Horrendous noises emanated from the basement today. Upon investigation, I found Jonathan using some sort of miniaturized jackhammer of doom to expand the opening between the basement of the existing house and the crawlspace of the addition.

BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM

Many sharp blades were involved as well.

After a while, Jonathan's whole body was reverberating from the effort, so he took a break, and I snapped this picture.

When he was all done, voila: the expanded opening.

Here's a view of the new heat exchanger, as seen from the newly expanded opening.

In the meantime, Steve continued with the stairs. He framed in the space between the wall and the bottom of the stairs:
In this picture, the part I'm referring to is to the right of the five bottom-most stairs (towards the top of this picture.) While we're here, please notice another new development: the baseboards, stained the same as the windowsills and trim, are going in.

A close up of same.

You can see also how Steve is fiddling around with how he wants the baseboards to be integrated with the small step that separates the addition (at right) from the current living room (at left).

Not to be outdone, Mike continued sucking down urethane fumes as he finished up with doors and what not upstairs.
There are three things to admire here.
1) the bathroom door, getting sanded and urethaned.
2) and 3) the new trim around the bathroom door (to the left) and the door to the bedroom (tucked away around the corner on the right).

Two piles of boards remain: the ones on the right are for the bookshelves that will go in under the windows both upstairs and down. And the plain vanilla ones on the left will go in the closet.

In the meantime, Michael and Gary worked on the deck. Here is the first official piece of deck, just outside the office door.

And - not to be outdone in the Exceptionally Noisy Department - they drilled into the foundation and attached these supports for the deck.

Brad - the concrete guy - came by to pick up a color chart for the staining of the concrete floor in the bump out. Oh, Jonathan has been calling this the 'sun space' - doesn't that sound more appealing? But we're used to 'bump out', so that's what it is. Anyhow. He'll be back on Thursday to stain that floor a dark gray. The idea is for it to soak up the sun.

Here's Sadie, Steve's dog, bored out of her mind, waiting for the neighbors' dog Molly to come play with her. Sadie's a sweetheart.