Posted by chris | Posted in Project Updates | Posted on 20-11-2009
A mechanical dinosaur ate our house. At least that’s what it looked like when the guys from Trilennium used their giant excavator to rip down the little Cape that had stood on the lot since 1939. Look at the attached photos and you can get a feel for the scale of that monstrous machine. That house must have been sweating when they left the excavator in the driveway the night before the demo began.
I felt a little funny about it, because that house was built by its owner, and he and his family were the only people ever to live in it. It was cute as a button, and though it had some odd features like root cellars, a lawnmower garage, a bathroom that was also a hallway, and a kitchen so small you’d have to leave the room just to change your mind, in the end it was someone’s dream house. Gotta be sensitive to that when you’re building your own. Some day someone may stand in front of our house and say, “You know, we could try and remodel, but it’s probably easier and cheaper to just tear the thing down. I wonder why there are poodle footprints all over everything….”
Things are zipping right along at the site. The asbestos guys came in and removed what turned out to be a lot of asbestos. Not only was it in the shingles on the outside, it was also in the floors of the garage, kitchen, family room and halls. Cutting edge at the time it was installed, it’s now making our house lot a haz-mat site! But they’re done, and now it’s time for the men of Trillenium Services to get in there and swing the giant excavator into action. See the accompanying video for the scale of the thing… it will knock the house down, pull the foundations up out of the ground, load it all into dumpsters and leave us with what should look like a battleground as our house site.
As a note I’ve spoken to all the neighbors about the new house, and about the landscape and tree work we’ll do, and why we’re doing all this, and aside from bracing for the noise they’re pretty excited about the project. I didn’t reach Kevin, our neighbor to the left as you face the house, until after the excavator had been parked in the driveway for a day, and the shingles were off the house. Needless to say he’d figured out what was going to happen, and was happy to see us join the neighborhood. Nice to be surrounded by good people on all sides, both in Newton and in Westwood!
Posted by chris | Posted in Video | Posted on 06-11-2009
Our daughter Jessica helped me create (OK, she did all the work) a present that I gave Angela at the Team Angela party in Oct. ‘09. It’s a slide show that captures just how I feel about my beautiful wife.
-Chris
WEBMASTER’S NOTE: Sorry about the lack of audio track on this video. We’re working on the problem.
Posted by mike | Posted in Project Updates | Posted on 03-11-2009
We’ve got ourselves a contractor to build our special house- his name is John Corsi, and his was one of 7 companies that bid on the job. We chose him for a few reasons: he’s done much of the work on Alexandra and Bobby’s house in Westwood, and it’s excellent; his pricing was sharp; he’s not afraid of slightly unusual design and construction details; and he’s a local guy with deep ties to the area.
