Earlier this year, I mentioned that we added on to our house. Well, the pictures are finally up. I'll only show the before and after, but you can see more pictures here.

Here's what the house looked like before:

Here's the final result:

It's been done for a while now, but we just got the pictures uploaded yesterday. Here's what we did: First, we removed the big picture window in the front of the house. We replaced it with two windows that open, and are much smaller, and added a wall between them. Then we added a porch across the front of the house, which is about 20 feet by 7 feet. If you notice in the original picture, the old porch was a small square of cement. That's still there, but we nailed the wooden porch right to the old cement porch. The tool to do that was basically a gun, and had quite a kick on it.

After the porch, we added the roof line, as well as the supporting beams. Ever tried to hold a 20 foot head beam above your head while someone else nailed it in place? Not fun. After we did that, it was noon on the first day, so we decided to each lunch!

Actually, that was Memorial day weekend. Throughout the summer, we put up the rest of the siding, shingled the roof, added shudders, put in some porch lights, added a ceiling, moved one side of the landscaping, and added a little landscaping on the other side. The project is pretty much done - the windows still need painting (we got lazy), but that can be done anytime.

Anyway, this is my first major house project (not the last, that's for sure), and, while I didn't do most of the planning for it (thanks to my father-in-law for that), I still put in a lot of work, and am pretty proud of how it turned out.