It’s been a while since my last post, but we’ve done so much.

And there she was….gone

I sit here trying to collect my thoughts and put something to paper, but frankly, I’m exhausted.  My body aches and my brain is foggy, so I think this post will rely heavily on pictures and quick captions to let you know what we’ve been up to the past two weeks.

We’ve really taken advantage of the beautiful weather and the longer days.  Now that it doesn’t get dark until almost 9:00, we’ve been putting in some long hours to get the last push done before the foundation starts.

Under the watchful supervision of Jill and James

My last post showed the removal of the chimney above the roof.  Since then, we’ve removed the remainder of it from inside the house.

With a little help from the air compressor and an air-hammer, I made quick work of busting it down, brick by brick.  Vanessa sorted and stacked the bricks we were keeping for reuse elsewhere.

Then we turned our attention to outside – the addition. We started with the roof and worked our way down.  Nothing overly complicated, just a lot of effort and grunt-work.

“GRUNT”

Strip off the roof, remove the roof boards, wall sheathing and framing.  The demo took longer than we originally anticipated because we did decide to salvage as much of the material as possible.

Rather than “grip-and-rip”, we dismantled everything, cleaned, sorted, denailed and stacked the material for our new garden shed/chicken coop that we’ll be building later this spring.

Minus the rot

We’ve also been cleaning up the yard in anticipation of our vegetable beds and gardens.  We picked up several wood pallets from the building supply store for free (the best kind) and built a couple of garden composters.

We’ll still have a few more to build around the garden, but it’s a start.  Our neighbor was kind enough to give us some poop, too.  Well, his cow’s poop to be exact.

We’ve got our blueberry, raspberry and blackberry bushes, as well as two cherry trees, a pear tree, three cherry bushes.

Our Honey Crisp apple trees should be arriving soon as well.  Our little grow-op has been a tremendous success this spring – the best ever, actually.  The only problem we’ll have is deciding how many of these little guys make it into the garden.

As you can tell, I haven’t the energy to put into this tonight – my apologies – but I also didn’t want any longer to pass before updating you on our progress.  So before I face-plant into the keyboard, I wish you al. bjhbsk rch p ccczzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Jokes.