Neena's Pride & Joy

Bill added another row of red rock on one section of our retaining wall. He had the dirt work guy while shaving the ground for the driveway to put that dirt on this area so it can be leveled out. For some reason Bill doesn't want to mow at an 80 degree angle next to a high wall. Of course, moving all that dirt is my job.

Grandkids came for the night so they pitched in and it took no time for that dirt to be leveled out. These boys are amazing. At 9 & 7 their work ethic is tremendous. I  finished the smoothing out because their little sisters were hollering at them to come drive them on the Go Kart. We do let them have a little fun when they visit/

So proud of these guys.

Throwing Our Hands Up

We have given up on the roofers fixing our roof. Bill and our yard hand, Steven, went up and found the problem areas. Steven was a roofer in his previous life and knows his stuff. They just kept shaking their heads. To stop rain from coming in the roofer stuffed pink insulation in to the crevices. That insulation is now a pink sodden mess that has to be pulled out. Steven introduced us to a Fles Seal for roofs that fixes everything. These roofers say they are metal roof specialists.

We are just waiting for a Mechanic Lien to be put on our property. The roofers say the Contractor we hired to do this portion of the building has not paid them anything. We have paid the Contractor what we feel is the amount owed due to the roof still leaking. The Contractor is gone! His house is up for sale and no one is living in it. This is a contractor who has bought from us at the rock yard for a couple of years now. Bill has taken all kinds of pictures to show the shoddy workmanship from the roofers if we have to go to court.

 Here is Bill and Sutton, the seven year old grandson, working on getting everything watertight on the roof. This kid has no fear. Which may explain his multitude of Emergency Room visits. Bill likes it that he has someone like him who wants to go high. I don't like to go high for any reason but will if Sutton isn't around.

No It's Not Finished

Bill worked his little tail off to surprise me with the next step of the pantry being done. He thinks it's okay to stop with a spotted room. Wants to add the shelving and call it done.

Can't add the ceiling until we know for sure the garage roof leaks are fixed. There is one little leak right above this room. He says I have a very special pantry with lots of natural light coming in from the big garage window. It was so funny; he kept trying to keep me away until he had covered all the drywall screws. He wanted one thing done before I saw the room. Now to find the time to do all the taping and mudding then texturing, then base and case, then door, then painting, then putting the shelves and cabinet in, then hanging the light, then the room will be finished for now.

The flooring will come much later. It will be done when we do the rest of the house. Want to be sure it will match what is in the kitchen.

I can get so many boxes unpacked when this room is done. It is the food pantry and the Butler Pantry. Every kitchen and serving dish box will be unpacked and I can get to my stuff. This is the stuff I love to use. I use the good dishes even when it is just us sometimes. When the girls were young and had friends over we would eat in the dining room. We would use the good dishes so show them we respected them and their friends and thought it was a special evening. Why have something and not use it?

Smart Key

I can now add locksmith to my resume. These new Smart Keys are incredible! After installing you can rekey the lock to match your existing locks. It takes approximately 10 seconds to do this. You don't have to take anything anywhere it is done right on your door.

That's all you do. It is so easy. If you are going out of town and a neighbor is checking on things for you, all you have to do is reset one door to another key and when you get home rekey it to the one you want. No extra keys floating around the world.

 I finally got around to putting the deadbolts on the entry doors from the garage and rekeyed them. Now where to put the rekey tool and keys? Normally they would go into my office but that isn't built yet. We'll find a spot and then hopefully remember where that spot is if we need to rekey.

He Loves Me

Most guys get their wives flowers, chocolates, diamonds to show their love. Bill knows just what to give me to make me excited.

An Industrial size of "Great Stuff" my beloved expando foam!

I can finish fixing the potential death sites of mice above our walls. An evening with flowers and wine would be nice.

Size Does Matter

The extra table and chair closet is painted and ready to be filled. Oh no Bill it isn't big enough. Our family will just keep getting bigger which means even more folding chairs and more tableswill need to be accommodated.

The folding chairs come out beyond the door frame. We will add a sturdy shelf  above all this to put the coolers and the wood chairs on, they are super lightweight. It is wonderful having these problems. Love our family!

Thanks Phelps'

Our dear friends, John &  Gailynn, just finished a big add on remodel to their house. Last week John called and said he was cleaning out the garage and came across building stuff they didn't use. Wouldn't you know it was two 5 gallon buckets of drywall primer. Guess what we are ready for? Dry wall Primer. Great coincidence.

Almost done with the coat of primer on our table and chair closet. So much fun using what our friends used in their house. I am a goofy sentimentalist when it comes to things like this. Thank you for thinking of us as a way to get rid of your unwanted leftovers. You know us well.

Forward Looking

When you are building piecemeal and not in the right order you always have to be thinking many steps ahead. How can what you are doing now make a difference in what you will work on later? One of these days we will have the time to work on our pond. We need to line it with good ole red clay and then Bentonite clay to make it waterproof and not a sieve like it is now.

Another good thing to line the pond with is gypsum. Sheetrock is made from gypsum. So all of our sheetrock scraps will be going into the bottom of the pond.  Saving the environment by not putting it in the landfill and saving us money by reducing the amount of Bentonite we will have to buy.

We will fill boxes with the scraps and then when we have a bunch we will lay them in the pond. I know this looks like a feeble amount but we have a whole house to sheetrock so there will be a bunch.

Smashing Good Time

With this project we get to do a little demolition along with the building. This time it was to demolish the casing around the entry point of the electrical power coming into the Residence. This was outside before so it had to be waterproof; it is now in the pantry so we can get rid of the bulky stuff and slim it all down.

