More Pictures

Lynna helped me with the Storm drains this week and she also kept busy policing up the worksite and watching the progress. We are impatient to get the house completed to occupancy so we can move on to landscaping. We have a lot of potted plants just waiting to be placed. There are some beautiful yards in the neighborhood, especially the house next door to the South. She employs a full time gardener so the place looks like a park.

A Very Busy Week

We made great progress this week:

1. Logan hauled several loads of crushed rock in, re-graded our driveway and spread the new rock to create a good bed.

2. The folks from Panther Paving finished shaping the rock & compacted it. They topped it with asphalt and made a good looking driveway. The city required a paved driveway to approve occupancy or we would have left it in crushed rock for a year or two and then done a nicer looking one in cement, but this is a good solution for much less money.

3. Jose and his crew finished the exterior paint scheme that Lynna put together and I like the end result. It looks good and should be cheery during our long, gloomy Winters.

4. Jorge and his brother had a problem with their texture machine but got it repaired and were able to come up with a light knockdown size that Lynna liked. They sprayed & troweled the whole house interior on Friday.

5. I worked on the rain drain system and have it almost done except Logan has to dig the trench to connect downhill to the catch basin in the NorthWest Corner of John's lot. From there, it will drain through John's system to the street below. We had hoped to capture most of the runoff from our roof by directing the water to a rain garden in the lowest part of our lot at the NorthEast corner but the county/city rules wouldn't allow it. Runoff from our roof has to be directed into a piped system that delivers it to the street. Seems to be a poor solution to me as it forces even small towns to have an elaborate & expensive stormwater drainage system.

6. Today the installers from Triple D construction came back and repaired the skylight. The tube had come apart where the solid tube connected to the flexible one. Seems fine now but time will tell.

A Full Week Ahead

We have been busy with Physical Therapy for my arm plus getting the Sheetrock finished & ready for texture. Jorge has been working long days taping, spreading joint compound and sanding then masking off all the windows & doors. Today he put in the attic hatches that the sheetrock hangers failed to build. I have been buying supplies to build our rain drain system and had just laid everything out over the weekend when we found out:

1. Jose decided to start painting Tuesday, and Sherwin Williams delivered a big load of paint late Monday afternoon.

2. Emery & Sons let us know they would begin installation of the fire hydrant Tuesday, which means a torn up street, flaggers, lots of construction equipment and trailers to be placed on our property.

3. The driveway contractor let us know that asphalt prices are going up next Monday so we scrambled around & managed to get our excavator to come Wednesday to back fill along the West side, regrade the driveway & then spread some more crushed rock so the asphalt can be spread Friday or Saturday.

4. Something came loose in the new skylight & Lynna had to get them to come back out to fix it.

5. We got a call from Deeter's that our cabinets are almost ready & he wants to deliver them Saturday. We called back & arranged delivery next week after the texture & interior paint is complete.

The paint crew got everything masked off & Jose was able to spray the green on all the soffits and then shot the main color on the West side plus part of the South and North sides. The green doesn't reproduce well on the computer. Its called agate & is a muted green, not bright at all.

July 4th

Jeremy, June & the grandkids came by for a picnic lunch yesterday afternoon. Jorge was here again & since he has been working very hard for quite a while with no pay yet, I called Jose to come by for a small draw so he could get some cash to Jorge for the holiday. We expect to do the texture sometime next week and Jose says he will start painting the house exterior on Monday.

Cedar decking

I haven't posted for a while since there isn't much change that shows while the joint taping & mud is going on. I have been spraying weeds & mowing the big patches to keep them under control until we can start landscaping the yard. I have to mow the large yard of our rental about every 10 days to keep it looking good. We have removed the pile of scrap siding and the two large piles of Sheetrock debris. Today we got the last trailerload of sheetrock scraps ready to be hauled to the demo transfer site tomorrow and later John & I went out to his brother's place in the town of Scott Mills to load up the cedar for our decking. They cut it to a true 2" X 6" dimension & then planed it, so it looks pretty good. We got 12' & 16' lengths both @ $1.50 a foot which is a pretty good price. I took a few more pictures of the interior.