June to February 2012 Part III

Here's the April post a month late.

Simple tools accomplish the job

Regardless, this is still a recap of what happened last summer and fall. So this post is going to showcase getting our garage floor poured!

The first thing we did was to get a bid for the work. We decided to go once again with the same flatwork contractor that poured our basement slab and porch cap back in 2008/2009.

Also at this same time we thought that if we wanted to have a drain in the garage, the time to decide that was now. The first thing Shawn did was to dig a hole in the center of the garage where the drain would go.
You can see Shawn here is using a 4x4 to compact the bottom of the hole to make sure the drain would not settle.

And the drain we chose is that black square box you see in the picture. The top grate comes off so we're able to vacuum out whatever debris will go into the catch basin.
 
The problem with deciding to add a drain to the plans is that there was no way of getting out of having to dig the trench for the pipe.












 


Also, Shawn had to drill through the concrete footing so that the pipe could daylight outside. He used a hammer drill to drill a series of holes in a circle, then chipped away the concrete in the middle until he poked through to the outside.

It's hard to see in the picture, but he is wearing a respirator since it was quite a bit of dusty work.

It was also hot. This was around the same time that we installed our A/C that I previously mentioned in the last post.

Ah, yes... no lack of digging on this project

After he finally poked through the wall, Shawn went outside and dug the trench for the exterior pipe.

Then it was time to set the drain and to install the pipe. We needed the drain to be installed 2" lower than the outside edge of the slab so that when they poured the concrete, the floor would slope towards the drain.

Gluing pipe, and Evan with his flowers

After getting the drain set, Shawn glued the drain pipe, and in the next picture you can see him working on gluing the pipe on the outside, while Evan showcases the lovely bouquet of flowers he found. I don't know their name, but it's a nice weed that we seem to have in abundance around our yard.


After the drain work was done, it was time to level the ground and to run a compactor to get the floor nice and compacted so it won't settle. Evan got to run some of the power equipment and had fun helping.

So strong!

You can also see in the next picture how big of a helper he was. He helped stack the pink boards of insulation that we decided to put under the garage slab.

The insulation under the concrete will help keep the concrete from sweating in the summer and  water pressure from the ground from wicking up into the inside of the garage. Also, in the winter time it should help once the garage is all finished and insulated to help regulate the temp. inside the garage.

And, if Shawn needs to run some heat in the garage so he can tinker with something or other (or if I ever get to have wood shop started and projects running!) we can work comfortably in the garage and help keep whatever little heat we may use.

The next step was to get the insulation down, seams taped and we were ready for concrete!
I wish I could say that it was easy as that. Unfortunately because of adding the 2 inches of foam that we had not originally planned for, and switching from a 4" slab to a 6" slab when the contractor came to shoot elevations, we realized that there would not be enough room at the new elevation to make the steps onto the porch on the outside work quite right. We could have gone with a 4" slab and made it fit, but we wanted to have the stronger, thicker slab for extra factor of safety.

Here you can see what the floor looked like before the concrete was poured. You can also see the rebar installed to help when the slab does crack (and it will! It's concrete!) the pieces don't pull apart. We did have control joints (saw cuts) into the concrete to tell the inevitable cracks where to go, rather than let them crack randomly where they will.

This was just after they poured.

Nothing like a concrete truck to fascinate kids!

Who could resist running on a fresh slab?

Evan loved all the construction

The kids had a good time watching the crew work. Evan was excited to see the concrete truck come in and do its thing.

Here Evan poses after the concrete was just poured and one of the workers is left smoothing out the surface. You can see the bullfloat behind Evan.

And after we came home from work, the new concrete was irresistible. You can see Bianca running around testing the new concrete floor.

The contractor came back later to do the outside slab. You can see in the next picture where the forms are set, and the steel reinforcement is already installed. That night, Shawn and I worked on getting the catch basins for the eave spouts installed.


He also installed a bronze cap to the sewer clean out that is right under the porch.

Here you can see Shawn working on gluing the clean out.

