Hmm, interesting and then again...

I am a geek. There, I admit it. I love gadgets, Star Trek the original series and You Tube. Okay, not really anything too socially debilitating there. But I installed Google Analytics on this blog to see who and how many are reading it and we hit 65 people last Friday. Beats me who the folks in Norway and Taiwan are, and I am not quite sure about the Canadians, but man there are a lot of Americans looking at this blog. Most from places that correlate to the Christmas Family Webletter I sent out, yet there's a bunch that don't synch up to anyone I know that I know. Well, welcome to the blog; now onto the house.



This week has been a continuation of last weeks slow progress--so slow that it looks glacial. I think we are suffering from Building Fatigue Syndrome (BFS), an insidious disease brought on by the constant effort to finish a house. The depth of winter, rain, dark and cold make it so much more inviting to stay at home and spend quality time with the kids.

Must keep building...must keep going. Gasp....Don't lay down, don't give up.

On New Years day we stayed home and slept in after watching all three episodes of the Original Star Wars movies. "Luke, I am your father!", "Noooooooo!" To remember President Ford's advice to "always work like hell", we spent the Federal Holiday for mourning working on our house. We got the kitchen exhaust fan installed and the siding past it. When the weather clears we will take some new pictures to show where we are, but this weekend we will be indoors. It's plumbing time! If you are interested in doing your own, I can SO heartily recommend PEX tubing. PEX is polyethylene extruded crosslinked tubing. It's made the same as the material in your average gallon milk jug, but it's much thicker. It's not unlike plumbing your supply lines with a giant 100 foot long hula-hoop. It's stiff, but bendable, and it withstands freezing, stretching and allows a straight run from your water supply to your plumbing fixture. That means no more waiting for the hot water to show up.

It's been a wierd 30 days...

Everyone told me that 60% of the time spent building a house is standing around and doing nothing. I am not sure if that's true of all houses, commercial and owner-built, but it's true for us so far.

Update: We have started the siding on the house, installed the soffits, ran about 50% of the PEX water lines and Kenny the plumber is running the waste and drain in the house (in between building his barn and taking his kids to soccer games). I have some really grainy pictures of the house in the near dark showing the siding, but I will take some more this weekend (maybe, it is almost Christmas after all) to show what it looks like with siding and trim. We have most of the south sided and painted, except for up at the soffit. Linnea also spent a back breaking morning doing parge coat over the basement insulation. Bob the mason brought by three yards of mortar (Type M for all you masons out there) and we tinted it to a clay reddish-brown. While we worked on siding, Linnea slapped the mortar on like a frenzied sculptor working in reverse. It's looking a lot like a house now, if you ignore the other unfinished bits.

Christmas?
Yes, Virginia, there is a Christmas. But we won't be in the house for it this year. That was our goal when we started (see earliest blog entries) six months ago with building. When we sat down with the kids to let them know Christmas 2006 was happening in the appartment rather than the house, one of them asked "How long have we been building?". I answered, "Six months", which led to the next question "How far along are we?". I had just worked that out with the bank, and we are barely over 60% done. So, this childlike sage said to me, "Then we have about four months left, if we are getting about 10% done a month, right?" Out of the mouth of babes...