more wood! weight bearing basement walls, and JOISTS!!

tada!
this is the door for the basement, to the right of the door are the two downstairs bedrooms (can you spot the two windows for each room?)

here is Henry standing by Andrew (blue shirt in the foreground) and his framing crew--working hard!
right behind Henry is the opening for the stairs to the basement

We have been waiting ALL summer to have Andrew on the job site. We are all so happy to see him up there! We are soooo excited that the walls are going up! hurray!

we have a WALLL!!! well, almost.

So, Andrew keeps laughing at us for celebrating things like moving dirt but we are just sooooo excited! =)

Today he is laughing at us because we are so excited about a wall that isn't even nailed together yet. BUT it is laid out. so, we are celebrating!

can you see the wall? =) sort of...

In the meantime, the boys will build their own house.

Look at all this wood. Soon it will be our house!

and the bike helmets are because they were on a bike ride, not because they are on a construction site ;)

I bet tomorrow we will have a real wall standing! Hurray! we continue to celebrate each step

WOOD!

What you are looking at is our first delivery of WOOD! Hurray! Hopefully we will have some framers up there today! HURRAY!!!!

Every construction site needs a....porta potty!!

see! a porta potty. now all we need is a framing crew to go with it! (hopefully next week! which is also Andrew last week :\  )

We've been trying to make our original driveway plan work...but with grading it wasn't happening... Jed had a fabulous idea and so now here is the new driveway plan! The circle driveway will go around this bunch of trees and makes a smooth arc to the garages in the back. hurray!

This is a view of the new portion of the driveway coming up to the garage. 

Here is Jed's awesome dump truck Joshua!

Joshua, here is Mr. Jed's new excavator.... he just bought it for 121K..... wow. 

This is the steep grade off the backyard down to the walkout basement.

Now we are waiting for the framing crew to finish up their current project... hopefully next week they will start framing the basement! Next week with also be the garage flat work. 

Noelle keeps going into the one room and saying, "this is my room. this is for my birthday party!" Elijah said to me today that he wishes our house could be done now. Me toooooo! 

And Henry suggested that we put a roof onto the cold storage room and just sleep there while they finish the rest of the house. =)

basement FLATWORK! hurray!

August 14th

more back fill and the garage is not a hole anymore! 

Cute Henry =)

love these cuties

love this guy too!

love my Elijah!

Late Night Visit to see the Loose Rock

It's late at night on the way home from a mountain hike for Joseph's birthday, past bedtime, the kids are all in their underwear because their clothes were soaked through... should we stop and see the loose rock they poured in the basement?

YES!

Everyone is blurry since it was almost dark.

As soon as the kids saw the loose rock, they all sat down and started making mountains with the it. No!!! Someone just spent a lot of time combing this flat!

This is a picture of Noelle jumping up and down saying, "we have a new house!"
She is just as excited as we are. =)

We are hoping to have flat work poured by next Monday... I wish it were sooner but I keep hearing it is amazing how much has happened since July 1. Okay! 

Andrew is working on our house!

How fun to have Andrew be one of our construction workers!

After a 10 hour dirty work day! 

He started working for Jed in June and has framed an entire house right near where we are building. He spends his days in the rafters of that house... we were not sure if the timing would work out that he could be a framer for our house too, but it looks like he will get to help frame our house!

Even though he'd rather be on the ground than up high (just like his dad!) look how high he is!

Look at that handsome framer! Yay Andrew!

In addition to framing, Andrew also is their trash man extraordinaire. (Please make sure you have him tell you the story of his first day of work sometime!) And yesterday he also used the pounding machine to flatten the basement ground. He is good at everything. =)

Andrew pounding the basement with the 'jumping jack'

Thanks Andrew!!

good bye foundation!

look verrrrry closely....can you see a little face?

The boys discovered a fabulous climbing tree across from our driveway. 

Noelle also discovered a place to play. 

okay, on to the house! Jed started pushing the dirt back up to the edge of the house. This is a pretty huge job... We really want to have the house step out into a flat backyard instead of lots of steps up and down. Same for the entrance from the garage into the house. So it's like a big sand box and all the dirt piles have to get pushed around. 

It's kind of a dark picture, but this is the front porch-- it is looking like we are going to have to bring in more dirt since we still need to bring up the level a few more feet.

Every time I think about the grading of the house for the rest of my life, I will think about the time Joseph stayed up all night. The slightly frustrating land engineer came back over and over telling us our plans for the grading were not sufficient. So finally, Joseph read a bunch, watched a few youtube sketch up videos and when the sun rose in the East, Joseph finished his very first grading plan ever.

here it is:
    

Joseph is the kind of man that finds a solution =)

Here is the garage. You can see how we still need more dirt to bring the level up. But, we all enjoyed going up there and feel like we were walking in and out of the garage (rather than being worried we were going to fall into a deep, deep crevice)

Well, there are still places to fall. =)

Yup, still places to fall... Jed is still working on back filling. Eventually all the black will be under the ground.

Look! Its a room! cold storage under the front porch

Next will be pounding the basement and garage ground flat, pouring gravel and then we can pour concrete! hurray! After concrete comes framing! HURRAY!!