 

Here he is working on hooking up the black drain pipe we installed for draining the eavespouts. We're using a catch basin so that leaves will get trapped here, and only water will go in.

Here's a view of the slab after it was poured.

After the slab was dry, the contractor came back to form the front step, and then it took a couple of weeks for him to finally come back and pour the step.

But here you can see the step. Because of adding the 2" of foam and switching from 4" slab to 6" slab for the garage and driveway, we only ended up needing 1 step.

 

I found this picture where Bandit was showcasing last year's early birthday present for me from my in-laws. On one of their trips to come down and help us while siding the back peak, my in-laws stopped by Menards and bought some pavers. You can see the small patio right off the back slider door. It's great to not have to step into mud anymore! 

That's it for this post. I probably have one more posts to get caught up. Then I can update on what's happened this year!

June to February Part II

Front gable all finished

So much that I still need to recap from what we were up to last summer and fall.The good news is that I finally found the rest of the missing summer pictures.

Here's a picture that shows a good view of the front gable all finished up. The hope is that this year we'll actually get to finish the rest. Under the front gable we will have stone siding, and to the left where you see the missing Tyvek paper, we will open up that wall, redo the tyvek, add stone to the bottom and create some columns in the front.

If your central A/C unit needs 2x4's to hold, you might be a redneck!

Another of last summer's major accomplishment was the siding of the gable at the back of the house.

Here you can see the picture of what the back looked like before we got started. Also, noteworthy on this picture is to highlight the new central air unit to the house. :)

Living in the basement wasn't good enough against the 90-100 degree temps that we had for a couple of weeks in a row. All window air conditioners sold out around town. I happened to try wal-mart again and reserved one of the last 6 units that were coming into town on the truck that day. By the time we drove from one side of town to the other to get it, they were all sold out and only ours remained. Thank goodness!
We took one window panel out and mounted the A/C on a handy 2x4 frame. To help keep the cool air inside, we use 2" pink insulation board. Tacky looking, but works great! Shawn also built it in such a way that you just unscrew 2 boards and the whole thing comes out.

This poor little 10K BTU unit was put to the test, but it did a nice job of getting humidity out, and it didn't take much to help cool, since it is a basement.

Once it got cool again outside, we put it away before the winter. I doubt that we'll have an actual central unit in before it gets hot this year, so this will probably be used one more time.It can always be used out in a (future) shop or Evan's tree house.

For the job of getting the back peak sided, the guys had to bring out the scaffolding again and set that up.

All set to work!

The scaffolding wasn't wide enough to span the whole area, so the guys set it up on one side. The sequence was to re-do the Tyvek with a new layer, install the soffit and fascia on half the gable, then the trim around the window, then install the siding. Once finished, move the scaffolding to the other side and repeat.

Notice the safety harness for fall protection. OSHA would approve

You can see above that the soffit and fascia are installed on the left side of the gable. Shawn is working on installing the trim around the window. One way to do a curved trim is to special order the already curved piece ($$$), another way is to hire a contractor who knows how to curve a piece of PVC trim ($$$). Another way is to cut out a curved trim from straight pieces and made to fit the windows (lots cheaper than option one or two). Shawn drew up the window arch in CAD. Then, he created a template to fit a 6" curved trim inside an 8" wide straight trim.He  printed the template to the right scale and gave it to my father in law who took it home with him to work at his shop. He glued the piece of paper to the 8" pieces of trim, and cut them out perfectly, and brought them back when he came back to assist with this job.


Here you can see my father-in-law once again assisted Shawn with the job . He manned the saw and cut pieces of siding, trim, soffit and fascia after Shawn yelled down the dimensions.


Shawn stayed at the top of the scaffolding, and you can see in the pictures that he was even wearing a safety harness so that in the event that he slipped, he didn't fall to his doom. He was 25' or more up in the air.






To get supplies and tools up to Shawn, they guys used a basket on a rope. Same trusty technology that was probably used to build the Pyramids in Egypt and all those other ancient temples.

