Finished Siding!

Once upon a time (last fall), the Lord worked things out for us to rent our current home from some friends. It was a two bedroom home, however, and it was agreed that we would do the labor while they paid for materials to convert the two-car garage into living space.
Here it is before we started working on it:


The once-garage is now our bedroom/office/room-to-hide-the-tv, and we love it.

Here are some along the way shots of the outside of the house...
In June. See the raw wood?


Also in June, but after I painted the wood white so that it would blend better:


And the beautiful finished product, with the siding done today by the siding experts:


Me like!

We're In!

I am thrilled to be posting from our new house this morning while my man snoozes in bed a few feet away.  Praise the Lord!

The work is not over yet (we have lots of clean up to do at the old house, some finishing to do in our new room, and, of course, the whole unpacking thing), but we are so thankful to be officially moved over (aka - sleeping in our new home).

I haven't been good about posting progress reports, so I'll recap:
On Sunday we painted the new room.  It was thrilling to see paint finally going up on the ceiling and walls.  There were times in the last month that I have wondered if it would ever happen.

Here's Jonathan cutting in on the ceiling:


Me painting the ceiling:


Dad Smith cutting in on the walls:


Mom Smith cutting in:


(a note about pictures:  I've just started a new habit of of shrinking pictures before I upload them to the blog.  So, when you click on the pictures, you'll see a bigger picture, but not as big as you used to see.  If I ever post something you'd like a full-sized copy of, just email me and I'll send it to you.  Not that I'm expecting you to want full-sized copies of our painting pictures.)

Monday we didn't get to work over at the new house because Jonathan's work-for-money day was very long. So yesterday, we brought over three loads. When we brought the first one, we took time to mop the floor in the new room, scrape up drywall mud, sweep, and mop again. The second load was beds and clothes, and the third load was office stuff. Jonathan got the computers up and running last night (or was it technically this morning...).

Today, I hope to get a bit of pre-cooking done and establish as much order as possible in my home. We'll see how it goes; I'm learning to be flexible and let go of my expectations more often. I even bought myself frozen pie crusts last night at the store!

My composition teachers would be appalled at my lack of writing finesse this morning, but I wanted to get an update done. So there you have it - we're in. Wootles!

Checking In

I realized today that I haven't posted an update on the house for a few days.  It's just that pictures of the various layers of the drywall process aren't distinguishable from one another.  However, though I haven't pictures to post, I can report that we are making progress!

We have a few ceiling joints that need one last layer of mud.  Hopefully, Jonathan will be able to finish up that tonight and we'll get the rest sanded.  Work is running late, so we'll see how much we get done before we crash.  We're planning to paint the ceiling tomorrow, and hope to be able to get both coats done so that we can move over the beds and such on Saturday and start sleeping in our new house!  We'll paint the walls next week probably, but we can scoot furniture away from the walls for that.

No profound thoughts from me today, but this post from Molly shook my boat (she has that way about her, I'm finding). 

Drywall

Last week we started drywalling our new room. Monday night, Jonathan and I worked on it some Monday night, but were only able to get a sheet and a half up on the ceiling. Tuesday, Jonathan and his dad got quite a bit done.

Then Wednesday, Alan and Joe (and their lovely families) came over. The guys worked together and got almost the whole room drywalled!

And no, it didn't take three of them to put up every piece, but they were obliging and posed for me.

Then, while I was gone this weekend for the doula training, Jonathan and Joe finished the drywall and got on a first coat of mud. Yay! Yesterday afternoon we went over and started the 2nd coat. Later in the evening, Dad Smith helped finish up the 2nd coat.



Serious progress!

Autumn Beauty

Moving Fun

The kids are so excited to have climbable trees at our new place!  This first shot looks like Josiah is way up high, doesn't it?


Until you see how much higher Ethan T. is!


Supper time:

Saturday Work Progress

I'm a bit belated with my updates. But such is life!

Saturday morning, Jonathan met Cary at the store to get building supplies. As sometimes happens, our perception of the required time for the task didn't match up with the reality of the needed time. Eventually, however, they got over to the house with windows, a door, lumber, sheetrock, and other fun stuff.

Meanwhile, some friends showed up at the house around 10.30 to help load stuff that was ready to go. They made a box brigade out the front door and to the Henkel's van - great idea!




Once that first load was ready, I headed over to the new house to direct deliveries. I've realized that the process of moving is one area in which my "picky" tendencies tend to show themselves. I truly want boxes to be deposited in the rooms in which they belong! Deliveries on Saturday went quite well, and I was a happy girl.

Once things were unloaded, I headed back to our current house to see how things were coming along. While I had been gone, Mama Byrd and Mom Smith had baked cookies and helped organize/pack, and Sue had led a big yard-clean-up effort and sorted out all the children's shoes (wow!!). It was so encouraging to see all they had done in my absence.

Since most of what we had hoped to take over on Saturday had been taken already, we loaded up the chili and the assorted children and headed over to the new house for lunch.

Stephen and I rode with Mama and ended up being quite a bit behind Sue (who took most of her children and mine). A while after we got to the new house (as friends and family wondered at my amazing slowness) I realized that our refrigerator and pantry were full! Our chapel family gave us a truckload of food, and our friends/landlords added a bunch of meat from their favorite butcher. It was such an amazing show of love... I was pretty much speechless.

The construction crew got quite a bit done by the end of the day, especially considering all the delays. Jonathan made a good bit of progress on the electric stuff, but I didn't crawl down into the crawl space to take pictures of him. Here are a couple shots of the garage project progress:

Update

I haven't posted for a couple of days, so I thought I'd take a minute to do that.

Work on the garage has been held up a bit.  The beam in the center of the garage is sagging and other work has been interuppted while they get a support in for that.  We are hoping to have some friends come and help us with construction and moving tomorrow - please be praying if you think of it!

