Friday, March 30, 2012

Speed Up...Slow down...Summary

Welcome to another day/week in the life of building a house. Lots of things are happening, but it feels like it's dropped to a snail's pace. :) Since things are starting to slow down, I'm just going to sum up what happened this week. 
 First on our tour is our lovely master bedroom. I've painted the walls green to see how I'd like them. It was scary when I first put them up on the wall because they went up kind of a mustard green, but thankfully when they dried, the yellowish green color was gone and the pretty green color remained. 
Inspecting Mommy & Daddy's shower.  Yup, it's good enough to shower in. 
 
Becky was excited to show off her bedroom. I put up some sample paint on her wall as well. It's on the short wall, but you can sort of see it. Gotta look hard though. :)
The upstairs office.
 Tommy's bedroom. Still needs to have some doors installed.

 In the Great Room, things are cleaning up to get ready for our built-ins. 
 ...and we're off. First they built the desk. 
 Here's a view from above it all. 
 Outside they are building the shelves for the desk. Maybe it would be considered the hutch?
 Starting to look more desk like now!
 Complete with bookshelves on top!
 Tada!
 Now its over to the other side of the fireplace. 
 Just wanted to show you how crazy it was in there. 
And that's as far as they got this week, but it's coming along!
 In the garage we are getting the trim installed. 
 Making it just right. 
 Digging a trench for our water to get connected to my in-law's well. Didn't want to dig a new one and possibly ruin theirs, so thankfully they agreed to let us hook into theirs. 
 Ever wonder what the inside of your transformer looks like? I did, so I had to take this picture. :)

 Building the linen closet complete with laundry chute for the kids. 
Then we have the mudroom. They built this while I was gone for a few days. I wasn't sure about it at first, but then I realized it would be perfect if they added some crown molding at the top.   
 Voila! Perfection! Well, it does need some paint, but we will get there someday. 
 The foyer. We are doing the board & batten look here and hope to hang our coats here on the wall. Gotta love Pinterest!
 Another view of the exterior of the house. 

 Later that week, our master closet built-ins were installed. 
 Adding trim to take it to the next level. Gotta wait for next week to see the final product though. 
 Our purty house!
  Getting ready to add the rocks for the overflow. 
 Looking good! Now we just need some rain to test out all our hard work!

Finally, Tom and I worked on building a dock in the pond this week with Clint & Kyle.  They stayed late to help us with it. Love those guys!
 There was a mishap though. We lost our first pillar because we forgot to brace it. Gotta brace those suckers! We were able to recover some of that cement though, so it wasn't a total loss. Just a very frustrating one. 
 Definitely couldn't have filled those pillars without the help of our friends. We were able to get all but a couple of them poured before it was just too dark to see. 
Well, that's it for this week. Come back next week for another round of our house-building adventure. :)
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Thursday, March 22, 2012

The Pit Viper

Today is the day. Nope - we didn't see a snake. Today is the day...
we fill in the giant hole with the Viper.  
 We borrowed the VIPER to vibrate the ground and compact it to fix the leak in the pond (hopefully). 
 Tom took the day off work to drive the compactor. 
Clint used his front-end loader to lower the Viper into the Pit. :) 
 That hole didn't look so deep did it? Yeah - that's about 16 feet down!
 Tom drove the viper back and forth...all...day...long.
 I think he enjoyed it for the first hour.
 Then it got rather monotonous. 
 The font end loader scooped dirt into the hole and the compacter would compact it down. 
 Tommy was super excited to watch them work. 
 Tom said his fingers got tired of pushing buttons. :)
 Here we go back and forth again. Isn't this super exciting? :)
 Closeup of the Viper hard at work. 
Bringing in more clay dirt for the hole.  
 Proof I was there!
 Leveling out the dirt. 
 La, la, la...more dirt moving fun!
 Bet you were wondering where all that dirt came from? Thankfully, it wasn't from a far off place - just our giant hill where we put our address post. 
 Clint dug down until we hit good clay, then used his dozer to scrape off the clay needed to fill the hole. 
 He scraped a LOT of dirt. 
 I think there was this much dirt before... :)
 Back to the excitement of filling that hole!
 Whee! Dropping dirt into the hole!
 Wait...who snuck a ride! Tommy - what are you doing there!
 The hole is shrinking...
 ...right?
Yup! Tommy can walk into the hole and get himself out now. How often can you dig yourself into a hole and easily get out of it, right? :) 
 Here we are getting closer to the finish line - wait! Clint is digging a LONGER hole! Just when we thought we were done too!
 I think Nikki has the right idea of burying her head in the mud...crazy girl! She and Becky were having a blast pretending to be pigs. 
 I would agree that they did a very good job of being pigs. Can you tell who loves dirt and who could live without it?
 Cleaning up the hill. 
 What a happy ending to a very long day!

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