You can also see in this picture that they made very good progress, and the work is looking very nice, indeed.Since they wanted to make sure they didn't need to do anything up here again, the guys made sure that they got the caulking done around the window as well.



Thankfully the work went well without injuries. It was a lot of work, but the job turned out great!

Taken earlier this spring, after all the snow melted!

And here is a picture of the finished gable.You can also notice that we got around to siding the chimney as well! But those pictures will have to wait until next post.

You can admire the nice job my husband and his dad did on the siding. The window trim worked out great as well, since that curved trim hugs the window just right. Very proud of the work they have accomplished thus far!

There is still much more that I need to get caught up on, but hopefully one or two  more posts ought to do it. Then we can talk about the plans for this year. Spring is here and we're very busy gearing up for another season of housebuilding!

God bless... and Happy Easter! Celebrate since He is risen indeed!

June to February- The posts that never came... Part 1

If someone would have told me last summer that it would be months before I got back to the blog, I would have scoffed at the idea. I would certainly have told them that I have more dedication than that!

But here we are, February of 2012 and so much to catch up. The leaves are all gone, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years... heck... even Valentine's day came and went!

So much time has passed since July that it is going to be a big task trying to get the blog all caught up with work that has been done since then. Though who knows who is still reading this since I abandoned it for so long.

But the great big news is that we finally have high speed internet! Well, it is not super fast, but when you come from a 24K dial-up connection, it feels like high speed. So hurray! For those of you who didn't give up on this blog, that means that instead of 45 minutes to upload a picture, I can actually do a post in 45 minutes (with kids running around). After kids go to bed, should be faster. In other words, no excuses left for not doing a monthly post.

So let's recap what happened in the last post. We were in the middle of siding the front bedroom. If you followed my father-in-law's blog, then you were able to keep updated somewhat on the progress of the siding. But for the sake of continuity, I will post here the same thing.

But, I do hope I am able to find the pictures from last summer since right now I can't seem to locate them. I really hope they are not actually lost.

Until next time...

That time came...

I can't believe the end of June came and went! I missed my June blog post, and I almost missed July. Having 26K dial-up for internet does not help, though that is not the excuse. I am really trying to do one post per month, so I better get this out today.

Recapping from the last post, I left off in eager anticipation of our garage sale. You can see Evan here as he posed with one of the many load that made their way into town. The statistics? Three weekends of preparation, 10 hours of prep work, 10 hours of sale, and we ended up with $300 to show for our labor selling a quarter of the precious things we took. Not bad!

I did learn that father's day weekend does not make a good weekend for a sale. Weather was perfect, but the traffic didn't turn out as expected. So I figured it is because everyone went to see their daddies! Regardless, we made good money for things that were on their way to Goodwill, and in the end Goodwill ended with some 38 boxes, as embarrassing as it is to reveal that, we did take 38 boxes full of things to Goodwill.

At the end of the last post, Shawn had just finished with the soffit and facia for the front bedroom. So the next step was to work on the siding. The first thing to do was to re-do the Tyvek.

The big 9ft tall rolls of Tyvek cost quite a bit of money, and you get 150’ worth of it. Well, we don’t need 150 ft. So we bought a 3’ roll that has 50’ on it. As you can imagine, this means more layers of Tyvek, rather than two pieces for the front gable wall.


And this is what a wall covered with 3’ wide pieces of Tyvek looks like. It works the same, you just have to make sure you shingle-lap it and tape the seams.

Then my father in law came back for some more torturous work, and he helped Shawn with siding the front over a weekend back in June. The siding that we used for the front bedroom is still fiber cement siding, except we used the kind that when finished, it will look like shingle siding, rather than lap boards.

Here you can see Derald as he worked on painting the pieces, which may be one of his favorite jobs. :)


Then the labor of mounting those pieces up began. It is quite a messy job, specially when cuts have to be made, and the guys make sure they have their PPE (personal protective equipment) to keep from breathing the dust.

