Latest picture of the lake side of the house.

We are making progress.

Done with second sewer connection.

The sewer pipe coming through the basement floor is the only thing to indicate that we are done with the sewer connections. As soon as more plumbing is installed, we can have another flush party.

Second try at the sewer connection.

Glenn came again today to make the connection to the sewer. It looks like the ground is soft enough to dig. After he is done, we can start putting together the yard.

Designing a house with Dick.

This is a picture of the kitchen and TV room from the new addition. The picture shows the arches and the posts that will be built to tie the rooms together. The small picture on the bottom of the page is an example of how the baseboard heater will be framed with wood. We get this type of picture on a regular basis from Dick. This will be all that we get, and the next thing we know, it is built. This process may be a lot to deal with for some folks, but we are enjoying every minute.

What a difference a day makes!

The 3 season porch is ready for paint and floors. I think we will move in.

3 Season Porch

The building inspector gave us his pre-insulation approval on the addition and the post-insulation approval on the 3 season room. Dick is cleaning up the 3 season room, so when he moves us out of the old porch to build the new kitchen; we will have a place to go. The 3 season room will have bead board paneling on the walls and ceiling. I will be adding temporary heat so that we can extend the use of the room by a month or two. This room will be a nice place to have coffee in the morning.

Now we have a playroom.

Will and Lauren came to visit this week. We turned the new kitchen into a play room. We have Will, Lauren and Linda working in the kitchen

One side done.

Dick finished the siding on one side of the house yesterday. He is working on the lakeside today. 

A lot of work still needs to be done.

If you stand in the right place you can see that there still is a lot of work that needs to get done on the house. There are two sides of the old house that still needs windows and siding. Dick will leave this part of the house alone until we can move to the addition.

Missle control center.

We passed the rough electrical inspection yesterday. The electrical inspector wanted to know if we were building a missle control center in the wall of the kitchen. There will be nine switches in this section of the wall.

I think the following list identifys the switches, but I'm not sure.
1) recessed lights over the sink
2) recessed lights over the stove
3) three way swicth for entry and exit into the kitchen
4) Fan in kitchen
5) Fan in 3 season porch
6) Light in 3 season porch
7) Lights for Stairs Deck
8) lights for path to lake
9) lights for boat dock

Real Posts

We have real post on the front porch. We plan to have the area infront of the porch filled and a brick walkway built.

No sewer work yesterday.

No sewer work was done yesterday, the pipes are still above ground. The ground was to frozen to dig. Glenn said he'll be back in a couple of weeks to try again.

Digging the foundation the old fashion way.

My friend Jack is building a new house. He is putting the new house in back of his old house and then he is going to remove the old house. This is a picture of where the new house is going to go. All of the black tar paper funnels mark where the dynamite will go. Jack is making a 9 foot deep hole in a rock ledge.
If things go badly, he may be removing the old house sooner than he had planned.

Another Sewer connection.

We are getting another sewer connection. I didn't think that I was going to see Glenn and his backhoe again. The house is about 82 feet long, and there is a bathroom at each end of the house. I can have a sewer pipe installed in the basement that runs from one end of the basement to the other end of the basement, or I can have another pipe installed in the front yard. We picked the pipe in the front yard option.
If you look carefully the front wheels of the backhoe are off of the ground. Glenn had to back up the hill after trying to go up the hill forward.

Temporary wall is back.

Dick has finished the work on the kitchen opening so we got a temporary wall installed between the new kitchen and the great room. The wall even has a small window so we can watch the workers.
I reinstalled the heat, so we can start eating in this room again. We have been eating at the computer desk, and there is just not enough room.

Pretend posts.

Dick installed tempory posts on the front deck. The post were the right width but only 3/4" thick. We had to decided if we wanted tapered posts or round columns. We like the posts.

Heat flow calculations.

We need to determine how much heating to install in the new rooms. This is done by measuring the area of each room and the amount of wall space covered by windows.

We have very little wall space in the kitchen for baseboard heaters , and limited wall space in the large room. To add to the problem we have 30 feet of windows looking out at the lake.

In the kitchen we plane to use an under counter heater called a 'toester' . I'm not sure what we will do in the big room.

Plan "B" for the fireplace.

We had planed to add a gas log to the fireplace. That is just a ceramic log connected to a Propane tank. The log sits in the bottom of the fireplace just like a real log. We had the back of the fireplace inspected by a mason, because there was a little rust on the back. The mason proceeded to turn the rust into large holes. The holes can be seen in this picture just above the pretend counter and cabinets.
We had to go to plan "B". Now we are looking at a gas fireplace insert. The only difference between a gas log and a gas fireplace insert is money.

Kitchen Design

We now have a pretend kitchen counter. We are testing the placement of the counters and cabinets. If you look at the end of the counter you can see the adjustable part. The sink will be in front of the arched window, the stove will be on the left side of the kitchen about the middle of the counter, and the refrigerator will be at the far end of the counter on the left hand side of the
kitchen.