News in brief

I'm so relieved to be done moving out of Chateau Danneel that I've spent the last couple of days hanging around the apartment, lounging by the pool with Stella, and catching up on my HGTV. I'm currently addicted to the show Property Ladder on TLC, where some hapless fool buys a wreck of a house and tries to renovate it to sell for a profit. They always have a totally unrealistic budget and schedule, no skills or experience, and insist on spending their budget on things like marble tile instead of say, plumbing. The kicker is that somehow, they almost always succeed at turning a profit, despite their total ineptitude. The whole thing lends some credit to the warnings about a real estate bubble.

Most of the work at TOH has happened outside this week. They moved the air conditioner compressor into the back yard to get it out of the way, and poured the footing for the new wall. The stucco has been torn off the outside of the old wall, and the studs from the interior wall between the kitchen and breakfast room are gone. It still looks like a great dusty pile of disaster, but at least we're almost done with demolition and should start getting some actual construction soon. Boudreaux says it'll be six weeks, but I think that's like the "two weeks" running joke in The Money Pit.

I got a better look at the flooring, and we've got vinyl on subfloor on top of vinyl on subfloor, on top of planks running diagonally over the support beams. I think we'll go down to the planks and put in new wonderboard and porcelain tiles.