Porch posts

This past weekend, the guys formed up for the concrete for the porch posts on the front of the house. We'll still have to do this around the other three sides of the house, but we've got the front done at least. We spent most of Saturday mixing and pouring concrete. Not too many pictures from that day, because I had to help. I got to be the one to shovel it in to the hole after the guys mixed it up. Lots of fun and I'm still sore today! :)

March pictures

I am having serious issues with my computer right now. I've decided to start taking pictures in RAW and I can't upload them to my blog like I used to. So you might see a posting with just pictures in it until I remember to upload the pictures before I start typing my little story. I'll figure it out eventually, so just be patient with me.

Changes, changes

Things have been pretty exciting around our house lately. Spring is finally here so we are actually making some progress on our house. The mortgage business is keeping me super busy right now, so that's my big excuse for not keeping up on my blogging.

The biggest thing happening right now is that Dana decided to quit the job he's worked at for the past 11 1/2 years. Wow! He is now the proud half owner of a countertop fabrication/construction business. Quite a big change for him, but I think it is really a great move for him. This will give him more flexibility with his time, so I'm crossing my fingers for more work on the house this summer! His partner in the business is our friend Leonard, who you've read about in this blog. The guys work absolutely great together and they both have the same work ethic, which is a big plus! Hopefully I'll get to post some pictures of their work in the not so distant future, although I think it will be quite a while before I get countertops in my kitchen and bathrooms...

The last couple of weekends have been fairly productive for our little house. The guys have the downstairs interior walls just about completed. There is quite a bit of extra work that goes into building those walls. They have to be built to absorb the shrinkage of the logs, so they basically have to be sliding walls. I think the walls will be ignored again for a while, since the weather is changing a little bit for the better, we'll be back to working outside again.

No pain, no gain.

About a month ago, Dana's good friend Leonard who has been our main help with this enormous project had an unfortunate accident and broke his back and his shoulder. (Dana, Aaron and Leonard went to the hills unsupervised - need I say more) It's been just been about 4 weeks now since that happened. Dana's spent quite a bit of time over the last couple weeks trying to help Leonard and his wife with whatever they needed until Leonard was moving around a little better. Last weekend, Leonard decided that he was tired of sitting around the house and that a broken back wasn't going to hold him back. So, he showed up to help build walls inside the house. Keep in mind that Leonard is still not allowed to lift more than 5 pounds so Dana wore himself out running around all day trying to make sure that Leonard wasn't lifting what he isn't supposed to. Leonard is much like Dana in that he needs to be busy, needs to be working all the time. The last couple of weeks have been really hard on him, so he's ready to get going again!

Last weekend Dana and Leonard made more progress on framing up some of the interior walls. They definitely go up much slower than conventional walls do, but the guys are getting the hang of it and are getting quicker and quicker.

I'm pretty sure that weighs more than 5 pounds!! In this picture, the wall that is built and laying on the ground seperates the kitchen from the laundry room. That door to the left goes out of the laundry room on to the back deck. Leonard is walking in what will be the bathroom and the guest bedroom is behind him.

This is the custom work that the guys had to create for this wall, since it didn't land directly below a log. The walls all have to be built in a way that they can absorb the settling of the house as all of the logs will shrink and settle.

Building the wall that seperates the laundry room and kitchen.

And the most exciting part of all of this is that Dana gets to use a chainsaw inside the house! Each wall gets notching on either side of it into the main, exterior logs so that the wall coverings (probably tounge and groove) slide into those notches and you don't end up with gaps or uneven seams.

Another work day is planned for tomorrow, so hopefully I'll have another update soon.

Diamond Lake

So, we haven't really been working on the house lately. I have no updates, no new pictures. The only thing that I can say about the house right now is that it is staying pretty dry inside throughout the wonderful rain storms we get here in CC. Since there's not an update on the house, I thought I'd give you an update on us.

We didn't have the greatest Christmas. Hagen got sick while we were in Redding and we took him to the vet there. Turns out he was pretty sick (we had no idea before this weekend). Long story short (and it makes me too sad to tell it anymore) we had to put him to sleep. Most of you know that we had Hagen for almost 8 years, so it was really hard for us to do it. It's been quite an adjustment for us and Bandit not having him here anymore.

