Day 2 the sun set with the pool completely drained.

Beau was more than happy to pose in the deep end for a shot to show how HUGE our pool looks when empty!

Umm, yes he is wearing a police uniform.

 

They also dug all the french drains by hand.

The drains continue on the other side of the house since water comes in from that side of the family room as well as this side and in our dining room.

They are supposed to start on refinishing the pool (tile and such) on Monday.

I'll be sharing the updated photo's then!

On another note:

All you Texans (or southerners) share with me your favorite hardy plant!

We will be doing more flower beds around the pool instead of grass and I want to do it easy and drought tolerant.

If this summer is anything like last summer then we will be draining the pool onto our plants to keep them alive:-)

Blogger doesn't like to load my photo's lately.

Not sure why I told you that.

So here we are on DAY 1!

They really got it in high gear for the first day of work.

Backbreaking labor I tell you.

(I have no idea, it just looked like it)

There is no way to get a tractor in our backyard so everything was done with manual labor.

They had all the decking, coping and sidewalk removed by the end of the first day.

Then our front yard looked like this...

Our neighbors actually thought we were removing our pool.

It was almost 2 dump trucks worth of debris.

Our pool was drained so they can re-tile and re-surface it.

24,000 gallons down the drain.

Wow.

***

In the meantime...

Here is a sign I painted for Derek's grandma.

She commissioned it for a friend of hers.

It was painted on pressed wood (she supplied the wood) so it was a bit of a splintery challenge to have it look nice.

It was fun to do something a little different though:-)

Check back tomorrow for DAY 2 progress!

My Friday post is a little later than unusual. But there is some fun news that you may have seen on twitter: Our kitchen renovation is being captured for the TV show Cityline. This past week they came to film the "Before" and when our renovation is complete - they will come back to film the final reveal. (Which, may, you never know, may also be tied in with a magazine) Appliances come next week so Monday I'll show you what we've picked! Yay! Still a long ways to go in terms of the design process.

Unrelated to the filming, I got picked as the Cityline Blogger of the month. It's fun being interviewed and hope you take a peek.  I have to say the question about my photography made me sad for a moment :( Anyhow, it's a really nice interview. See you Monday. xo Linds

They started on our pool redo/flood fix yesterday.
Some have questioned why we are having our pool redone...
Our pool is about 30 years old and the tile was crumbling, the coping and decking were not the same level anymore and the walls of the pool were wearing through.
On top of that we have the issue with our family room flooding that was connected to the pool redo.

There ya have it.
So here they came.

No time was wasted as they got right to work.

Our yard looks like a hurricane hit it.

Though it didn't look that great to begin with.

Here is the beginning.

Unfortunitly we will not have a diving board for about a year. Those things are costly.

I quit cleaning the pool when we decided to go ahead and redo it.

The pool surroundings have been untouched as well since we knew from day one that it would be destroyed eventually.

I just picked out this tile to go around the edges.

Yay for progress!

I'll update with day 1 photos tomorrow!
***

By the way, added new items in my Etsy store.

Be sure to check them out!

It's no secret that I haven't been entirely satisfied with the layout of our living room. The open layout of our main floor - which I love and plan to open up even more when we reno our kitchen - is a bit of a design challenge, especially with two focal points (tv and fireplace). I initially confined the "living room" to the area around the fireplace, creating a dead space behind the couch that I started to turn into a work area.

The Before:

Drawn using floorplanner.com. Keep in mind that it's not to scale and our furniture doesn't really look like this. 

Even though I thought I was maximizing our space, I was really just making the room feel smaller (oops). From day one I had been picturing this space as two distinct "areas" instead of one big room.

The Soon-to-be After:


Again, not to scale, not our furniture.

It's amazing how much larger the entire main floor feels this way (yes, I already started moving things around - I even used painter's tape to map out an area for our future rug). It means I'm losing my little work area, but we're gaining seating, storage and a much improved traffic flow. This picture gives you a better idea of what we're planning in terms of layout (we're planning to keep our shelving open, so ignore the doors).


Image via bhg.com

Now to sell and/or relocate some furniture and buy and/or build some new pieces.

Looking for some furniture arrangement ideas? Check out this slideshow from BHG.