Theresa Gets Stuck With A Lemon

We took a week off to make a road trip to Montana to visit our friends Dave and Sharon. They bought a beautiful place there for retirement, and now spend every available vacation moment there. Of course, Ed wouldn't have had a good time if he couldn't play with tools.

   We did some sightseeing, some off-roading, and generally had a great time.  All too soon it was time to start home and get back to the task at hand. 

   This week's task began by hanging plywood on the east and west ends of the house. As always, everything was wet and slippery. That's going to be a nice big window on the west wall. Since that end of the building is very very high off the ground, he and Rick used a system of ropes to hoist the plywood into place. 

  

When he hung the east wall, he decided to hang the plywood without making the cutouts for the windows first.

 Then once the plywood was up, he just got out the sawsall and cut out both windows. 

   Having the walls up on the house sure changes the view from the apartment! That's one of those things that you know academically but don't realize spatially until it's done. Now when we open our apartment door, we have a view of a building instead of trees and the barn. On the upside, it will shade the apartment door in  the hottest of the summer sun (if we ever get any this year), plus eventually we'll be living in the house.

Once the east and west second story walls were up, Ed switched gears and began prepping the balcony for the floor. He wants the floor down to work on eaves. He needed to be sure the balcony drains well and away from the structure, so he sloped all the joists. They will be graded toward a drain (actually two drains)  He'll put down 1/2" OSB, then heavy duty plastic liner to the drain. We're using a very thick plastic used for pond liners. Then the deck joists will go in, and the balcony floor boards. That way he will have a secure surface to work on the roof from.

   In the meantime I am still having a hard time imagining the inside of the house. I took a picture of our beautiful Magic Chef 1000 kitchen stove, and tried to scale it to match the cabinet. Then I did my best re-inactment of 1st grade, and cut and pasted it all together, broke out the colored pencils and went to work. The stove is actually a creamy soft yellow. There wasn't a pencil in my box labeled "Creamy Soft Yellow".I was stuck with a "Lemon".   I'm still not sure this is what will actually appear in the house.I'm still working on the cabinets surrounding the stove. We'll see.

Ed and Rick then started laying plywood for the roof.   

This seems like a huge leap forward. First to go up is the roof for the soffits in the front. It took them the better part of one day..in the rain, of course. 

   On the one hand it seems to take forever to move forward. On the other hand, each little step changes the entire complexion of the house.