Dear Mom & Dad - Send Money!

As many of you know, we are adding on to our house. We bought the house 4 years ago because of the price and also its versatility. The house is on 1&1/2 lots which leaves a lot of space for improvement. When we bought the house, it included a mother-in-law (MIL) suite but has remained unused to this day except storage. I think we actually had a mother-in-law stay in it one time so I suppose you could say we got our use out of it. But we only have 1 bathroom between the four of us and it gets pretty crowded around potty time. So we've decided to undertake a dreaded remodel slash addition. Our initial idea was to build a room and hallway where our patio stood to connect the MIL to the house and remodel the MIL into the new master bedroom. We foolishly borrowed $20,000 thinking that would be enough to complete the majority of the project. After having to spend just $1500 on an architect, we realized we were wrong. Very, very wrong.
So here we are now (see picture) with a partly completed wall and a destroyed backyard (and a destraught gardener.) The contractors got this far before realizing the roof was going to be a problem. If you've seen our house you know that the peaks don't all run north and south. You might have guessed that the MIL peak runs east to west. So, basically, to make the whole thing structurally sound, the builders have to turn the roof 90 degrees. Complicatedly, they have to rebuild the whole roof and parts of the garage roof with trusses that are specially engineered into triangle shapes that look like M.C. Escher drawings. Which means more money (donations welcome!) and more delays.
The girls have had some fun during this time. The first day the construction workers came out, they sat at the back window all day watching "the builders." And since we don't have a backyard to swing in anymore, we've gotten to go to almost every park in Skagit Valley at LEAST 10 times each. And Savvy always mentions how excited she is that daddy is going to make her a play room upstairs, pending we have enough of the aforementioned money. All in all, this will be a great learning experience for all of us, provided it doesn't break our spirits (and our bank account.)