Children and the Sand Pile

On Easter Sunday, we had a family gathering when we got all of Ron's boys and their families together. 

The older grandchildren decided to go for a walk in the woods.

 Ron, and our daughter-in-law from Salt Lake City, Anne, and I took the younger children for a walk too.

It was cool, so we started out in an assortment of sweaters and coats.

We ended up at the building site, and what child can resist a big pile of sand?

or a lovely mud puddle.....  In my defense, I always tell the mothers to not send their children to visit Grandpa and Grandma in their Sunday clothes.

We hosed them all down and found swimming suits for them and let them end their day in the hot tub.

Trusses Going Up!

Every day we see progress!  

The walls are all up.  The boom truck arrived with trusses on Tuesday.

Wednesday most of the trusses got set in place.

From the inside, it is getting easier to see where everything will go.  We're hoping to be "dried in" this week!

Construction Continues

Ron and I have become expert shovelers - our latest project was to cover the entire crawl space with sand before the framers showed up - fortunately, we had a friendly track hoe operator with a dump truck to bring us sand and put piles in the crawl for us to rake to every corner.

Septic tank is installed - waiting for inspection to cover leach lines.

Lumber package is delivered!

Day one - framing - crawl space is framed!

Visiting Relatives

My Step-Dad, Dick, and mother, Millie, came to visit in Washington probably for the last time.  Mom will be 96 this month, and they don't like traveling much any more.

We had kind of a mini-family gathering the first weekend of their visit.

My sister, Molly, and husband, Bill, came for a full day.

Unfortunately, Mom had a fall and ended up in the hospital and then rehab, so my brother, David, and sister-in-law, Barb, had to visit Mom in the rehab center.  

Happily nearly everyone got to see Mom and Dick while they were here, and they made it safely back to Alaska where they are doing fine.  Sorry I didn't get pictures of all the visitors, but it was a grand showing of love for our beautiful matriarch!

Busy Times and Some Progress

We started March with a visit with my Mom and step-Dad from Alaska.  Lots of visitors and lots of pictures - then a computer crash and lots of pictures lingering on the crashed computer....so more on the visitors in a later blog where I'm sure to have lots more pictures.  Mom had a fall and spent five days in the hospital, but she is now recovering in the rehab facility of Providence Hospital in Everett. She is making amazing progress, which is what we expect from her as she has been an inspiration to all of us for many years.  As she nears her 96th birthday in April, she is still full of life and determined to be back on her feet to be home in Alaska by her birthday!

In the meantime, Ron and I have been working for a few hours every day to do "our part" in building our new house.  We are hiring subs to do the real work, but putting in 500' of waterline seems like real work to us!

We connected to the existing water line, and did all the connections (with the help of a hair dryer to soften up the pipe) and finished our job this past weekend.  It was inspected and signed off by the County yesterday (March 23), and once we cover it, we will be back in supervisory and out of ditch-digging mode.

In the meantime, the foundation guys have finished the foundation walls.  The PUD has blessed our installation and the electrician has hooked up temporary power and built our meter mast.  

Backfill will be done tomorrow, and framing will start next week!

So for now, off to the rehab facility to visit Mom and more relatives.  Definitely a busy time for us!

Home to a Huge Project

We were home early this year, but the weather felt like Spring.  The first day home, we headed to the County to pick up our building permit.  That's when we discovered that the CASP (Critical Area Site Plan) that the 2nd floor planning people had prepared couldn't be recorded due to technicalities (print they added to our site map was too small).  So one more day to get that right and we finally after waiting for months and after many thousands of dollars, had a building permit in hand!

We took advantage of the sunny warm days to stake out where the new house would go.  This involved measuring the 70' sides and the 44' sides, then measuring diagonally until those numbers were exactly the same.  

Once that was done, we tied string around the perimeter and then used several cans of white spray paint to outline the digging parameters for the backhoe.

Ordered a sani-can for the duration of the building.  Now we're ready for workers!

In one day, we had a giant pile of dirt and could begin to see where the house would be.

After one day, the foundation guys had the forms built for the footings, and the inspector had signed off the first step in our building process!

My brother-in-law, Scott, says there are 10,000 details in building a house.  We think we may be up to 500 that are complete.

New Roof for Georgia House

We built the house in 2006 so the roof should be good for many more years.  However, we have been notified that the comp roofing we used has been declared faulty.  So we are part of a class action suit, but in the meantime, we needed to deal with the roof.  We decided to replace the comp shingles with metal and hired a local roofer to do the work.

The roofing material arrived in spools.  The All Metal people sent it out with a machine to extrude it to exact lengths and two guys to do the work.

Soon, they had several piles of material ready for the roofers.

By sunset, our whole new roof was on the ground.

Work begins

Not quite done, but close enough for us to head home and start work on our house building project in Washington.