Getting work done

Just to show that it's not all heavy stuff around here, we (read "Matt") have been getting some work done on the house these last two days.

"Stop! Don't take my picture!"

We decided to push off renting the lift with two days of rain (and thus mud) forecast, and now plan to pick that up on Monday. With the rain (and mud) Matt moved inside for a while. We are so grateful that so many of the supplies have already been purchased and are just laying around here waiting to be used.

On Wednesday, Matt was primarily upstairs in what will be his mom's rooms. He started cutting holes for plumbing going down...

...and vent pipes going up.

While the girls were busy dropping bits of foam down the hole, the boys were busy stapling the plastic things that keep the insulation out of the venting space for the roof. (I'm sure there's a short name for that!) Owen was particularly helpful with this job because it's super easy for that monkey to crawl around in the rafter spaces, so he could quickly and easily do what it would have been much more cumbersome for Matt to do.

Today was a good day as well. For starters, the big huge severe storms complete with damaging winds and hail ended up being nothing more than some wind and fat rain drops and distant thunder, and was all over in about 20 minutes. Not an issue at all. And gradually over the day the sun came out, so maybe tomorrow will even be an okay day to work on the outside again.

Matt's morning was spent taking random extra supplies back to Menards, ending up with over $300 in credits and refunds. Not too bad! I'm starting to think that we might get our driveway, garage, and basement back someday after all!

In the afternoon he busied himself with prepping the main level windows for foaming in and screwing in the fasteners for the upper level radiant tubing (because we have a wood floor and not concrete on that upper level, the radiant goes under the subfloor instead of on top of it. Not quite as efficient, but I told him way back that I couldn't handle concrete floors in bedrooms. Living spaces was fine. Bedrooms were not.) The kids enjoyed helping by passing him the little clips and riding along on his rolling stand. (At least until their bickering increased to the point that it was more helpful for them to go inside, where they proceeded to play beautifully together for the rest of the day. Who knows.)