Ty Pennington has nothing on MY carpenter!

We moved to our new home in July. One of the deals of us moving just 18 months after we bought our last house was that we were getting out of debt. So the projects on this new house are being paid for in cash! That means they are taking FOREVER!

There were two things I believed that God gave me to look for in a new house. One was a swimming pool and the other was 5 bedrooms. I didn't know why I needed either of those (we love to swim, but with young children a pool is kind of scary), but I felt strongly those two things would be in the house we moved to. When we found this house, it had a pool, but only 4 bedrooms....huge rooms, but still only 4. Yet I knew this was the house God had for us. So when I was laying in bed one night during the FOREVER time it took to sale our other house, it hit me where the 5th bedroom was. This house had 3 living rooms and a small formal dining. The way it was set up, we could easily turn that formal dining in to the fifth bedroom and take the front living area as a formal dining. But that would require building a wall and knocking a whole in another wall. Since we can't afford to hire it out, that meant doing it ourselves. Now you have to understand that when we got married, John couldn't even paint a door because he refused to let the paint dry inbetween coats and didn't understand why his paint kept peeling off! But that was almost 10 years, 8 houses (1 being a 100 year old farm house that we redid) and many projects ago!

So this is the work in progress. This is the hole he cut. He made me take the first whack during demo which I thought was so sweet until I realized that he did that so that when I griped about us starting this big project right before we have BOTH families at our house for Thanksgiving, he could say, "But you are the one who put the whole in the wall!"

He has now trimmed out the cut out and WE (yes, I layed laminate floor!) layed the floor today. Tomorrow we have to finish painting and load in the room. Then we will be done! Well except for the crown molding, but that will come in a week or two. So after we get it done, I will post the "after" picture. But here are the pictures of the hole in the wall! It was a little scary! No turning back at this point!