Well I have failed you all.  I promised an update yesterday, and I did not deliver.  My apologies.  But, I do have a very long post here today! :)  So much has happened in the past few weeks, so I figured we should take a look back.  So let's look, shall we?

Waaaay back on April 28th, this sweet boy turned 1.

It's hard for me to believe he has been with us for a whole year!! Here are just a couple of the 300 pictures I think I took at his party!

The very next day, that sweet boy's sweet daddy turned 27!  We took him out to Miyos for a yummy lunch.

A couple weeks later, we celebrated my 4th Mother's day!  What a precious day!

That brings us a little more up to date, when we went to the beach for the weekend.  We were there to celebrate mine and Ben's 5th wedding anniversary.  We treated each other to a nice surprise gift for each other.  I finally got him his own John Deere riding mower, and he got me the top band for my wedding ring set!  Unfortunately, we had awful weather at the beach, and it was cold and rainy the whole time!  We did take the kids out 1 morning just so they could play in the sand for 30 minutes or so.  

Can you see the tooth?!  It FINALLY broke through on his birthday!

And lastly, I always like coming home from a vacation, but this time was the best!  Why?  Because we came home to a *FiNiShEd* house!!!  My dad finished the roof while we were gone, and it looks incredible!!  Here is the finished product!!!

The front of our house before:

And the front shot NOW!!!!

Can you believe it's the same house?? We can't!!  In case you have lost track, we had an addition built, raised the pitch of the porch roof, added 2 more columns for support, and got a brand new roof!  I know I'm biased, but I just think it's the most beautiful sight!  

The side shots show the porch roof level really well.  It was almost completely flat before and held water really badly.  Now, it has a nice slant for the rain to run off, and it looks 10 times better because you can actually see the shingles!

Ahhhh, home sweet home.  

Vacation!

Well folks, we've reached that time...my favorite time of the year aside from Christmas!  Summer vacation!  We will be spending a large amount of the next few months at the beach.  We actually leave tomorrow for our first little 4 day visit!  I thought I should check in since it has been 2 weeks!  I haven't been neglecting the blog, I've just been waiting it out!  The dormer addition is complete, but dad has a couple more days on the roof.  He will be finished this week, and then I will share the pictures!! I wanted you to see the finished product all at once! We will be back Sunday evening, so you can expect an update with the final pictures on Monday!  Hope you have a great weekend! :)

Allow Me to Introduce....

The ADDITION.  No, we weren't planning on it being so big.  And yes, we were referring to it as a dormer in the beginning.  We have canned that word.  This thing is huge people.  These pictures I'm going to show you are not how it looks now.  We ran into a little problem with the porch, and it has been completely rebuilt.  Well, the roof at least.  When we (they!) cut the hole out upstairs, it exposed the top of the porch and we were able to see that the rafters were merely leaning up against the house.  As in, NO nails.  As in, getting ready to fall at any second. (In my head at least!) Obviously it needed to be rebuilt.  Our builder suggested that we raise the pitch of the porch roof for a few different reasons.  First, the reason it is rotted in the first place is because the roof of the porch is (was!) completely flat.  The rain came pouring off the roof of the house and then dumped onto the flat roof of the porch and took forever to drain.  It built up and rotted all the wood.  Second, we couldn't see any of the brand new shingles that we spent so much dang money on!!  The porch is a huge part of the front of our house and because it was flat, the shingles were completely unseen!  The last reason is because once the "dormer" went up, Ben and I panicked. It was SO big.  And tall.  It looked out of place to us and there was no taking it down and refiguring at that point!  Now that the porch roof is raised, it looks SO much better!!  We are so happy with how it turned out!  Today I'll show you the pictures I took BEFORE the porch was raised!

Pretty crazy right??  HUGE change!  I love it though!! It's reminding me of an old southern plantation house in Beaufort or something!  One day we plan to wrap the porch around both sides.  We had to take that into consideration when building the new roof line as well!  And speaking of roof, here are a few pictures of the new shingles!

It was getting dark outside!  Things are still in progress here!

Woohoo look at those pretty new shingles!!

Here's a shot where you can see the top is done and the back porch roof below it wasn't.  Look at the difference!!

Things are still going strong here! I'll keep you posted!