Which I’m sure one day will be in the same boat as asbestos and be illegal, since it is bad to breathe in.

Here Derald demonstrates the proper PPE to use for this job.


Installation for the shingle siding is a bit similar to lap siding, in that you need a 1 ¼” starter strip.

Then you need a solid board for the first run, since when you put the shingle siding on top, you need to have something behind it to cover under the slots.

You only need this on the first row, since the shingle siding pieces are designed so that when the next row goes on top, the previous row provides the solid backing for the shingle slots.


You can better see what I mean here:

You can see the solid siding off to the right, that is underneath the first row of shingle siding.

When the next row goes up, only the “tab” at the bottom of the shingle siding piece will be visible. And you can see that in the next picture.


The shingle siding comes in three different board "styles" and you alternate the three different pieces so that the end look will be a "random" pattern to the shingles.

From what I heard (I was not there that weekend), everything went smoothly until they started to get around the window.

But by the time it was quitting time on the second day, the guys had made great progress for a weekend’s work.

My father in law did a great job giving his perspective on this job on his blog:

http://dagwoodshopnotes.blogspot.com/2011/06/hardly-board-siding.html

So you can check it out and see the whole account! 

If I can, I’ll get to another post this month, to sort of catch up. I don’t have current pictures, but my father in law did return to finish the job on another weekend. And the front gable is all done! Plus I have more that I need to update, so until next time...

I'll leave off with daddy and Evan posing and showing off, dad's new drill he got for Father's day weekend.

Progress is off to a crawl start on siding... but the big sale is coming!

I wish I had a ton to update since the last post over a month ago. But I don't. I'll start off with the miscellaneous things that I can remember we've done. I should keep a diary, just so I can keep track of things for the next post. Maybe next month. (Yeah, right... add it to the list)

First off, we did end up putting up the screens for the windows upstairs to test the fit. Shawn think they should be fine, but I'm not convinced they will not get full of dust and become yucky. We should put them away, but I doubt that we will. The good news is that only the basement bar/kitchen screens were the wrong size. It is still on my to-do list to get the correct sized ones, so there's another thing on list.

The other thing that happened is that we finally got the electrical inspection. Good news is there were no issues, though the inspector did state his reservations about the basement ceiling not being covered. But that's acceptable by code, and we're good to do. So then of course, the electrician's bill arrived shortly after that, and even though we had saved up the money for it, and we were ready, it is always painful to part with such a sum that could buy a new vehicle. And that's for half the house. And to think that we got another small vehicle sized electrical check to go in the future. *sigh*

Still on an electrical subject, Shawn got a splitter for the phone lines, and here you can see him as he starts on connecting the phones to all of the rooms in the basement. We have six lines, one to each room, though we're not sure that we need all of them. At least we had the means to pay this electrician for his labor. :)

On a more exciting note we have a date set for our garage sale! And our daycare provider has graciously invited us to have it at her house in town, so we're excited (more like I'm excited) because the traffic will definitely be better, so hopefully that will mean plenty or treasure hunters willing to pay for our junk. It is scheduled for mid-June and I'm happy to report that the old house treasure is officially sorted into keep and sell piles.

Here are a couple of pictures that depict that oh-so dreaded task. The stuff that was upstairs that fit through the window made the journey to the outside, where we sorted into trash, burn, keep and sell piles.

Here is another picture that shows the monstrous undertaking.
All in all it wasn't too terrible, just odious. It took about three full weekends, and a couple of evenings. Of course, we could not have done it without some help keeping an eye on the kids while we were in the old house. Grandparents spent some more quality time with the kids, and we took advantage of their help again.

And next picture you can see what will hopefully give us a small refund. Even if it doesn't, all of the stuff you see here will have a one way trip into town. All of these precious items will become someone's treasures either through our garage sale, or from the goodwill because nothing will be coming back!

