At Home in the Mountains

Terrible pic, but as you can see, the roof is going up! Yay! Hopefully it will be dried in before snow flies. All the rooms are framed out so you can go in the house and kind of walk through all the rooms and see how it's going to flow. We are supposed to get a fireplace picked out ASAP. You can now kind of see the house from the road. It is a weird feeling. It still doesn't seem real to me. I think next steps will be bringing in main electric and water lines and gas lines. They have to excavate for all that. We will go through at some point with an electrician and plan our lighting. There are certain things that go in according to code and then we can add extras such as recessed lighting in the kitchen or things like that. I am not sure what all we will do extra. That can bump the cost up pretty quick. I think that I would like to get some special recessed lighting around the fireplace and built in bookshelves to display some art and the will probably do a bit extra in the k...

 So busy doesn't even describe the past few weeks. I will just post about the house for now and then do surgery and family visits and leaf viewing and all that stuff later. We closed on our property in Divide on Sept. 2. I wish I had before pictures but we just tore right into the place before I thought of it. All you need to know is carpet in the master bath and the strong odor of cat pee through the entire house. Believe I've already mentioned this several times.  We ripped out all flooring. Then we kilzed and primered the floors and walls. We did about 3-4 coats of kilz on the floor as we kept thinking we still smelled some odors, especially in the bedrooms and laundry area. We primered the walls and then painted the living areas and bedrooms Navajo White and the bathrooms plain white. We ripped out the master bath shower and are redoing the panelling on the tub. (Don't ask. Pictures later.)  We then had carpet and linoleum installed. We spent one night i...

We closed on the house on Sir Richard Drive on Friday.  We thought it wasn't going to happen because HUD was last getting their paperwork in. We signed our portion in the morning and then at 4:45 in the afternoon we got the call that everything was good to go and we could go start working on the house. We came up with Aaron's cousin-in-law, Matt and made a list of stuff to get to start work on Saturday morning. We then went and had some yummy Mike's BBQ for dinner. Saturday we started at 9 a.m. We ripped out carpet and padding, ripped out linoleum, did clean up and painted all the floors with kilz to get rid of the cat pee odor. We also primered walls with odor killing primer. On Sunday we painted all day long. I hate painting so that was they day I just about lost my mind. On Monday we finished up painting (touch ups and painted the laundry area) and worked on the bathrooms and replacing faucets, cleaning, etc. We decided to take out the shower in the master bath and repl...

We continued to work on Aaron's office. He wanted a mini fridge and a microwave so we got that at Wal-Mart. I am being the decorator for his office. HA HA. We are going for a Western theme. We bought a beautiful print of Pike's Peak by a local artist on Sunday. They had and art show at the fossil beds, so we went out again and saw that and bought a print for the office. It supported the fossil beds. They did all of the dirt work end of last week and beginning of this week. They backfilled all the dirt in around the foundation. You can see in this picture that they ran into the corner of the garage and cracked it. They tried to reform it but did a really bad job. It has a major crack. The guys who tried to fix it were the guys that broke it with the skidster, not the builders, so Aaron wrote to them and they came out and checked it today. They said we will have to reform that corner. I think it can be done but they need to talk to the engineer about it so pretty signific...

Well the last week has been the classic cliche of hurry up and wait. Maddy is really enjoying her Sunday school. Above is her worksheet from last week. I love the circled 10 with the arrow pointing up the scale. After church we went out to the fossil beds. Maddy had been asking to eat at McD's for quite a while. She saw the commercials when we watched the olympics that the chicken nuggets are now free of artificial flavors, colors and preservatives and are made with "real" chicken. I still have my doubts about some of these claims but we did let her try them. No ill effects after, so guess they were ok. They used to make her sick as a dog. While we were eating, this Stellar Jay came to visit. I could only get pics of his silhouette. The lighting was just not right where we were sitting. He was a very pretty bird and pretty friendly. The girls also loved a chipmunk that came to check out the scraps they were dropping. After lunch, we went and got Maddy a Jr...