The pantry door would not be able to open flush with the wall if we left this junction box here. Bill took a hammer to it and got rid of it. I was very close but not too close in case of electrocution. Thankfully, nothing happened. Actually, it was very safe. All the wires are encased and there is no way of being harmed.

We pulled the electrical wires as far into this box as possible and made lots of room in the pantry. This box will be in my table linen closet in the kitchen. It makes no difference how big the box has to be in here.

What's Behind Wall #3

No one really knows what is behind the walls of their house. Last week Daddy and I were talking about some of the things the building crew he worked with had to do to make things line up right.  Nothing that affects the integrity of your house should ever be done but sometimes things need to be jerry rigged.

To put the drywall up on this wall we needed some jerry rigging. The sheet was going to end right here on the valley of the sheet metal. So Bill took two scraps of sheet rock stacked them on top of each other and they were the exactly what was needed. Now all the sheet rock is screwed into something solid along their edges.

Hickory Dickory Dock

The mouse ran up the clock, the clock struck one, the mouse ran down. I don't want any mice running down anything in this house. We live in the country and don't have a cat at the moment. That means we will have mice, there is no way to avoid them. Putting sheetrock up against the metal skin of the building leaves gaps. I can just see a mouse running along the joists, falling into one of these gaps and dying in the walls.

Oh that is a horrible thought. Not only for the poor mouse but the smell will be atrocious.!!!!

Expando Foam to the rescue again. I love this stuff as much as I love duct tape. It can fix all kinds of stuff.

I squirted it between the ceiling board of the pantry and the sheet metal to block any possible way for a mouse to commit suicide by jumping into what will be a sheetrock abyss.

Not a fan of heights and this is what I had to crawl across to get the foam all the way across the wall. I would have preferred a 5 foot wide walkway instead of a ten inch one, but at least this one was wider than my knees as I crept along it.

Albert Einstein

This weekend Bill got busy running more wires for lighting and outlets. He didn't just run wires he added another breaker box so nothing is ever overloaded. Our last house we couldn't run our outside Christmas lights and have the dining room lights on. That won't be a problem here. The building now has three breaker boxes. Bill is my onw personal Albert Einstein, he gives me light wherever I want it.

 We put this breaker box in the cleaning closet. Haven't been able to insulate in here until he figures out exactly what needs to be run into here. It's out of the way but fully accessible.

 Our ever faithful florescent light we move around with us until we get some lights hung.

Hey, the cleaning closet now has an official light complete with bulb.

And the pantry has light. This is all super cool. Little steps toward getting things done.

Let The Rain Come

Alright! We have a real driveway! We need one more load of drive material but we have a fully functioning driveway all the way around the back of the West Wing and into the garage.

Here is the drive with the skidsteer putting down the material.


 After the granite screenings went down it was time to compact. That is the key to a project like this. If you don't compact, compact, compact the material doesn't set up and get as firm as it should.

 Bill went one way then the other way, and then diagonally.

 I wold wet the drive in between his passes to help with the compaction.

 You can see the difference. On the left has been compacted twice and on the right just once.

This was my job. The guys got to use the equipment to move stuff around. I got the wheelbarrow and shovel. The skidsteer would never be able to get up close and personal with the rocks so that is all done by hand.

So excited to have this done. In the rains this morning we were able to just pull out and drive. No worries about ruts or anything.

Rain Stay Away One More Day

We would really like to get our driveway finished before the fall rains come. We moved a little bit of  the driveway material around ourselves when the garage was being built so the building material trucks would have a surface to drive on but most of the drive and parking area is just red dirt.

 At our rock yard we load lots of product with a skidsteer but to shave and slope a drive with it; so that sheds water correctly is not our area of expertise. Luckily, with our business we know people who do this all day long and are really good at this kind of thing.

Yesterday Bill brought in two truck loads of the driveway material, we already had one load there waiting. Of course the weather forecast is saying rain for the next four days straight so all this needs to happen quickly.

Here are the piles of Hybrid Granite Screenings we are using for the drive. It is Granite Screenings with a man made sand mixed in with it so it sets up really really firm. They use this as a base in making the asphalt used for roads. It's just prettier than black asphalt and it costs less.

 We had two very special little girls helping us get things ready for the dirt guy to come in the morning. Mallory would stand on the roadway cloth and I would cut the cloth to fit together. She had a very important job . You have to be sure the cloth overlaps in the right direction so the rain water flows over the downhill piece not under or that will cause erosion.

Some of us had to take more breaks than the rest of us. Just because it was dinner time and they weren't being fed. I had given them a hearty snack of grapes and bananas before we started but their little tummies were saying, "Feed Me"!

Everywhere the fabric overlapped we laid down the drive material. Some of the edges were already being held down with the Oklahoma Red Rock that will line the whole drive and  there were also spikes used to keep everything in place. There was a strong chance of storms coming in and we didn't want this road fabric blowing away before morning.

 

These Grandkids of ours are going to go into adulthood with a vast array of knowledge that most adults never achieve. We are so fortunate that they just jump right in and help even when they are only 3 years old.

Even the future Son in Law got into the action. So excited in nine days he becomes one of us!!!!!

This is huge! 

We have the drive and then lots of extra parking and we have to have room for the propane  and trash trucks to come in and back out without getting on the lawn. The drive continues to the right along the back of the West Wing to the garage. We are leaving the original drive to the front of the buildings for people who may not be able to walk distances. And it give the grandkids a big concrete area to play on.

We will have 4 inches of the Granite Screenings over the road way material. This will be dampened and driven over and over and over to pack it well. If all the grading is right; we won't have standing water and all the water will flow down the side of the existing drive and out to the street. We haven't had any standing water yet so it should all work well.