Our old bedroom is full of the keepsakes, but now that the major sorting is done, I want to do second opinion and thin the keep pile some more. Really, we need none of it. It's been six months since we've moved out and I have not had the need to use any of these things. Realistically I know we won't get rid of all of it, but I'm optimistic that we can part with a few more things. Probably in the next couple of weeks before the sale, we'll start sorting the sale pile, cleaning some items and pricing things to get ready for the big day!

The big focus has been on getting the old house sorted. But in between here and there when it was not raining, Shawn began to pick up where he left off on siding. So now the main focus will once again be siding. Shawn began by building the cornice returns, or whatever they are called, in the soffit and fascia of the front gable.

The birdhouse return is another silly name for it, and it is the white triangle thing you can see at the corner of the roof in the picture above. We did a lot of driving around to take a look at how most houses have these done. It was very hard to find some sort of guidance about these on the internet. So Shawn took a stab at it, and it turned out really nice and professional looking. You can also see in the picture where he had begun to cover the soffit up the top on the opposite side.

This picture shows both corner returns finished, and the front gable soffit and fascia is all installed. You can also see the poor shape that our Tyvek house wrap is in. It is to be expected since it is not meant to be left exposed for two years. We will be tearing it off and replacing it. You can see a hole above the window where Shawn noticed a bulge. We had birds making nests up at the top of the wall, and their butt was positioned just right so that some of their droppings slipped behind the tyvek and had been collecting there for a year or two. Gross. So needless to say, there will be some cleanup and repair that will need to be done before we cover that up with siding. Hopefully this next weekend we will start some of that. But overall, the Tyvek has done its task of protecting the wall behind it, despite the abuse and neglect it has received. So we will just move on, but we'll make sure we do a great job of preparing the wall before siding goes up. At least is it great to know that protected and done right, that Tyvek will do its job.

Also, in preparation for the siding job to come up, Shawn began to paint the trim boards so that those are ready to go.

This past weekend my in-laws came down to help us once again. My mother-in-law, Pam, watched the kiddos, while I was at the old house finishing up with the sorting. And Shawn's dad has been working on making us some laundry cabinetry. So he brought what he had built in his shop at home, and Shawn helped him to get it installed.

 You can see how great my laundry area is starting to look! Most of the lumber for the drawers and trim is from Derald's pile of maple wood he got from Shawn's grandpa Harley (Pam's dad) from a tree that fell in a storm several years ago. We bought some of the hardware, and other things, but Derald has been very kind in making this for us. As you can see, there are two drawers, and they pull out the full length, so I have access to the very back of the drawers. Nice! We are still deciding on the door, whether to make it one single door that will pull out both drawers at the same time, or have two individual drawers. I mean to go to some stores to take a look at some cabinets and decide. So maybe sometime this week or the next we can get to that. Once we do decide which route to go, Derald will make the door and come back and install it. You can see that the drawers are a little darker than the top. That is because they have a coat of varnish on them already. We sill have to varnish the rest of the cabinets, and I think we should get to that as soon as we can, because I do not want anything to stain the bare wood. Probably not this weekend, but hopefully the next.

If you want more details on the cabinet, visit my Father-in-laws blog. If the cabinet is not on yet it should be soon.
Derald's blog - washerdryer nook

So once again I'm shooting for a post mid to late June. By then the sale will be over, and hopefully the siding work will be fully underway! Until next month!

April Post

Spring is here, and the weather is making us think that it's time to start to get serious about siding. Last week we got the bill from the electrician (yes, we did pass inspection even with our weird project) and it came about $600 more than hoped. We had added a few extras and some of the work done upstairs was part of the upstairs bid, and not the basement. We knew it would be higher, but we had really hoped for less than that. So, there went the little we had saved up so far to start this year's projects. *sigh*

But, we do have the dumpster rented and we're supposed to be cleaning the old house. Right? I guess we're really used not doing anything or somehow we seem unable to come up with the time to get to it. Not to mention that with the kids it's about impossible to do anything. With Evan wanting to play with everything and keeping Bianca from eating whatever is on the floor, not much progress gets made if we bring them in. And I don't allow Shawn to throw anything unless I've had a chance to look at it, that by himself he doesn't progress much just because he waits for me to take a look.
Still, we got things sort of sorted into piles, but the dumpster is miserably empty. I have to keep reminding myself that we've actually burned a ton of things. But still. I am really really really really hoping that it's because I want to sell things at the garage sale. I'm watching that show about hoarders and I definitely don't want to go down that road.

