Projects of the Summer

I know I've been ver-r-r-ry neglectful in my blogging, but it's not due to lack of blogging material.

Living in an old colonial house means that there's ALWAYS some project in the wings. In a previous blog I showed a pile of plaster that came from the stripping of the hallway walls. Here's the biggest wall of the project waiting for it's new sheet rock and bead board wainscot. One of the neat parts of this project is that we discovered a landing at the top of the stairs which had been covered over when they brought the floor straight over to the steps. We've opened up the landing and are getting used to the new "step pattern" at the top of the stairs. We'd like to redo the stairs to be less steep, but that would be too big of a project for us to undertake right now...and we'd probably have to lose some space in the downstairs bathroom, which would require plumbing changes, and....(the project would snowball into an avalanche project so we'll stay happy with our current stairs!)

Another project that we've been thinking about doing for several years was jacking up the house and replacing the old wooden support beams that were showing their age (I guess I would, too, if I were 150 years old!) The goal was to lift the beams enough to put new posts in and be able to shut the doors to the rooms opening into the hallway (without them sticking). This has to be done very slowly for the house to ease back into the "new" original position so the beams don't crack. The doors are now much easier to open and close (though we do have to shave a few dozen layers of paint off the top of one door). When the boys pulled the posts out into daylight, we were VERY glad that this project was done this year and not put off any longer.

I also mentioned in a previous blog that a project we hoped to tackle this summer was the steps to our front door. The porch has been off a couple of years. Shortly after the porch came off Wayne spoke with a man that has done extensive rock work on his property to see if he'd be willing to build the steps for us. He agreed to tackle the job, and we told him we'd be in touch as soon as we had the stones and money to pay him. The tyranny of the urgent kept pushing the step project aside, but a few weeks ago Wayne went and spoke to the man again. He thought we had found someone else to do the job and was more than happy to follow through with the plan. Tuesday Sam arrived with his tools and the project was underway. Matthew, Nathanial and Marc helped the first day. On the second day a friend from church filled in Matthew's position since Matt had to work at his regular job. By the middle of the 2nd day we had our steps!
We have a load of topsoil being delivered soon and then we'll do the landscaping of the flower beds around the steps. Hm-m-m what's next on the 'to do' list?