I finished insulating the walls and buttoned up all of the sheathing this morning, using sprayfoam liberally for all of the cracks too small to fill with insulation. Mario came back in the evening with his brother and a bunch of drywall and knocked out about half of the room. Behold:

Looking to the front of the house from in front of the closet

Standing inside the closet, looking at the doorway to the front bedroom.

When Jen and I got married, one of the things she brought with her was her vacuum cleaner. It was a big black modular unit that served us well up until the summer of 2015 or so when it finally gave up the ghost after about 20 years. We then sprung for a Dyson Ball, which was a lot of money at the time, but we got it home and it’s been working for us really well until Sunday, when it started making a funny noise and smelled like burning. I’m pretty handy with household repairs so I sat down with it and disassembled all of the parts I could get to; this isn’t hard with a Dyson because it’s engineered extremely well. The Dyson has several color-coded elements that help the user disassemble the key sections where clogs will most likely occur. I went through all of these areas and found a piece of cardboard that had clogged the main pipe but that didn’t fix the burning smell, so we called the local Dyson service center, which is only about 10 miles away. Jen brought it in and the guy told us the motor was probably shot, but he’d replace it as it was still under warranty. That was Monday. She picked it up today and we were vacuuming pine needles this evening. I think that’s a stellar bit of customer service, even if I’m annoyed the motor broke after only 2 years.