Despite all of this, there has been progress. In between waiting for the electrical inspection and the carpet to show up, Shawn worked on our data/cable outlets. We were blessed with an extra Christmas gift from my parents to complete the purchase of a new flat screen TV. So, to go with our new tv, we splurged and got ourselves some dish network. Now you really know why progress has been slow. I call it training. We do watch a lot of DIY Network. Anyway, we needed to have our coax cables hooked up.

And here you can see Evan being a great helper while Shawn installs the data outlet in the guest/laundry/spare bedroom.

Shawn bought all of the supplies and tools needed, and installed the coax and cat5 and phone outlets for each room. Right now we have the satellite feed coming into the closet under the stairs, where it connects to the family room line, our bedroom and the guest/spare bedroom lines.

This picture is a close up of our new outlets.This one is in the family room right behind the TV. The one on the left is where the cables for the surround speakers come in on the wall behind the tv. And the outlet to the right shows how our new data/video plates look. We have phone, data, and cable on this one. Eventually when we are able to switch internet providers once our cell internet plan expires, we will have the capability of surfing the net from our tv and stream movies from netflix. But that will have to wait until next year, since our Verizon contract won't expire until then.

The other exciting thing that happened is that our family room carpet is finally in! And no, we didn't go with green carpet. This is the guys working on installing the rubber pad. And remember how we had to cancel the carpet install because the order had been messed up and only 2 rolls had come in? Well, they get the pad down and it turns out we only needed 2 rolls. Figures. At least we can use the leftover pad somewhere else. We also ended up with enough pieces of leftover carpet to do perhaps Bianca's room. Might need to tape a few seams, but I'm sure we can handle it. We have installed carpet before (once) and it actually wasn't too bad, it's just a bit labor intensive. But a small room like Bianca's might be worth the rental fee for the tools, since we already have the pad and carpet for it.

I thought I had a picture of the final carpet install, so that will have to wait to next month. (Yes, I am trying to do at least one post per month.)  This is what I have for now. At least you can see the nice dark chocolate color that we picked for our carpet.

We all love the change from hard floor to this nice soft surface, and we do spend a lot of time playing on it. One rule we now have is to avoid eating in the living room and no drinks. So far we're doing good on that.

I was trying to think what else we have worked on since last month. We've done a few miscellaneous things here and there, like caulk the joint between the floor and the toilet. Right now the current project is to install a frosting membrane to the bathroom window. It will be a while before we get some sort of window treatment, so this at least will help with privacy. Even though the neighbor facing that window is across the river, over the hill and half a mile away, I still feel very exposed.

One thing that we should have done when the windows came two and so years ago, is that we should have taken the stickers off the windows. By the time we thought about it, they were already so stuck on there, it's not even funny. By then we didn't have the time to be messing with this since there were other priorities. Now it takes about a thirty minute scraping and soaking with acetone to get those things off. So we'll be working on those suckers on and off as we get a chance. Another thing we should have done, was to double check the screen sizes. Those were delivered about a year after windows were installed, and we've been storing them since. Finally, today we brought them out since it was nice enough outside that we wanted to open the windows. Uh Oh. The screens for the bar/kitchennete window are the wrong size. Shoot. Now we have to go back to the dealer, and we're not looking forward to that. It took this rep 8 months of e-mails and phone calls to get him to get us the two missing handles that never came with the windows. Maybe by fall we'll have the right screens, if things are the same.
We got the rest of the screen for the basement in, and sometime we'll have to double check the ones for upstairs.
I really don't want to install those yet because they will get wrecked since work is still needed up there. But we better check them now, since at our rate, it will be five years before we're able to get to use them upstairs.

