Shaping up

Today has been a wonderful day! Our rafters are up and looking awesome!

 I love how the front of the house is turning out. We have the window header on the second floor framed in now too. 

 Rafters over the great room. Looks like ribs from this viewpoint. :) Guess it kinda is the house's ribs.

 The kids had fun inspecting our new rafters.

 Tommy even got invited up for a quick run around the scaffolding way up high!

 Peeking out the rafters over the great room.

 Tommy with his buddy Daryl. 

 Of course, the girls couldn't be left out, so Becky climbed up for a quick look. Daryl took her around to have her make certain everyone was working hard!

 Then Nikki had her turn. Daryl asked if she was our mischievous one. How could he tell? :)

 She had fun walking around with Daryl, but he kept a close eye on her. She didn't want to get down when it was time, but we told her she might find something even more fun to do if she climbed down. 

 Becky thought it was pretty fun to pretend she was a ghost since she could walk through walls. Silly girl. :)

 Peeking out the rafters in the girls room. 

Puddle stomping for Nikki? But she looks so innocent... 

The bones of the house are taking shape now.  

 Building the short wall between the roofs. 

 The roof is being extended here.

 Our first roof is being laid down. 

 So cool!

 Dan showing off his balancing act. 

 More roof is being installed. Yay!

 I took one final shot of our house as we left for a final walk-through of our old home. 

Happiness following all that Craziness!

Yesterday did not go according to my plans, but today was a lot of fun to make up for all that craziness! First, I went out to check out the new rafters on our roof. 

 It looks so awesome despite all the rain. 

I then took the kids to a friend's house to make gingerbread houses.  Tommy decided to try building a two-story house.

 Amazingly - it worked out great for him!

He was pretty excited about it.

 Becky kept hers simple and cute!

 Nikki had fun letting me help her decorate hers while she ate the candy - I think she had the right idea!

My friend's daughter even created a really cute front door.  

 Our finished houses.

While working on these houses, I got the wonderful news that we get to close on our house TOMORROW!!!! I'm so excited! What an awesome early Christmas present. :)

Craziness

Last weekend I drove my family up to Ohio to celebrate my cousin's decision to get baptized. It was wonderful to spend time with family and we had a wonderful time catching up with each other. Saturday night at his baptism, Nikki decided there could be no strangers at church, so she became good buds with my cousin's close girl friend. His baptism was the first part of the service, so we took Nikki back and went inside to watch his baptism. It was wonderful to see how God has changed his life and how excited he is to have God in his life. His testimony was awesome! After watching him get baptized, the song service began. We were singing and suddenly Nikki disappeared. Tom and I got concerned because the church was very full and we hadn't been there before. So we started looking up and down the aisles for her, when finally someone caught our attention and pointed to the row behind us - where she was snuggled up with a stranger lady and singing quite happily! I was so relieved, that I just let her finish singing with her new friend! 

Sunday afternoon we headed back home and about halfway there, our car started vibrating every time we went over 70mph. So I kept our speed down and about 40 minutes from home, the vibrating started up again. I switched seats with Tom and the vibrating was better for a while, but after about 10 minutes of driving it started vibrating again getting worse with each passing minute. By the time we got to our exit, we were only able to go about 50 mph and when we finally made it home, we were only able to drive 25mph without vibrating. 

So yesterday  morning, Tom took the car in to get it fixed. They worked on it all day long, and told us it would probably be finished by noon on today. We planned to drive to work together, pick up the car, I could get some errands run, go home and enjoy watching the roof get put on the house. 

That is not how our day went though. :( At lunch we shopped at Costco, ate pizza, and then we hoped our car would be ready to pick up. They were still working and hoped it would be finished mid-afternoon. I stuck around, getting work done at Vikus (yay!) and the kids did there best to be good and quiet. Mid-afternoon passed and our car was still being repaired so we continued working. By 5:30, we called again to check the status and found that they had about one more hour worth of work on it, but they closed at 5:30 so we have to wait until tomorrow (yay-boo!) to get it. So unfortunately I only took pictures of our house when they started work this morning. 

I can't wait to see what it looks like in the morning with the new roof on!

All in a Day's Work

I love having Christmas Break where we can spend all day outside watching our house go up. :)

They have begun working on putting up the beam and rafters over the Great Room. 

That beam is huge so it takes a few guys to hold the beam in place while one guy nails it into place.

We are also getting our concrete patio poured today. :)

They staked out the form for the patio, then rolled out welded wire mesh for the concrete to attach to. Then the cement trucks came to pour the concrete and Matthew began the fun job of smoothing out the concrete.

The girls had fun collecting rocks. Nikki kept looking for pink rocks, but sadly, none were to be found.

The kids needed some exercise, so we walked to the top of the hill to see the progress from another view. 

It's so neat to see how our house is taking shape.

Here the builders are getting the Rafters built over the Great Room Windows. 

It was fun watching both the concrete go down and the roof go up. 

I was amazed at how many workers it required to build the roof, but we do have a tricky roof-line.

They used string between the beam and the rafters to figure out what angles to cut the next beams at. Just figuring the math for how to make the cuts took at least an hour, if not more.

It's going to be so neat to see once the rest of the rafters are up.

This is where they ran out of concrete, so we ended up having to get a second load to finish it up.

Tommy loved watching them smooth out the patio. He was amazed how the rocks bumpy texture was slowly smoothed away with the patience of moving the smoothers back and forth across the concrete until it was nice and smooth.

The roof over the dormers also got built today.

These dormers make me happy. :) I love how the peaked roof makes it look like the house is happy. It should be since we have awesome builders working on it. 

We took a look around once the builders left for the day, hoping that the concrete guys were gone too so we could put our hands in the cement. But they were still working away, since Buddy had apparently joined them once or twice to inspect their work (and leave his footprint which they had to repair). I also found out that the reason the concrete outside is cut is because the squarer the concrete is, the less likely it is to crack. Concrete is going to crack no matter what you do with it, but cutting it helps to encourage it to crack in appropriate places. The interior concrete isn't usually cut because flooring is usually placed on top, so it doesn't matter where the cracks happen. 

Anyway, we had fun looking around while it was still dusk.

I can stand right next to the short walls in the homeschool/play room without bumping my head, so they should be perfect for a magnetic chalkboard/whiteboard wall or something like that. 

It was amazing to look at the way they connected the beams for the main roof. 

So intricate and complicated. I'm glad I don't have to figure out how to make it work. I'm sure the house would fall down like a house of cards if I were required to do it. :)

Tommy and Nikki had fun cheesing for the camera. How lucky am I that I got them both to not only look at the camera, but also smile! :)

I even braved the ladder to take some pictures from the platform they built to put up the big roof.

Our Great Room looks so cool at night. 

When we finished looking around the house, we snuck out back to the concrete and tried to put our hands in the concrete. It was too hard to press our hands in, but we were still able to scratch them in. 

Of course, now that I'm posting this, I realize that it's really December 19, not December 18. Oh well. :)