Happy Solstice!

Well our internet is still out and we've been too busy to try to figure out how to fix it. This makes posting much more difficult but really is not a good excuse for letting more than a month go by! There's been much news on the Homer-front; Matt has gotten a full time job working for the Seldovia Village Tribe's Medical Center. It's a great job working with a fantastic organization, plus it's indoors! Poor guy has to shave and wear shirts for the buttons while I "get" to continue to freeze my toes off building our house. However, I have been taking a few weeks off from our house to help dad finish up the other house on Forest Glen. It's nice and cozy warm working on interior trim and installing toilets, I'm getting spoiled. Once that house is done we'll be able to both move up the hill and move fast to get ours done. We've got big bags of insulation sitting in our living room waiting to be installed, the wiring and plumbing is done and the HRV is done except for a few little odds and ends. We managed to string the power line up across the road so that the snow plow won't bother it and so our permanent-temporary power is set until spring. I've been dreaming lately about refrigerators lately. It may be silly with all the work to be done yet (ahem, insulated walls maybe?), but all I can think about is this refrigerator. It's the one I'm determined to get, even if I have to sell a kidney to pay for it by the time the house is done. Isn't it beautiful? Our current refrigerator is about thirty years old and if you even THINK about opening the door the motor will start to run like a jet engine. It is so loud that when we watch a movie we have to continue to adjust the volume to compensate for it. Our electric bill is a good $35 more a month because of it! I want a new refriderator!!!!
And speaking of carts before horses, here are the kitchen cabinets that are waiting for us as Spenards(it will be another month minimum before we get to pick them up) I got a good deal on them and love that I was able to get full ceiling height upper cabinets. Classy, eh?

Finally, an update!

Phew! Our internet connection has been out of order, and I have to write from my mom's computer. We've made great progress lately. The plumber has come and is nearly finished doing all the plumbing rough-in. We've recieved the parts for all the HRV (Heat recovery ventilation)unit and I've been running the ductwork myself. A bit of a learning curve, but there aren't any prizes for perfection, so...whatever.
We've finished the tyvek, and all the exterior trim and corner boards save a few little bits. It has been so so so cold lately, ugh. It's hard to imagine it ever thawing out enough to stain the siding, I'm not sure what we'll do about that...we may have to bring it inside to stain it once it we've insulated. Anyway, it still sits in a huge pile outside. Also, some bad news on the HEA front...they finally arrived last week with the big machinery and started to dig the trench across the road to lay the power line from the transformer to the house. Well, within a few minutes they determined that the ground was too frozen to dig and we'd have to wait to spring. I was initially freaked out, but we've figured out that we can run a temporary line up a pole to go across the road and that it won't affect our mortgage. Phew!

And finally, a roof.

And we are not the ones doing it, thank god! We've "sub-contracted" out the roofing and I couldn't be happier. It looks fantastic, I really like the weathered wood color that we picked, it goes nicely with the blue-green trim color.

Walls, walls and more walls!

I really love building interior walls. I mean I REALLY love it. I go to bed early just because I can't wait to wake up the next morning so that I can go to work and build interior walls. There is something about how quick it happens, how spacially satisfying it is to see rooms and closets and nooks and be able to imagine where all the switchplates are going to go and how this little corner will be perfect for a comfy chair or a potted plant. I love using the level to get everything plumb and strait. I love that you build it on the floor and then heave it up into place. I love that I get to measure and re-measure to figure everything just right. (and I love that I can use the saws-all to erase most mistakes ;-) Since our house is so tiny, it's difficult to get far enough away to take decent pictures of the interior, but here are a bunch anyway. Look at all those walls!

Our stairs...in the beginning

So we were out at the lumber yard yesterday to pay our bill and pick up a few boards. I ask our lumberman if he ever has any 1" by 12" boards that we would be able to plane down and use as stair treads. He usually doesn't but being the extremely helpful and most extraordinarily nice guy that he is he said that he just happened to have a log in the line up that he thought he could get some nice boards out of for us. And there it was, just sitting on his roller next to the saw, waiting to be cut up into boards for us to make stairs out of. He wrote our names on it as a reminder and that was that. What a romantic and beautiful thing. Really. Wow.

Exterior trim, knee walls and a dollop of freezing cold weather!

Brrrrr! It didn't get above 29 today, but I kept plenty warm building and hoisting a 27' long wall all by myself! Well, it was a knee wall, but it was made of 2 x 6's and nearly 6' tall, so I do get some burly points for the effort. After one failed attempt in which all 27' of it came crashing down magnificently, I was able to get it up by incrementally raising it and propping it on taller and taller blocks. After completing the knee walls on the second floor, I nailed the 2 x 4's to the rafters to fir (fer? fur? foor?) them out and create more space to insulate on the angled part of the ceiling. I couldn't help but put up the trim around one of the windows...it looks fantastic. Dad and Matt got almost all of the facia board on yesterday while I painted trim and built an interior wall. We're sub-contracting out the roofing (Hooray!) and they might be up at the house as early as Monday. The shingles have been ordered and should arrive Monday morning, so we'll be ready for them.
Also, sadly, the little cluster of trees that were so mercifully saved during the ground work and stood the the front left corner of our lot providing that extra "woodsy" character...have been chipped. HEA flagged them and a crew came today to clear them out in order to put our power line in. Good news is that maybe this means we'll get power before spring.

We've been making progress...baby steps it feels like sometimes. Today I built the dormer walls and Matt sanded and began painting the exterior trim. We worked over the weekend to get it all cut and put together and it looks pretty classy. I was actually thankful to see rain today, because at least it wasn't snow! No more snow! We still have a roof to shingle! Egad. It will all get done in time even if we have to shovel the roof to do it. I've finally included a few pictures of the back side of the house, which are hard to get since the ground drops off so steeply around back, it'll be a good sledding hill perhaps.