Move in Date is...

..coming up very soon! Yesterday we were declared done by the appraiser, we signed on it this noon, and promptly started thinking up new projects to torment ourselves with. Where will the garage go? Can we put in a pond in the dooryard? Can we reinstall a ram pump on the stream to have a waterfall? Tomorrow we are doing area beautification, tool repatriation, and long neglected farmhouse cleanliness measures. And Sunday we are doing nothing - I repeat, nothing. Breakfast late, followed by visits from some family and friends. Then Monday I will finish tiling the Lowell Pate shower enclosure so that when the propane tank comes, I can take my first truly hot shower in months. Or a bath in my fabulously deep slipper tub. Hmmm...so hard to choose.

Lilac Time

The roof has been Enkadrained and dirted, with much effort by the usual crew plus Uncle Jim and his Cat as well as his work crew. He lifted the dirt up in the bucket of his Cat and we hauled it out of there and spread it. It's been seeded with rye grass that is just coming up and I have oodles of perennials to transplant once the innards of the house are done. This weekend (Memorial Day) we will be painting up a storm and putting in the glass block shower, cabinets, and assorted trim bits. Before we got the roof on I was just so tired and unhappy, but now that that's done we are at the "kind of fun" portion of the house, the prettification stage. And we have hot water again at the farmhouse, which was also taking its toll on our oomph. When you move tons of dirt, you really want a hot shower afterwards. The farmhouse is giving us distinct signs that it's time to get out, but when you consider that it is 110 years old this year, it has stood up remarkably well in spite of several generations of Hoy cobbling. Now if only the wind would stop blowing - I have had horrible dreams about the farmhouse blowing over or falling off its very minimal foundation before we finish the new one.

Barefoot!

Coming back from the new house this morning, I decided to ditch my crocs, which are on their last legs. When we are done with the house I will be done with them! They have taken a licking, as have we, but we keep on going. I thought tiling was bad, and it was, especially when I decided to grout, then go to work, then clean the grout when I got home at 9:30. Bad idea - I was out there till 2:30. But it looks good now, especially with my bare feet on it! The hardwood glue is currently kicking me six ways to Sunday, but it's going down and looking good too. We have most of the plumbing done, along with most of the drywall and most of the electric, so we're just rounding up the straggling bits and the cabinetry!! Check out the fabulous painting Erin and I did on our stained concrete floor - nasturtiums make everything better!

March Madness

Slogging away here, literally, since everything is melting. Getting from the farmhouse out to the new house is an exercise in puddle management, but yesterday and today were quite warm and windy, so things are drying up nicely. Sunday and yesterday Dan, Deb and I put in our thermopanes between the beams and got them trimmed. We did have one pane blow out before we had it secured, but otherwise all went well and it adds a lot of light. Mom and I got all the other windows trimmed last week between the window and the box and Sam stained the trim for the box edges on Sunday, so today I'll get that up. The trim we've been using is some rough sawn cedar that Dad had in Warehouse #3. It looks great, appropriately rustic,and smells great too, but the sawdust it makes is so fine it gets into your lungs and makes you all wheezy, so I'll be glad to be done with that. I've been cleaning mortar off the post facings so I can stain those too and stained the concrete in the two bedrooms, one copper and one green. The green bedroom Erin and I are going to paint nasturtiums over top of, like the living room in the farmhouse. The tile in the entryway is in and Thursday I'm probably going to lay tile, the yellow stuff, in the kitchen. So then we just need a wee bit of plumbing and some drywall! And a nap -I'm thinking I may just nap for all of May.

Post Funk Action

So... as soon as the hardest part of the house got done we had to go on to even harder things. Dan's sister, Jan, passed away at Christmas from a thyroid condition that went undiagnosed too long. Jan had a hard row to hoe due to some mental illness issues that had worsened in recent years, so her condition got chalked up to that and to her stubborn, "Don't help me, I can help myself" nature. Her late night phone calls were sometimes a trial, but now we miss them.

Then there's my Dad, who has been our mainstay through this whole project - part of the reason we thought we could do all this ourselves is because he did it, twice, with three small children to get in the way . So he knew what to do about all things building. He gave us tons of advice, mostly prefaced by " It's none of my business, but..." or "Call me a meddling old fool, but...". He had an injurious fall last spring that had him feeling down and out for most of the summer - every time he'd start to feel like he was healed up he'd over do and be right back to feeling crappy. He finally went to a sports doctor who found he had a torn rotator cuff and did surgery in October. Dad whined a lot about the physical therapy and subverted the "no driving" rules whenever possible, but he seemed to be getting better for a few weeks. By early December he was back to feeling lots of back pain, probably more than he told us, and had been in to the doctors several times trying to get some help and sort out what his problem was. The pain meds they gave him stopped him up something fierce, so he was choosing between the kinds of pain and relying on industrial strength doses of Ben-Gay and back rubs from anyone he could talk into giving him one. The day after Christmas the doctors were able to say that they suspected he had some form of cancer in his trunk that had metastasized to his bones and that was why he was having such back pain. They scheduled him for an MRI and a CT the following week and then a biopsy to determine where the cancer started and where to go from there the next week, but in the course of that two weeks he went from being in lots of pain, but mobile and lucid to being delirious and needing help for any movement. The Friday his biopsy was scheduled Mom and I were only able to get him out of the house and to the hospital by dint of adrenalin and desperation. From there he was admitted and had the biopsy and an MRI, but by the time the results of that came back on Monday his kidneys had ceased functioning and he was beyond the help of dialysis, much less treatment for the cancer. He died Tuesday, January 13th.

As you can imagine, we haven't been super active on the house since we finished the walls. I am so glad that I was able to spend those last few weeks with Dad, helping Mom keep him comfortable. And then afterwards everything sent me into a state - I keep thinking of things I want to ask him and now I can't, want to borrow a tool and don't know where to look, want to see if he knows the answer to the 12:30 Quiz question on WPR. But lately we have managed to emerge from our funk and are making some progress. Dan has all the interior walls framed up, which don't look overly exciting in the pics, I admit. I've been working on flooring, laying tile around the masonry heater, which we've named Norbert. We always derided Dad's habit of saving things, but it has helped us a lot. He had enough tile left over from doing the floors in their house to do the hallway and border around the stove, including a bucket of leftover pieces that had been cut and saved us from having to mess with tile cutting a lot. The weird angles in Mom and Dad's house are almost the same weird angles in our house.And I like it a lot more than any of the spendy tiles I've seen around town. I'm doing a faux limestone finish on the kitchen floor and a leather look flooring made with brown paper and polyurethane on the utility room floor. The electrical work should be able to happen in the next couple weeks and I'm ordering cabinets and thermopanes for the areas between the beams on the living room side of the house. So we're back at work, trying to do Dad proud, and just glad he got to see the finished walls if not the whole enchilada.