Before Amelia and Eli moved about 1000 bricks, we took the first photograph (on the left of the rear of the house, from the corner of our neighbor’s driveway, facing South and a bit west) toward the rear of our house.

We removed the patio, cut down the bushes and trees. This provides a clear view of the entire rear elevation, just days prior to beginning work. The barren patch of the facade on the right of the door used to contain a porch and rear entry door. You can guess something was there because it is so unbalanced with the rear of the house and more generally with the entire house, which has classic bungalow, arts-and-crafts symmetry. The porch and door were removed sometime after about 1987 and before 1996.

After an unexpected one-week delay for a property survey (through which our suspicions about the above-mentioned missing porch were confirmed) the project began. On September 23rd, late in the afternoon, they began the project by tearing down the garage, and the next day began the house foundation. The huge CAT was fun to watch.

In about 8 workdays, they finished laying the foundation for the addition and the garage; you see the pink exterior foam insulation showing at about what will be the final grade line for the property.

The view of the rear corner of the house, looking East toward our uphill neighbors, shows the driveway pad and rear of the house. This view, and that in the next photo, suggests just how bleak our usual exit & entry into the house was. At the back of the blue SUV, is the spot from where the previous photographs were taken. The patio and trees are gone, but the bushes were not yet completely removed.

Once work had commenced, the outlines of the addition really begin to take shape. In this image, again looking East, the foundation has been dug, three feet below the current basement so that we can have a full basement, brick laid, concrete poured, waterproofing and rock backfill added, and bracing set in place. In this photograph, you get a good sense of the addition’s size, noting the rear wall extends almost to the edge of our former patio. Also, the existing exit door is still visible as are 3 courses of foundation brick, showing the former ground level clearly.

This final photograph, looking West (the other direction from the previous two pictures), you can get a better sense of the foundation, looking inside it.

And, finally these last two photographs, both taken from the back of the property shows the shifting rear landscape, with a larger garage pad evident and further back. Also, the grade of the landscape has been raised across the back, offsetting some of the loss of grass from doubling the size of the garage. For some perspective, these are taken from the ravine. Where the play set was located is now the back rear edge of the new garage foundation.

For some reading and listening on the current economic crisis, check out This American Life, A Giant Pool of Money and its follow-up, Another Frightening News about the Economy, which discusses the bailout. The Columbia Journalism Review, Boiler Room has a sobering story about the origins of the financial crisis and the blindness of the business press to the “crooked origins of the credit crisis.”

Of course, we build and play while Rome burns, which is an odd feeling. Is there really a crisis?

It is hard to tell here in Chagrin, with the exception of the fact that there is a larger than normal pool of homes for sale. Our addition has been moving ahead, without pause, belying the slow deconstruction of the economy. The foundation went up in just over a week, despite three-days straight of rain. I will post some images of the past week tomorrow, maybe. Meanwhile, the perfect antidote, though perhaps disconcerting image that reveals that ordinary life goes on despite such crises, here is a pix of Eli smiling before his soccer game this morning–a Saturday morning just like every other mundane autumn morning.