Progress. Kinda.

George's brother Aaron arrived about 11:30 a.m. with a three-man crew, a couple of jackhammers and a tracked Bobcat mini-backhoe. It quickly became apparent that they were under-tooled for the job. Even if the slab they're supposed to demolish lacks the 3' footers required by code, the fucker is still a 12"-thick monolith of reinforced concrete.
If they had the big Bobcat with jackhammer front end that the crew used to demolish the old garage foundation, they'd still have their hands full with this new slab. As it is, they've just been chipping away at it all afternoon. Here's what they had accomplished by about 4:30 p.m.
Aaron ran into town and rented a 30" wet saw and carved at the slab a bit, but I can't see much in the way of results from that effort.
Unless they get their hands on heavier equipment, I don't expect them to finish this slab by the weekend.
George called about 2 p.m. to say the guy who's going to close off a dead space on the north side of the house (you can see it on the extreme right in an earlier photo with the crappy door propped up against the opening) arrived about 3 p.m. with his fat son and a Dairy Queen chocolate cone in hand. I showed him the job, explaining that the wiring that ran through the space serves an electrical outlet on the stairway landing and that the outlet quit working during the winter - about the time we discovered the door had fallen off and the space was exposed to the elements.
So the wiring must be addressed before the space is walled off and sided over. But he didn't have his circuit tester with him, so he'll be back tomorrow to do the work.
It's a good thing that I've been able to cultivate a certain sense of detachment about this whole business since we had our meeting with George yesterday. As long as we're moving in the right direction and not running seriously over budget, I can tolerate some delays.
The decision to rip out the new concrete and reposition the garage involved rotating the building by 90 degrees. Whereas the original plan was for the garage, with its two-car-wide overhead door - to face the back of the house, the building will now face the south and the driveway. We had planned to have a rather pricey 16' wide picture window on the front of the second story, but when it became apparent that the huge window would face the south and get pretty much continuous direct sunlight, we scrapped it in favor of smaller windows and three skylights on the north side of the roof.
Wanting to have a structure that looked like it fit with our 104-year-old Queen Anne Victorian house, Maria took a cue from our neighbor Larry's barn and suggested a cupola. At present, the plan calls for a windowed cupola with a light-reflecting system that would channel daylight downward into the second floor. It should be a very cool detail up in the vaulted ceiling.
Rotating the building onto an east-west axis also puts the access door much closer to the house, something we'll appreciate this winter.
Assuming the building is finished by then...