We’re back from a fun trip to Arkansas for my parents’ 45th anniversary, and look at what was outside our back door when we returned.

A big hole:

And a big pile of dirt formerly in the hole:

You can see here that the new room will go out a little bit more than the pantry (which is the wall you can see). The idea was both to get a little more room than we otherwise would and to make it so we didn’t have a huge long expanse of wall:

This morning they’re setting up the forms for the rest of the foundation:

We’ve had our first surprise, which is that that neither the pantry nor the kitchen/bathroom/laundry room chunk of the house are on foundations. You can see a root from a tree on the other side of the house protruding through the plastic in the picture above, and see a little bit of the random bricks and bits that the house is standing on in the picture below. So after this foundation gets poured, they’re going to pour in some more concrete to keep the soil from pushing in. Or something.