Shut down.

Well shoot. Monday evening upon arriving at home Jacob and I found this little sign tacked on our retaining wall:

darn.

drill, baby

It’s been a couple of crazy weeks- hence no blog posts for a while and then 3 in one morning! School just started on Tuesday, but I’ve been back at work since the middle of last week/ That means that my grandpa has been pretty much on his own when it comes to building the retaining wall. And guess what? It’s almost done! He finished excavation at the beginning of last week and we started drilling the holes for the I-beams to go into.

that was our driveway during excavation- it looks like a hill of dirt!

TLC

Our bedroom and bathroom are basically brand new- but they already need TLC. With the fire, having to open up the sheet rock to accommodate a new heated floor mat and a new HVAC system, and water damage from the surprise rain we got while our of town- well, there’s a lot. So because we needed drywall patching done, I called up our original drywall guy and he came to save the day. Our master suite looks better than ever! Check out the before and after shots:

The drywall:

where we had to open up the wall to install the new heated floor mat

Destruction Zone

One of the many things that drew Jacob and I to our house was the multitude of little decks all over the place. One of the decks is already gone- we replaced it with our laundry room. And now a second one is gone- but this one only temporarily. The coolest deck that came with our house by far is the one right off of our office. Unfortunately, it was not built well, correctly, or safely. So in order to avoid more water damage this coming winter, we decided to take some action.

the deck pre-demo (with Totoro making sure his mama doesn’t fall off the roof)

Excavation Day 2

Today my grandpa continued excavating our dirt! Unfortunately I wasn’t home to help or to catalog the events with my camera (I had Professional Development!), but this is what I saw when I got home:

our driveway is now dirt

So It Begins

….And it’s so exciting! This morning and 7:45 my grandpa came over with the excavator and got started digging! We need a whole bunch of dirt gone before he can get started on the retaining wall so we rented a big piece of machinery to help us out.  While my grandpa was doing all the hard work I basically stood by in case there was anything he needed moved out of the way (random pieces of wood, metal, etc.). However, he did show me how to operate the excavator and I did one bucket of dirt! That was a lot of fun.

While I know my grandpa is a very capable man and has been doing this his whole life, there were still times today that I was preparing myself for that excavator to slip and slide. I am so happy it didn’t!

Grandpa making his way up- I was so freaked while he was doing this!

Further Preparations

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks! I spent the last two weeks teaching summer school and since school is about to start in Jacob’s district he’s been working crazy hours. The result? Progress has been slow, but steady. We are still waiting on our drywall/paint guy to come out so we can finish the fixture installation of our bathroom, so in the meantime we decided to shift our attention. Since the prep work for the inside portion of our house is pretty much ready for the wood stove, Jacob and I decided to focus on the outside preparation needed. This is partially because we need to do it in order to finish roofing the section we’re tackling this summer, but also because the weather has been freaking us out! While we were on our honeymoon, it actually rained! So in order top cover up that gaping hole we cut in the roof and to fix the part where the roof was already having issues (the seam in a valley on our roof), we needed to focus on prepping the roof- and that included taking a chunk out of the beautiful roof we finished last fall (to make room for the chimney).

the section of roof we had to cut out