stairs, there will be newells and a banister, it will look pretty different and hopefully really nice -- also -- in this picture you can see that under the stairs, some of the space is "framed" in because we will have kitchen storage under there and on the front side will be a closet -- thinking about leaving the banister in pink wood -- what do you think (j/k):

Here is another "before" view of the stairs before with walls on either side:

This picture was taken from upstairs and you can see the new beam to support the stairs now that the wall is down and into the kitchen space:

Here's another new beam that went in to support the 1939 house - I am pretty sure this is looking at what will be the breakfast area and the living room.... but Brian will need to confirm that.... in other words, this may be "updated" when he reads it because I am completely off ;):

Our 4th/Guest Bedroom upstairs is already framed... guess that means we are ready for visitors.... The pink framing inside the room is the opening for the bathroom (on left) and the closet (on right):

They have also cleared out all the brush on the back of the house and took down the fence that had fallen (I am pretty sure parts of the fence fell down during Hurricane Ike) - here is a picture at the back of the property, behind the car port and will just be a small area of grass (dog run for Ike?!):

Yesterday Brian said they had made a lot of progress and had finished framing the 2nd (E's bedroom) and 3rd bedroom, and the "jack and jill bathroom", finished the opening in the front of the house so that it would be centered and not look like we just left the stair opening, as well as putting in other beams and supports. No pics of the progress because he was busy the whole time there. Even though he doesn't always read the blog -- let me again say how lucky I am that Brian is on top of EVERY detail going on at the house. He can visualize everything and has worked tirelessly on this project. I am SO thankful for all he does each day making sure this house is our home!