Welcome!

Hello! My name is Michelle. My husband Jack and I are starting our remodel! We live in Southern California, Mar Vista which is about 3 miles from Venice Beach. You can see what it looks like here, just before construction begins. It is 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom home with 997 square feet! We purchased our home in Mar Vista 4 1/2 years ago. During that time, the home has fortunately doubled in value, but has not doubled in size! We will have been married for 8 years this coming September and the entire time we've been married , no matter where we've lived, we have always had only one bathroom...Until now! We have been planning this for about a year and a half, maybe longer, and i could tell you a lot of boring details on how we got to where we are today, but we are here today and that's all that matters now! We are adding on 2100 square feet to our 997 square foot house! We are going out and up and over. Jack has completely designed the house himself, with a little help from me, of course! OK, sometimes a lot of help from me. Really i told Jack, i brought him into our current closet, which is pretty big, and said, "look around, you see the size of this place? I want the new closet in our add on to be at least this size, JUST FOR ME!" He laughed, but this is not laughing matter! All of my clothes are squished together on my tiny side of the closet! and if I even think of inching over to his side of the closet, ah I don't think so! So, yes I do have a few requirements! Anyway, our design is finished! We submitted our plans to the city for our permit one week ago and like we paid for, they expedited and the corrections were back to us in one week! Amazing! I took the corrections over to our structural engineer on Friday for him to make the corrections the city asked for. Once we receive those back, next Friday, away we go with our permit. In the meantime, we have been preparing by packing the entire contents of our home, into a storage bin that will live in our driveway the entire time of construction. This was great for packing. we had lots of things with drawers and cabinets, so we filled those with other items to be packed, so there were a lot less boxes. And Jack is the master of packing small spaces. We have put a lot of stuff in a very small amount of space. You can see from the pictures attached. These were taken this weekend while we were packing everything. My old office, completely destroyed to make way for the new laundry room! I am so excited for the new stuff, but I was sad to see my office go. i really liked that space, but my new office will be just as nice. In the meantime, you can see my temporary office space in the corner of my bedroom! That is where i am composing this from! Tomorrow is the big day! Officially Day 1. Juan, our cnstruction guy, will be here at 7am sharp! The "lowboy" bin is set to arrive tomorrow morning along with the workers toilet. Tuesday am, the fence arrives. It will surround the front area of the house while we are under construction. We have to rent it for 6 months at a time, so when 6 months is up, we better be done with it! Jack is going to rent a jackhammer in the morning as well and out goes the patio in the backyard, the front walk etc.....Oh my, wish me luck, hang on and stay tuned!