First runs of siding!

With the weather being much cooler than it was in July and August, Nathan has moved outside.  He has wrapped the lower half of the house in chicken wire preparing it for the stucco.  While he had all the scaffolding in place for that, he decide just to get that wall done.  With this, the first few runs of siding have gone up! 

The stucco and the siding will be the same color.  It offers a different texture and will make the house appear smaller.  This will give a the tall house the look of a reduced size - more in line with the houses on our end of the street.

There will be a band of trim about midway up the house (under the 2nd floor windows).  Above the band will be the siding, below the trim will be stucco.  In the gable ends of the roof, we will do stucco again.  This is cheaper than doing the siding as we won't have many ends of boards that are wasted.

You can now also see the full color scheme for the house.  Can't wait to keep seeing that blue to disappear!  Pretty exciting stuff!

First runs of siding!

working on the short "easy" wall

Won't have to move the scaffolding to finish this wall.

Added later:  By the end of the next day, Nathan had this whole top section done!  YAhoo!!!

one section DONE!

Labor Day - literally...

A bit out of order...but I wanted to give a shout out to my family who came up for a Labor Day weekend to LITERALLY labor.

It was  a full family affair!  Most of us "camped in the city [lot]".  Mom & Dad stayed in their camper and we in ours.  We used Mom's camper as the kitchen. Gigi (my grandma) brought the majority of the food.  My dad, brother, daughter & husband all worked on insulating the attic.  We used scraps of Styrofoam from the outside of the house.  J had the pieces in her little wheel barrow in the attic and she would take & dump the pieces all throughout the attic.  I don't have pics right now, but they are super awesome!  She was an awesome Team Mate!

Dad was in charge of filling the hopper with the insulation cubes.  The machine would separate the insulation and blow it through the hose.

Thumbs up!



 Nathan was in the attic spreading the insulation to the correct depth.  Keith prepped this by getting up their a few days before and hanging strings from the rafters.  This was a guide that Nathan could then use to make sure the attic had the proper amount of insulation spread out evenly.  Pretty clever, those two!

strings for depth gauges, blowing in insulation



The result: pink snow everywhere!

That was one day's project.  The next day - Dad & Bryan helped hang sheet rock in the hard to reach parts.  Nathan could have done this on his own, but saying 'it would be a bugger' is an understatement.

They finished the highest walls in the stairwells.  The rest will be much more manageable for Nathan to complete on his own.  Plus - it looks beautiful!

looking up stair well - lot of high walls here

During down time, my dad and Bryan worked on moving the big dirt pile in front of the house.  Mom & Charliegh jumped in and helped with it also.  Charleigh worked so hard, she got BLISTERS!  The hill is about 1/4 remaining, so I have plenty to do when I get a few minutes to go work.

With all the activity buzzing around the property, I got a bee in my bonnet...I decided it was time for the rickety old fence to go away.  We had a trailer for picking up the insulation and the timing was just right that if we loaded up the fence we could haul it to the dump & return the trailer to our friend.  So I got out the saws-all and the sledge hammer and got to work!  Dad & Bryan helped with a few of the posts. Most of them were rotten (wood put directly into the ground) and one of them put up quite a fight.  Dad and Bry got out the crowbar and pulled that thing up.  Many parts of the fence came loose once we had an end free.  I had to cut it into smaller pieces to make them manageable.  Plus I got to tear things apart with a cool saw!



 Remember what it looked like with the fence?


Old fence - doesn't look as bad the further you get from it....

Fence is gone now and makes the property feel much more open and not so dilapidated.  When I lived across the street I thought about pulling that ugly thing down...well, I finally got to do it!  We've done the neighborhood a big favor!

 

Fence is gone!  Garden dreaming has commenced!

Rockin' Out

Sheet rocking, that is :)

Kip & Nathan have been putting Jazz tunes in the CD player and hanging sheetrock on the weekends.  They changed 'strategy' last week and decide to knock out a bunch of the entry way (this includes 2 bedrooms, 2 closets, Kristen's office, bathroom and the hallway.

It was SO FUN to come in at different times throughout the day and see more and more of the house feeling like HOME!

 

From hallway looking into dining room



From kitchen looking into entryway. Looks like a house, huh?! (J took this picture!)

 

The Jazzy work party!  This worksite has the BEST music playing!



It has been so hot the last month that Nathan spent almost all of his time inside the COOL house.  No systems are up and running - and remember, there's NO A/C and people that came through (us, J, family, neighbors ALL are amazed at how cool the house is!  Insulating and low air flowing through the walls is so COOL!)  The weather has cooled off and is pretty perfect right now for working outside.  Nathan has shifted to putting the chicken wire up on the outside of the house, prepping it for the stucco.  The time is here to get the outside done before winter.

 

  In the meantime....



Terese is over at the property TAPING SHEETROCK!  Yeah!  AND we'll be priming and putting up our first layers of clay soon.  Yep - no paint in the house (besides a No VOC primer) - we're putting clay on the walls. It's pretty cool. I'll tell you more about it later!