House Watch: Getting Caught Up

So here's the latest on our house: we're waiting. For the past couple of weeks we've been helping out in other people's houses getting ready to paint or getting the kitchen ready for vinyl flooring or just cleaning up. Meanwhile our house is getting worked on by subcontactors. We finally finished framing and stuff is happening but we're not doing a lot. This next saturday (Aug 23) we're supposed to finally start paint prep in our house. Things are going really great and it looks like we'll definately be in our house sometime in October. What will we do with all our free time? But here are some pictures to give you an idea of how things are coming.

This is a picture of the sweet set of stairs that I built with the help of my Dad. Mom and Dad came out for a few days so we could get our hours early in the week and take that trip to Tahoe.

Here's Julie taking a shower in what will soon be our Master bath. We like it a lot because in our tiny apartment now the bathroom is barely big enough for the tub and toilet let alone a person. Our new bathroom will be a lot roomier.

Here we can see the subs are getting the walls insulated so we won't freeze to death.

And here we see the sheet rock put up. They really do a good job of giving the walls texture and rounding off corners and things. It's going to look nice when we're finally done.

And this a picture of the scaffolding that they put up all around the house so they can put up the stucco. It's really coming along and hopefully at the end of this week we'll have pictures of the finished exterior. We only hope it looks good. It's been so long since we chose the colors that we can only hope they look good.

And just to make you jealous this is a picture of one of the awesome sunsets that we get right out our kitchen window.

First Steps!!!!

Damon took his first steps tonight!! After we came back from working on the house tonight, we were hanging out at Talon and Lisa's for a bit and Damon wanted to go to his dad (he always does--Joel is definately his favorite). So I let go of him to see if he'd stand a little, and he just took a couple of steps to Joel. It was so exciting!! Then after we came home, he took three steps to me while we were getting him ready for bed. It's amazing how fast babies pick things up.

Damon has been learning so many things lately. His most recent accomplishments include playing the guitar and piano with Daddy. He also likes to work out with Mommy.

Happy Birthday To Joel

Happy Birthday to me! Yesterday was my birthday! Hooray! Now I'm another year older, another year wiser. It was a good day. I went out and worked on the house most of the day but when I got home Julie was really making what was left of my birthday special. She made me a cake with a Superman symbol on it and it said "Super Dad." It was pretty cool looking. Before we had cake, of course, we went out to dinner first. It was the first time either of us had been to Tucano's. It was incredible. It's a Brazillian Grill and bufftet. For those who aren't familiar with it you have free range of an incredible salad bar (which they call a salad festival) and while you're sitting there servers come around with different meats, supposedly cooked exactly like they do it in Brazil. It was all delicious. We had filet mignon wrapped in bacon, sirloin steak, teriyaki beef, garlic roasted steak, turkey and pork, mango cod and barbequed pinapple. You could really just sit there and eat yourself silly. We almost did. And since it was my birthday it was two for the price of one. So it's an expensive restaurant but didn't cost us quite so much.
So it was a great birthday; it's too bad that it comes around only once a year.

House Watch Catch-Up: The Trusses

Okay, now it’s time for the next catch up entry: the trusses. It’s kind of a difficult day because we have to make sure we have enough people to do the whole thing. We need people up on top of the walls nailing the trusses in and setting braces and we need people down below to hook the trusses to the crane. Oh yeah, did I mention we need to hire a crane? Aside from all those people we need to have extra people to act as ground support. The last time we did trusses we only had 5 or 6 people and that’s not really enough. It took us quite a while. For our house, however, we had a lot of people and it went really smoothly. In fact, it was like the fastest time we’ve ever done trusses. It figures that we would finally get it right for the very last house. But anyway, it went really well and here are some pictures of the process. I was one of the people up on top nailing and Julie was down below acting as our ground crew. It rained on us a little bit that day and since it had been so hot lately it felt really good. When we were all done a rainbow came out and I joked that it was God promising us that we would never have to do trusses again.