Warming the House

As the weather starts getting chilly, our chores around the house have tranistioned into what Nate calls "buttoning up" the house. One of these chores was to finally put insulation into the upstairs and attic. Adam was nice enough to spend his day off climbing through our teeny tiny attic laying down insulation.

I don't know if this is clear, but this is Adam up in the attic. It is so small that you have to basically crawl on your belly and you need to not be allergic to fiberglass (I'm still itching). The job took very little time compared to what we thought it would and now we have a comfy, cozy, warm house.

We took out the built ins in Nate's office to access the eaves one side of the house

The insulation project took so little time that we were able to get some other projects done! We had spent most of the summer on the backyard that we had neglected the front yard. One of the major issues was our retaining wall. The cap on the retaining wall was not present when we bought the house and it was obvious that it hadn't been there for awhile. This was causing some issues since the bricks were the type with holes in them and water was getting down in them and during the winter it was freezing and breaking the bricks. Before this happened again this year we wanted to get a cap on the wall. Jill came down and spent her afternoon off helping us lay the caps.

Before cap

After cap

We are also going to stain the brick to give it a more uniform look but we didn't have time for that today.

From the picture above you can see that we got A LOT of stone. Luckily, we made a new purchase for our house that allowed us to get the stone delivered. When we went to Lowe's on Saturday, they had a bunch of appliances out front on clearance for various reasons. One was a stainless steel convection stove, double oven and 5 burner. Basically our dream stove. It had dent on the side that the cabinet hides so they had knocked 600 dollars off the price. However, it was still too much for us so we got what we had gone to the store for, and left. On Sunday, Nate went back to Lowe's to get the insulation and the stove was still there.... AND another $200 had been taken off the price! Once they added a 4 year warranty to the deal we caved. They delivered it today (for free and they delivered the stone for free too ... I think they wanted to get rid of the stove) and now the eye sore of our stove is no more (oh and if anyone wants a working stove let me know)!

Believe it or not, this is not everything we did today. However, I have not gotten pictures of everything yet. Instead, I'll show you some other projects that we've been working on.

New Chalkboard: We have this awesome huge chalkboard that will not fit on any of our walls in our house. Anyone that knows us knows that we can't live without a chalkboard so we had to figure something out. The school Nate worked at this summer happened to have extra slate chalkboards left over and so we compromised and now have two small chalkboards instead of one large one. We have now put one of them up in the kitchen.

New porch roof: Our roof on our house is actually really new. However our porch roof leaked. We figured out that this was because they put the shingles over slated wood instead of plywood. This was starting to be an issue since we are closing up that porch and so we decided to rip the shingles off and do it right. Nate found a 4 day period that was supposed to be really good weather and went to work. He got the old shingles up, the plywood down and the water and ice shield down. Now this shield is made of tar and when the sun hits it, it melts and fills in all the cracks. Nate put it on the entire roof since it's shallow. Now, this is supposed to keep all the water out. The only problem is when it rains a day early and not just rains, but POURS for hours. I woke up Monday morning with it raining in the inside of the porch which, just in case you couldn't guess, is a bad way to start your day and week. Since it had decided to rain early, the tar on the seam between the old and new roof had not had time to seal and so the water was going under the new roof into our porch. After some quick work on Nate's part (with me at work being neurotic and calling every 5 min to figure out what was going on) the water situation was taken care of. Nate finished shingling the roof later that week and we now have a non leaky roof!

OK. I think this post has gotten long enough. Next up: Progress on the back porch

New Deck

Here is a tour of the new deck. It isn't completely finished at this point but it is really close.

Nate is so excited that the grill is officially on the deck

We have Grass!!

New retaining wall and slope instead of stairs

New Plexiglas windows so Nate will have light in his work area

 New steps down into the basement and retaining walls. We also added drainage at the bottom. Now you don't hit your head on the way in and it won't flood!

This may seem like a weird picture but it comes with a story. Nate was using the drill in the back porch and when he put it down on the ladder it fell and managed to hit a can of spray insulation just right to puncture it. This resulted in the spray insulation going every where and in an attempt to get it out of the back porch he threw it outside on the deck. Now we have an insulated deck.

Back porch all insulated

Our little tree in the front with new grass. Now no one will know about the crater!

New mums in the garden

We have updates on the inside as well but I'll save that for the next post. This weekend we are insulating the upstairs so our house will be super warm this winter!

Time Flies

With the start of school the blog has really fallen to the bottom of my To Do list. Therefore, this is going to be a little bit of a catch up. The deck building to a little bit longer than we thought. This was mostly due to Nate breaking his finger by hitting it with a hammer. Information we learned from this: the very tip of your finger bone is called a tuft and that breaking your finger makes your finger get really big hours after it is broken resulting in a ER trip at 3 in the morning. Anyway, it's all better now and the deck is progressing nicely.

I couldn't really visualize how big the deck actually is until we had all the decking down. Next post will include the significantly more finished deck once I take pictures. The deck was just one thing we needed to do around the yard. Another thing we needed to tackle was a huge stump in our front yard. We had tried to get it out using the Kaboda tractor but we had little luck except digging out all the dirt around it. We decided to pull out the big guns to try and extract it. Both my dad and Nate's dad visited for the weekend. They brought along a chainsaw and a come along to battle the stubborn stump. First attempt: attach the come along to the entire stump and use the tree across the driveway to try and pull it out of the ground. Nate, however, proved himself too strong and snapped the cable between the tree and come along which resulted in him getting spanked by the cable (resulting in huge welts... it's really good that we live within walking distance of the hospital). At that point the guys decided that trying to pull the entire thing out at once was not going to happen. That's where the chainsaw came in handy. After much effort (This was NOT a small stump) my dad cut the stump into thirds and after semi fixing the come along the guys were finally able to pull the pieces out of the ground. Each piece was a good 200 lbs. It definitely looked like a meteor hit our front yard once it was gone.

One third of the stump

 Since we had a huge whole in our yard, we decided to fill it in we a new, much smaller tree. We went to the nursery and found a tree that we liked for the front yard and found out that the fruit trees were buy one get one free so we decided to get a few peach and pear trees too.

It is like where's waldo in this picture

New fruit trees

We also planted grass seed in most of the back yard. Pictures to come of it actually growing!