Summer time!

Apparently I'm a little behind on my blogging again. Since I've been getting hassled by some who frequent this blog (you know who you are) here are some more pictures of what's been going on around here.


We're working on the interior walls upstairs. Here's Bandit guarding the newly purchased lumber for those walls.

Finally the sun has come out a little bit around here. It wasn't a bad winter, but it just has stayed wet for so long we've been too nervous to pull out the logs from under the tarps. But since we've finally got the concrete work done, it's time to get started on the porch. Even with heavy equipment it can take all day to move piles of logs around. I still feel so lucky that we were able to purchase the Gradall. I really have no idea how people build houses without something like this!

These are the logs we will be using to build the porch with.

Pouring

This is the only picture I took last Sunday. Dana, Dad and I poured concrete all day long, so no one was available to take any pictures. I'm sure our neighbors loved us that day - the concrete mixer ran until 8:45 that night. And it is NOT quiet in any way! The concrete needs a bit of baby sitting after it's poured. You have to keep it smoothed out and then when it's just dry enough I had to put the drift pins in there (the little pieces of rebar that sit right in the center). Then when it's even drier, but not all the way dry, you have to go around and edge all of the sides. We finally ate dinner about 10pm and then had to go back out around 11pm to do all the edging and make sure it was setting up ok. It was a long day to say the least.

Monday morning Aaron was back from the camping trip that we missed out on and came by to help us pour the last side.

So glad to be able to say that one more little task has been completed! Next up - standing up the logs for the porch. Stay tuned...

Updated views of the house

Here are some pictures showing more recent views of the north, west and south sides of the house. These are all from last weekend. Notice the tarps still on the roof. Once we get the porch posts standing and the porch roof system started those will be pulled off so we can finally finish the roof!

Dana and Dad are working to make sure all of the form board squares are just that...square. Lots of pushing and pulling to get the boards in just the right spot before they can be screwed.

Form Boards

Here's part of the form boards up on the north side of the house.

Bandit's always right in the middle of things with whatever random stick he can find. Usually it's some 2X4 that he's found laying around.

My beautifully dug hole. After we dug the hole and put up the form board, we went through and touched up the holes to make sure that they were exactly the same size as the form squares and made sure the corners were nicely squared off. It was a LOT of digging.

The measured, leveled and fully screwed together forms on the west side of the house.

Porch posts...again!

Memorial Day weekend. Always love having a long weekend. We thought about going camping with friends. You know, take some time to relax, sit in the sun, drink some beer. That didn't happen. Instead we spent all day Saturday digging holes around the remaining two sides of the house. We measured for all of the squares, painted our lines and got them all dug. Then we started building the forms for these sides.

We had to put up some of our batter boards again, since they had been run over many times with various pieces of equipment. We ran our string lines, measured every which way and made sure everything was level.

Then we got to drive stakes in everywhere to make sure none of our boards moved.

Filling in low spots

We put a couple of dump trailer loads of dirt on the north side of the house. It took quite a bit of dirt to bring it up, and even then we were still lower than we wanted to be.

There's Bandit again, we still couldn't get him out of that trailer! I think he really likes to lay on the cool dirt. Luckily with the dump trailer we didn't have to do too much shoveling, but some of the dirt stuck in there. It was still really damp.

Here's where we built up the dirt around the forms that sat so high off the ground.

You can see here just how soupy that side of the house was. With so much rain it never dried out and that's the main road to the back yard, so everytime we drove over it, it just got worse and worse. It's been a couple of weeks now since we've really had any rain, so it's dried out quite a bit since then.

Moving mountains

The north side of the house is much lower than the south side. Below is a picture of the forms that we built for the front (east side) of the house. As you can see, when we made it to the north side, the forms were quite a ways from the ground. We decided that before we built the forms on the north side we would bring in some dirt to make things easier. On the east side we had to figure something out so the concrete wouldn't go everywhere, so we built up the holes with sheetrock and then piled dirt up around it. We had a couple little blow outs, but nothing too major. But, we thought we'd make it easier on ourselves the next time around.

The very back yard was really uneven, so Dana stole dirt from the high spots. Thank goodness for tractors!

Bandit always wants to go along for a ride, you can't keep him out of that trailer. I don't think he thought it was so fun once the trailer was filled with dirt! He got himself un-buried though and then just walked all over the top of all the dirt.