Longtime YBNBY readers might be interested in what has been taking so much of my time away from this site lately. Over a year ago, I got it in my head that we should go see what was on the mysterious and inaccessible second floor of my house. In a three part story I told about taking a look.

Since then I got married and doubled the size of my family, so we set to work building a stairwell and four rooms upstairs. We started with an architect right after Christmas. The construction started in April. We ran into some problems along the way, namely a contractor who promised an outrageous budget and a reasonable schedule and then couldn't follow through on either. As the year was drawing to a close, we took matters into our own hands and pushed the contractor outside. This past weekend, we finally moved in! See, we got married in June thinking that the upstairs would be finished August first. For seven months, we had six people in two bedrooms driving each other crazy (well, let's say the kids drove us and each other crazy). If you are at all interested, you can read the entire story here. Yes, there's more work to be done, but I am hoping that I will be able to spend more time entertaining you instead of tearing my hair out dealing with local problems in 2010.