Farmhouse Update

The other day Noni came out and had Boo and Peanut help her clean up all the dead grass from last year! It made a huge improvement! 

T was able to burn the piles on some calm evenings and it cleaned up the yard so much!

Perhaps our biggest accomplishment...we have a working bathroom inside! No more "going to the ice block" as the girls started calling it after using the frozen port-o-potty all winter. :P

Pretty floor and new toilet and sink cabinet! Just need some mudding/taping...and a door. Haha.

T rented the excavator again to dig the footings for the kitchen/pantry/mudroom addition and was able to take down a few more bad trees.

Our Pastor and Youth Pastor came and chain-sawed up the fallen trees and split the wood, leaving a pile for a us, and then removing the rest. So nice!

I had no idea what a huge process the addition would be! They just kept saying we needed to do the footings first and then the walls. Let me tell you that is a loooong process with a LOT more steps than it sounds like. 

After the footing forms were finally complete T and Grandpa poured the concrete themselves. They used something crazy like 300 bags of concrete! 

Grandma burned all the bags for us in the burn bin.

Once the footings were finished we started working on the walls. Again...many, many steps before we were finally ready for the concrete. This time it was enough (volume) that we could have a truck come out and pour for us, but it was SO muddy, due to rain, that he wasn't able to back all the way in and the guys ended up having to hand scoop the concrete down to half the walls. I jumped in and helped for about ten minutes and then they finally made it to a place where the truck could reach. 

After letting it cure it was another week-long (two hours each evening) process of removing the forms/clips/etc. and lots of clean up before we could move on to working on the sub floor. I feel like that was a big hurdle, and now that we're over it things are moving more quickly. The end may still be far in the distance, but now at least it's in sight. Haha!