With the budget so very low, we're starting to think about what we will be tackling next. The old house still needs clearing, and I really need to prepare for a garage sale. The garage slab will probably have to wait until fall, when we hope to have the cash saved up for it. At least for siding we have all of the materials bought, except for things like paint, and caulk, which we should be able to fit in the little money we have left right now. So probably by next month there will be some sort of siding progress made. We'll also try to get to the soffit , but that's a little more expensive than paint.

We'll see what we can do. Maybe the garage sale will be a huge success and we can fund some more house projects with that.

Until next time...

Phase III - It begins

Well, we've officially kicked off Phase III. And we are christening this season of work with some carpet.
We saved up enough to put carpet in the family room since Lowe's has that good deal of labor for $100.
We need a special pad to go under our carpet, so that the insulation value of pad + carpet is low enough to allow our radiant heat floor to heat the space as designed. Three weeks ago we ordered the carpet and pad, and it arrived at Lowe's a week ago. They called, set up the install for this past Monday, so we spent a whole afternoon moving all of the furniture out of the space and cleaning.

As usual, we got the phone call that somehow someone messed up the order and though we had ordered 3 rolls of carpet pad, only two rolls showed up. It will be another week before the pad comes in, so we're hoping that on Monday we will get the call that the carpet pad came in, and we shall have carpet installation scheduled soon!

We are also still waiting for the electrician to schedule the electrical inspection. He must not need the thousands of dollars that we owe him since he doesn't seem in a hurry to get that inspection done so he can send us the bill. We keep making a whopping 1% on it, so doesn't bother us to keep the money a while longer.

The other thing that I can finally get some pictures is for my laundry area.

Here you can see our washer and dryer up on the pedestal. My father in law has volunteered the labor to build us a counter above the washer and dryer and some small cabinets on the side, and maybe some shelves/cabinets on the wall to store laundry items.
We're saving up the money to purchase the lumber, so maybe this spring he could get started on those? That would be nice.

And here are the pictures of those two interior doors that we purchased earlier this winter.

This one is the one we purchased for the bathroom that had the wrong swing. So you can see it here now as Bianca's bedroom door (which will someday be the office). We still have to stain and seal them, but I like the natural color so much, that I'd like to just put a clear coat on and leave it as is.

And this is the other door that had the correct swing for the bathroom.
Speaking of the bathroom, here is how our sink area looks for now:

The mirror is recycled from the old house, and where you see the little table on the right is where we will someday install a second sink. We had a mind of just building another fancy stand out of 2x4 like the one we currently have, and purchasing a sink top to match. This works for now.

One other thing that he have done in the month since the last post is that we built some plywood doors to close the area under the kitchen sink. We had Shawn's dad, Derald, route a rounded edge on them during one of his visits, and here you can see Shawn painting them to match the rest of the cabinets.

All in all, they turned out good, and it's nice to be able to lock away chemicals from inquisitive 1 yr old Bianca.

That is pretty much it for now.

Now that it is beginning to thaw, we will probably start focusing on the exterior. The goals for this year are:
-Finish the siding at the back peak, the chimney, and the front of the house
-Pour the garage slab,side walk and parking area in front of garage
-Get some garage doors
-Deal with the egress window wells and landscaping a little
-Stain the windows, get more interior doors, and install trim in the basement
-Get junk out of old house, have a huge garage sale and demolish the old house

It's a tall order, and we'll go as far as we can. We've begun cleaning out the old house, and we got a medium sized dumpster to clear house. Last weekend Shawn's parents came down to give us a hand going through the piles of things we have in the old house. By the end of the day, only a couple trash bags had made their way into the dumpster. This whole idea that oodles and oodles of things would end up in the trash pile somehow didn't work. Hopefully it is because things are garage sale worthy and not because I'm hoarding all of that!

I will try to post again in early April, and hopefully by then the old house will be cleared of the usable things, and the piles of things we'll be ready for garage sale season. We have a mind of also going through the barn and taking advantage of the dumpster as well. Until next time!