This is the story of a endless battle for truth, justice and the American way. We started the planning for our house in 2001 dreaming on several occasions over glasses of wine. We went through many "what if" scenarios talking about what Vicki liked and what Mike liked in a house. If we could do something to change Vicki's house, what would that be?

Why Vicki's house you might ask at this point -- Mike's house is pretty nice. There are lots of reasons, but here are some of the main ones:

• Our house is 5 minutes from Lewis & Clark where we both work.
• Our house is located in a great neighborhood where we know many of the neighbors
• Our house is on a double piece of property that is very nicely wooded.
• Our house is in an area where the home prices are rising rapidly and has high value houses (significantly higher than Vicki's original cost) on the same block.
• Our house is 10 minutes from downtown Portland.

We had lots of ideas what we'd like to change. It seemed that we spent lots of time with friends enjoying food and drink . . . wouldn't it be great if we had a placed specifically designed to cook and entertain friends and family. We also wanted a nice place to work at home -- Vicki spends time writing and conducting business after hours; Mike works on Web projects and keeps household records. We wanted family and friends to visit and be comfortable. There were many more ideas that we wanted to work into the design of a new house.

We started working with Gary, a contractor who was recommended to us. Gary spent many hours working with us on the planning and layout of the house. We used to have weekend morning coffee and spend hours working on details for the plan. Gary contributed a great deal to the plan -- 35 years of experience is very helpful...and at no cost. Originally we were shooting for getting in the house by Vicki's birthday (Christmas). So we packed up the house during June and at the beginning of July we moved everything to a storage unit to have it ready for construction to begin.

This could be a long story at this point but suffice it to say that by mid-September when nothing but the asbestos abatement had happened we were concerned. We finally gave Gary the ultimatum -- start this week and finish by March 1 (too late at this point to even think about Christmas). Gary said he couldn't do it and fired himself. This began a series of meetings with other contractors that we had found out about from friends. After many meetings, phone calls and visits to the house in a very short period of time, we got bids from three other contractors and picked the one we felt we could work the best with. Our new man in charge was(is) Bill McGown and he got started immediately after we gave him the go ahead. So after a long wait for things to begin, we are underway. We were hoping to get the second story framed and the roof back on before the inevitable fall rain in Portland but that idea disappeared with the initial delay. So Bill and crew are now working in the rain but they are pressing on and the saga continues.

This site is designed to keep our families and friends updated on the progress of our remodel project so they can share our trials, tribulations and triumphs. We will endeavor to keep this up to date and fill you in on some of the details as we progress. We will break the house into areas so that we can devote different pages to each. The areas are:

• the kitchen/great room
  
• the away room
  
• the clearstory/living room
  
• the master bedroom/bath
  
• the second floor
• the back yard/studio

It seems there's so much we could say about each of these so I think we'll add some narrative on the appropriate pages. So click on the areas above to see what's happening with each. But first, take a look at the floor plans and see how the whole thing is going to fit together.