Dana and I have both been really busy at work. Dana's got a new boat in the shop - the Roller Bay. And surprisingly, lots of people still want mortgages right now. I've been working longer days to keep up and it's been a little draining. We decided to take last weekend off from all responsibility and went up to Diamond Lake, Oregon to ride our quads in the snow. The weather and the snow were both perfect and we had a great time. We haven't taken the quads anywhere in a while because we were so busy working on the house, but it was definitely time to get away.

There are lots of trails at Diamond Lake that are groomed for quads and snowmobiles. We were definitely the odd-man out with our quads. Most people there had brand-new snowmobiles and expensive enclosed trailers.

Keep in mind that it was REALLY cold and I'm wearing like 17 layers of clothes. Yes, I'm still working out, no I haven't gained any weight. Although you really can't tell that by this picture.
The Umpqua River. We had lunch here on Sunday.
One of the beautiful trails we rode our quads down at full speed.

We had so much fun last weekend that we're going to try to get up there again before the snow melts.

We've had some really nice weather so far this week. If it holds out through the weekend we might get some more work done on the house. It's so hard to be motivated during the winter, but we've got so much work still ahead of us. We'll get back to it one of these days!

December already?

Suprisingly the weather has been quite nice here in CC. We've had a few days of rain, so we've kept the tarps on the house for the most part. We've got one last section of roof that needs our 2X8's, so we've just been folding the tarp back from that section so we can work on it. Leonard was over on Saturday again so he and Dana got to be up on the roof while I ran the Gradall.

Here the guys are cutting the cedar fascia to put up on the front and sides of the dormer.

Here the guys are fitting all of the 2X8's in the valley on the south side of the dormer.


Dana and Leonard got the valleys on the south and north side of the dormer finished on Saturday. Then on Sunday I got to be the helper on the roof and we got some more of the 2X8's put up, working toward the edge of the dormer at the front of the house. We still have all of the blocking to do out on the edge of the dormer (I think there's pictures of what that looks like in my earlier postings from working on the other dormer). We had to quit early on Sunday afternoon because it started sprinkling a bit and got really slippery up on the roof. So we called it quits and pulled the tarp back over that section. We finished out the day working inside the house, we had one last window to frame up and get covered. We've been doing a little bit of work inside the house each night after work, but of course the bulk of it is still getting done on Saturday and Sunday. We'll have another full weekend again this coming weekend if the rains stay away. It's been a pretty dry winter so far, I hear we are really behind on our average rainfall, which is just fine by me! We'll cross our fingers that it stays this way for a while!

Finishing out November

Here are some more pictures and an update on our November progress:

We broke down and bought the Gradall that we used all summer. It just makes things so much easier, especially when Dana and I are trying to work by ourselves.

The winter rains have made parts of our yard a muddy mess.
A friend of ours has been nice enough to bring us some wood chips to spread out around the house. (Thanks Gavin!)
And, the dads have been playing around some more with the tractor. We've taken out some more of the alder trees close to the house, so they've been working on taking those stumps out.

Unfortunately I don't have many more pictures from this month. Dana's been putting me to work quite a bit, so I don't have much chance to take pictures. We've still been trying to work as much as we can, but of course it's getting dark around 5 now, so we don't have much daylight during the week. We spent the whole Thanksgiving weekend working on little things around the house. The weather was really nice over the weekend so we sprayed the house again. We had 2 coats of stain on there, but still needed to put the clear up. We got one coat of clear sprayed on about 1/2 of the house by Sunday night. And we pulled the tarps off of the roof to finish up some little things. We had some more blocking to finish on the roof and more A35 clips...I think we must have put up about 400+ of those now. It seems like there's still lots of little things to finish up that you just never get around to. Those little things take up a lot of time and don't show any progress! We got most of those things done and then on Monday morning we woke up to the prediction of rain! So, we scrambled around that morning to get the tarps spread back over the roof. We made it, and luckily so, because it actually rained pretty hard throughout Monday night. Everything stayed nice and dry though!

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving!