Getting it done!

Ryan and I are up to our ears in projects, and we're loving every minute of it. A little while ago I posted a little list of things that I wanted to get done this summer. I am happy to report that we are well on our way!! Here is what we are doing:I should have gotten a before picture, but it just sort of happened. I couldn't take it anymore, this wall was coming out! There is a hutch in the wall, and the back of it goes into our stairway making it very difficult to get down the stairs. The other side of the stairway has a wall that has cupboards in our kitchen, making our kitchen seem so crowded and small. And then there was a closet that sat between the living room and kitchen right in the hall, it also went into the stairway making it smaller. In the picture below you can see that I have taken out most of the hutch to the left, and the closet is on its way out. This is where I ended that night. Ryan had quite the surprise when he got home. Being the supportive husband that he is, the next weekend, he helped me finish it off:

A little push from muscles, and a few from myself, and then a bunch more, and some more hammering, and then a little sawing, and the wall came down...
WALLAH!!! You can see right through to the kitchen! We put boards up so the boys can't fall, but really there is no wall there. Now to figure out how to put everything together. We found out that the far wall is a load bearing wall, so we need to figure a few things out before we can go any further.
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The next project started last weekend. We are putting in a fence. We are putting a large steel gate in the front, and a large wooden fence in the back. Last weekend we put in the posts. They are kind of hard to see in this picture, they are the dark wooded posts standing in front of the white fence:

We also got rid of the lattice-and it opened up our whole back yard. So we finished off that project with the only other thing that we could do...

Yes, we went and found our Barbecue!