Two weeks of work, poured into ONE blog...

 Ok, Ok, Ok... I have a really good excuse for not posting last week's blog, and putting two weeks into one... Jim was in Seattle for the week on business, and couldn't log into the edit mode on the blog on his work computer.  Here's how the blog works... I take most of the pictures and post them in a working copy of the blog.. Then, I write my part of the blog (most of it), with the little bit of understanding that I have, and I don't write anything on the more technical aspects of the building process...  Jim then looks at the blog and adds his (small) part, and then I post it... He wasn't here to edit, so I didn't post...  That's the best I got.

Jim and I have had our cabin project going for a little over 10 years, and the saying is very true.... we make little strides every week, but, are still "traveling" together, and life is pretty fine.

In my travels (web searches) this week, I found these two little end tables...  It was the iron "knuckles"  on the sides that caught my eye.  Jim thinks they would be perfect on the deck because we are planning the same iron knuckle design on the balusters (railings) that will go on the deck... I agree... There is glass that is placed on the tops... so I like them.

.

I saw this picture and couldn't decide if I wanted it in our Provo home or at the cabin... The cabin walls won...

Howard our handyman/helper told us his specialty is finish carpentry work.  He pointed out that the door frame in the loft was a little misaligned.  Jim told him it was thrown in at the end of the season and just put up to seal the house for winter.  So Howard offered to pull it out and reinstall it - a little more square.

And, he brought up a corner trim piece -  Plastic clad wood that looked so good and will weather well.  See the upper left corner of the doors above.  Well done, Howard.

The doors works so much better now.  And, it looks so pretty now.. and closes amazingly well!!! (And, the extra siding looks pretty amazing also!)

Jim installed the power outlets in the island this weekend.  Woot, woot, technology.  Two HDMI outlets and two plug outlets.

We had to do a little measuring this past weekend.. trying to figure out what size of a cooktop to purchase that will fit in-between these two pop-up outlets... I got the measurements 30X19 is the magic size, and I've been looking at the hundreds of cooktop stoves that are available... The question is:  Do we go with 5 burners, or 4 burners, or 3 burners... a black top, or a white top... tons of options, in all price ranges... Gonna be an interesting decision.. Any suggestions?

And, I found a cookie jar with two moose (Mooses? Moosi?) sledding down a hill.  How fantastic is that?  (Ok, when I sent Jim a picture, he thought it looked weird...But, when he saw the cookie jar in person, he admitted that it was really kind of cute.  But I only need one (two) cookie jars at the cabin.

And, the massive hole and the huge pile of dirt is completely gone!  Somewhere down there is our septic tank.  Jim has a couple of the markers still there so we know where the tank it when we get to the point of putting in the septic field in..  I'll explain that one when we get to that point.

As I mentioned in earlier blog entries, we have been salvaging bricks from different places to have them put into the patio area.  It's been a project that has been going on for several years..  The house that was being torn down (.. you know, the one where I had the squatters sign the photo release for me... uhuh....) it's totally torn down now and I got permission from the construction man in the skid steer to salvage some of the brick.  I thought it would make a good addition...  Well, Jim and I went over with the trailer on Thanksgiving morning, to load some of the brick... It's really a difficult job, especially when you have a couple of people working on the project that have major knee issues.  I am half way through having gel injected into my left knee (I have no cartilage left and it's just bone on bone... kinda painful) to ease the pain.. I've had my second set of injections... and you have one shot in the knee for three consecutive weeks... I've got one shot left... I'm not particularly steady, and so in reaching down to pick up bricks, I stepped in a hole and totally biffed it... Fell down and damaged my knee more - I don't know what I'm going to tell the doctor on Tuesday, but, I don't think he'll be particularly happy with me...  But, the almost as bad part was, I fell into a bunch of goat head weed - stickers... they poked through my gloves and stuck into my hand...  Took almost an act of God to dig them out, and, are they ever painful...  These little beggars are evil...

I had to wait a day for them to fester and swell to start getting them out of my hand... they had broken off at skin level... After all this happened,  Jim made the executive decision to just call it quits and go home with a partial load.  I agreed.

But, here's what our brick accumulation looks like...  These are the bricks that we got from Coalville, but just dropped them on the ground because it was too freakin' cold when we got them, to stack them.. Now, they are nicely stacked..

These are the new bricks from the house that was just torn down...

Except for this lot... we were too tired and said, "Bag it... we'll stack these next time"...

And, this is the whole pile that we have collected...  And we still have a pallet load in the backyard at the house in Provo..

I told Jim that I am glad that I was not one of the slaves that was carrying bricks for the pyramids... because, I would be one of the workers that was "sacrificed" for being too slow... 

And, I've been looking for years and years for a set of windchimes like these... I wanted the longer and thicker tubes that have the deeper sound, and couldn't find a windchime exactly like I wanted... The top of these look like an acorn, and they really appealed to me... I hope I don't eventually hate them,

I think these are called saddles, but I am not sure...  Jim is the expert in this field... He's welding up columns to hold the glulam beam that will support the deck... did that make sense?  These will be on the top of steel tubes and bolted onto hold the big glulam beam up that supports the deck above.  Because we are on a mountain the outer edge of the deck will be held up with 7 foot high concrete columns on footings that have 8 foot high steel columns on top of them under the glulam.  Eventually the concrete columns will be filled in with dirt to level out a walkway under the deck but the view is going to be fantastic.

And, rounding out our blog for the past couple of weeks, our helper, Howard, had an encounter with the local neighbour....  He was driving away from the cabin on Tuesday on the dirt road, and I can only imagine, but, one of the locals (a deer) wanted to have a chat.. I think they wanted to snag him from our project, and when Howard objected, they rammed his truck...  From the picture, I think the neighbour won this round... So, thank you, Howard for keeping us first in line...  Those deer should have known better than to step out in front of your truck to get your attention!  Giggle...

As always, the adventure continues...

Love, Jim and Cheri