During the interior tear out we found a few neat things like 60 year
old greeting cards, and comments written inside the walls. The coolest
find was during excavation for the new foundation: 2 old toys. One is a
truck, the other a streetcar! They're covered with rust and so probably
not worth money, but they're valuable to me as pieces of the past. I'm
saving them to put in our new showroom eventually.
The landscape plan is finished, Beth Young did a fantastic job. We've
decided that we can't afford to do the whole yard this year, so we're
going to execute the plan on the east & south sides and just put
lawn on the west side. Next year we'll complete the landscaping on the
west side of the house. It's not too surprising that a project like
this would run over budget, but we'd hoped that wouldn't happen so
early in the process!
We're having solar panels installed on the south side of the Irwin addition. They should pay about one quarter of our electric bill. Federal & state tax rebates will recover about 80% of the cost eventually. The up-front cost is about $20k so it's a significant outlay, but we feel that it's worth it.