Mama and I (and a couple of friends here and there) have gotten quite a lot packed this week.  There is still plenty to do, but it will all happen in God's timing.

Jonathan is meeting our friend and landlord at the store in the morning to pick up the new door, window, and sheetrock, so tomorrow should be a very productive day!

New House Work Day 2

Jonathan and I had to go into St. Louis for an appointment today, so we didn't get a lot done on the house. But Papa and the kids got a lot done!

I forgot to get a picture of the opening for the new door, but here's Papa starting to get the framing in:


And they got out all the drywall that needed to be removed from the walls. And we were pleasantly surprised to find good insulation back there! I guess with the two garage doors, the insulation can't be that effective.  I'm sure it will be much warmer with a real wall.

The garage door on the left will have a large window in it.

New House - workday 1

Papa and Mama got into town last night, and today after several hours at other tasks (Jonathan and Papa doing installs, Mama and I packing), we all headed over to the new house to work.

The big project on the new house is that we are finishing the double car garage. It will be a multipurpose space, and will include our bedroom, office, and "den." We are tearing it out to the studs, re-working the wiring, adding insulation, drywalling, painting (including the floor, which is concrete), etc. We are also adding a window or two and a new door to the outside. Lots of work, and we hope to have the bulk of it done this week (probably excluding the mudding of the drywall and the painting of the walls).

I missed getting pictures of the garage before the guys got started. The pegboard walls of the garage were covered in hooks and containers. An amazing assortment of screw, nails, fishing equipment, shelves, etc, etc. Today's work of several hours consisted of stripping the garage walls of all their "stuff."

Here are some of the earliest pictures I took today (they had almost half of the stuff taken care of by this point):




And at the end of the night:





Yay for Jonathan and Papa, and for the Blessings, who helped out quite a lot.
And yay for Mama who helped me get lots of stuff packed and unpacked today!

More pictures of the new house

We had a wonderful time yesterday evening with our friends from whom we will be renting our new house.  I forgot to get a picture of all of them together, so I'll have to do that this next weekend (they're in town for a little while).

Here are some more pictures, mostly of the house.  They have captions, but I don't know if they show up in the slideshow (they do show up on the Picasa page).

Moving!

I suppose this post should have come before the "packing" post, shouldn't it?

So, thanking you for your grace extended to my misplaced posting, I'm here to announce that we're moving!

We will be renting the home of some friends of ours who have temporarily moved out of state.  The move will save us over $300/month in housing payments, which is a huge blessing.  The house is beautiful, and sits on a wonderful 10 acres of land (with creek, pond, chicken house, and more).

Though the job of moving a family of 9 is always overwhelming, I am so very much looking forward to being in our new home.  I feel God's blessing and guiding hand over this move, and I am thankful.

How about some pictures??  I hope to get pictures inside the house next weekend, when we will meet with our friends and finalize some details.  But for now, here are a few shots from the outside:

More Kitchen Work - The Header Goes Up

When you take out a support wall, you have to put up a header in its place.

I honestly don't understand how these studs:

can be replaced with this header:

I'm just thankful it works, because it makes it possible for me to have this extra space in my kitchen! The refrigerators and stove are where the basement stairwell used to be.

This is by no means the final arrangement for the kitchen. We're going to be working on developing the big picture of where we're headed with this project, then as money becomes available, we'll fill it in piece by piece. And don't look at these pictures too closely, because I am in dire need of cleaning my appliances!

Kitchen Work

But first... Happy Mayday! I have fond Mayday memories from Holiday Weeks at High School camp at KBC. Fun times.

The last couple of weeks have been picking up with our work for Lowes (praise the Lord!), so it was odd when we had no work at the beginning of this week. Hindsight reveals that it was for a good purpose!

Monday, Jonathan worked on taking the cabinets off of this wall in the kitchen/dining room area so that he could drywall (and recut an air return vent that we took out when we tore down the wall between the two rooms).

We moved a couple of them into the kitchen temporarily so that I would have a place to put some of the stuff until we got to our big kitchen project.

Later that day, I came upon Jonathan gazing thoughtfully at the section of wall that now was bare studs. I noticed his gaze wandering over to the kitchen wall slated to come down at some later date, and I cautiously asked, "Whatcha thinkin', Babe?" To which he replied that he didn't think he could do the drywall for that day's section until we tore out the kitchen wall and put up the support beam... "Oh. Okay." (Laurel smiles what she prays looks like an encouraging smile, and thanks God for the grace to not flip out but be thankful for progress)

To give a bit of explanation, our basement is non-usable for the most part. We decided a while back that we would use the current basement stair space for our kitchen remodelling, since the basement is a mostly unusable space that is accessable from an outside door. If we're here long enough to build an addition, it will have an accessable, usable basement.

So, on Tuesday morning, the kitchen wall to the basement stairs started coming down. Oh, the beauty that panelling has been covering up!

Jonathan's favorite part of remodelling work - the demolition!

And, viola! Hours of work later, the walls are down. Note the conflagration of wood that makes up that one stud in front of Jonathan.

Here's Jonathan hard at work putting in supports for the new floor. And it was hard work. Aged hickory is no picnic to pound nails into, from what I hear.

Woot! The supports are all in!

And the subfloor can be put down!

Jonathan put in a Really hard day's work on Tuesday, and got a ton accomplished. Once we get our socialism check, we can get wood for the support beam, get that up, take out the rest of the studs, and think more about the next step in our eco-friendly kitchen redo. That "eco" would stand for economically, mind you. No (more) debt, pay as you go, and all that good stuff.

P.S. - Sorry about the grainy quality of some of the pictures. We were trying a setting on our camera that we will no longer be using.