A month latter

As I start to write this post I can't help but notice that it has been over a month since my last post!  I wish I could say that we have been so busy getting things done that I haven't had a chance to write but that is not the case.  We have been busy at times but not at the homestead.  We helped Ray move to Nashville, went to visit David, Rachel and the kids and generally took a very much needed break from this project.

Last weekend we did spend a good deal of time and got a lot accomplished.  We worked on a couple of projects.  I wanted to find out what I was up against with the final bit of wall by the dinette.  Gloria wanted a fire pit and Roger came to help take out the stumps from some bushes that we had cut down a while ago.  Here is the before picture:

 Note the Windows Sill that has rotted away

 After removing the Aluminum siding

 After tearing the original exterior off, Note the pine boards that comprise the inside wall

 Another shot after cleaning up a bit

 Hard to tell in this shot but the sill plate has rotted away and you can see into the basement

 Standing in the basement in the coal room (Dad's old workshop) looking up

 After I tore out the old stuff, note the electrical wiring to the outlet has been pulled down into the basement.  One thing I found interesting was the way the house was built.  The room to the right which had originally been a porch before being enclosed to make the playroom when we were kids has a concrete floor.  About half of the floor is over the basement with the remaining a concrete slab that as far as I can tell is sitting on the ground.  The dinette has a wooden floor.  From the outside it appeared that the slab from the porch extended across the dinette area.  What is actually there is a concrete lip approximately six inches wide.  You can see the floor joists which sit on top of the edge of the concrete block basement wall.  The sill plate has about an inch supported by the concrete with the remainder resting on the joists.  I had to shim the joists about 1/8 inch to get everything level. I am not sure how they dealt with that when the house was built.  It made installation easy because I just followed the original builders and nailed the sill to the joists rather than trying to fasten it to the concrete.

New framing in place, outlet reinstalled and rewired

 Wall insulated

 And covered with sheathing.  This picture was taken Sunday afternoon, I had to leave to go to church.  Later in the week Gloria and I took care of calking and covering with Tyvak home wrap.

While my focus was entirely on dealing with my last chunk of rotten wall Gloria and Roger were hard at work cleaning up the patio and building a fire pit.  It turned out really great.  I regret not taking some before pictures but in general the patio could have been described as not as bad as it once was but still pretty much covered with vegetation with lots of stumps and tree roots sticking out. Here are a couple of pictures of it afterwards:

This turned out to be the only picture I took of the fire pit.  I certainly attempted to take a number of others as it turned out quite nice but I guess my cell phone decided not to save the.

All in all a pretty productive two days.  I need to figure out how to replace the window sill and some of the wood around the windows.  I am sure that a professional would have just ripped them out and replaced with new, better windows but I want to preserve as much of the look and feel of the house as I can and these windows are pretty memorable to me.  

And as Paul Harvey would say now for the rest of the story.  By Saturday night it was getting dark, we started a fire in the new fire pit, the sun was setting, it was beautiful.  We continue to maintain the Saturday night tradition that we started with Dad back in 1992 of getting Nicks Chili for dinner pretty much every week.  As my siblings can attest this was an extension of the tradition we had growing up where Dad cooked dinner most Saturdays which was pretty much always hot dogs.  Mom cooked dinner the rest of the week but Saturday night was time for Dad's hot dogs which were stuffed with cheese and broiled.  Anyway we decided to celebrate the fire by eating Chili and Chili dogs on the patio around the fire.  Gloria left to get the food while Roger and I cleaned up a bit.  Boy did she find a mess when she got back.  

It started when i decided to put some more wood on the fire.  I removed the top grate using the proper tool and set it next to the fire.  I added a little wood and then went to pick up some more sticks.  It is never hard to find sticks around this place but it has been particularly easy of late after the trim trimming job was done last summer.  There are still limbs and sticks everywhere because we didn't pay them to haul them away.  The removal efforts got off to a pretty good start until the chain saws got stolen which had pretty much stalled that effort.  Anyway I went to find some good sticks, along the way I stepped on a log which rolled.  With my typical grace and style I managed to fall down.  I hit on my left side skinning my arm, shoulder and leg and smashed the side of my head on another log laying in the grass.  Not good.  Fortunately although everything went black when i hit I was not knocked out.  Getting up is never easy with my worn out knees but this was particularly tough since I was basically laying on a bunch of logs.  Roger rushed over and helped by moving logs and sticks away so that I had some room to get up.  Needless to say I was hurting pretty bad.  I went and sat down.  I asked Roger to put the lid back on the fire pit.  He went over and without thinking started to pick it up.  I can't really blame him, it was dark, he didn't take it off and the tool provided was laying in the grass in the dark.  This instantly burned his fingers pretty badly.  At first he was afraid that the black marks were burnt skin but they at least proved to be just soot from the lid.  He had second degree burns on the middle two fingers on his right hand.  So Gloria came back to find that both of us had managed to get pretty hurt in the 45 minutes we were left unattended.

On Monday Gloria and Roger (who was fortunately on fall break) went over and picked up a lot of sticks.  That night Roger and I used the tractor to haul most of them away other than the ones that need me to find a new chain saw.  Here are a couple of pictures:

While we were moving sticks we saw something very strange in the side yard.  It appeared to be a hunk of either paper or foam.  After closer inspection we determined that it was some sort of fungus.  I have never seen anything even a little bit like it.  Bright white with almost square edges: