The Grapple is gone and so is most of our house.

Here's what I came "home" to last night after work. For whatever reason I felt a little more bothered by the sight of it than the day before... I think because, being at work all day, I hadn't witnessed the destruction as it happened. So it felt more out of my control or something. But the grapple is gone, having done it's job. A neighbor joked, "I see you've decided to go with a ranch?" to which my joker husband responded, "We wanted a really open feel to things." Thank goodness we've kept our sense of humor through it all.

There's still a giant mess to be cleaned up. They actually have two dumpsters going- one with masonry and brick to be recycled and one for the other stuff. The brick stuff is overflowing the garage area and the rest is piled where our music room used to be and overflowing into the back. Today I imagine they'll bring some machine like a mini-bulldozer to shovel out all the stuff into a dumpster. They are taking down one last wall by hand and then it's clean and prep for framing.

Meanwhile, we're finalizing our window selection today and most likely will put a down payment on our appliances. Now we have the fun of watching the money rush out of our accounts ;) but really, the process of selecting fixtures, appliances, tile, etc. has so far proven to be really fun for us. We both feel like we're building our forever home and that's beyond exciting....