The bathroom is growing!

A tour in photos of how the work has been progressing...

May 30:

The big lilacs are down, and we're getting ready for tomorrow's excavation.

Matt and I measuring off the corner of the existing house to get the extents of the excavation staked in.

Meanwhile...Owen is trimming back the mock orange bush to make room for the mini-excavator to get around the garage to the back of the house.

Rinnah and Evania helped by dragging all of the branches he cut off over to a pile near the fire pit to be burned up at a later time.

Matt got to hand dig the northeast corner because when the electric company marked the line, they showed it cutting right across where we were going to excavate. Hmmmm. That didn't jive with what was on our survey from a few years ago (only moderately reliable), and our memory of how the line was originally dug based on where the HUGE lilacs were, so we went down with a shovel, carefully, hoping that we wouldn't have to have electrical work done before we could excavate. The photo on the right below shows the line. There is j-u-s-t enough slack that we'll be able to ease the line around the corner of the foundation wall.

May 31st:

Today's supposed to be excavation day...but...it gets pushed off one more day. Matt uses the time to get the drain tile roughly laid out, ready to go down, with the sump basket, once the hole is dug.

June 1:

Oooh! There's a trailer with an excavator in front of our house!

Bobbi's bed is the best place to sit to watch him get to work.

Looking out the living room window also gives a decent view...if you're as tall as Daddy is. By lunch time, the crawl space is dug and filled with gravel.

The rest of that day was also quite full. They had started talking that morning about sending Mira home from her last hospital stay, but with extra equipment. Matt got home from the hospital where he was with her just in time for he and I to leave with Bobbi for her appointment with her neurosurgeon to review the results of the gait lab. I'm realizing that I have not yet shared what we learned at that visit!! Hopefully I'll get to that yet. Anyway, as we were finishing up with the meeting and walking out to the van to head home, we got a call from Mira's nurse saying they were planning to discharge her and could we be there at 4pm to meet with the medical supply representative who would teach us how to use her new equipment. Um, sure. That gave us *just* enough time to drive from Gillette's south metro office where we currently were with Bobbi, past our house to drop me and Bobbi off, and for Matt to then continue north to the main campus where Mira was. Busy day.

June 3:

A perfect afternoon to sit in the shade and drop gravel into the sump basket at the bottom of a hole. Daddy took the time to start dropping some lumber into the hole as well to begin the work of putting together the foundation.

June 5:

A wood foundation wall saves money on materials (treated lumber is less expensive than concrete), AND, more importantly, is something Matt can do on his own, thus saving money on labor! Since it's a very small space, wood footings were also appropriate, unlike the big addition from a few years ago when we had concrete footings poured, and built the wood foundation walls on top of that.

June 7:

Getting the ledger onto the existing rim for hanging the new floor joists.

June 10:

Surveying the work. Matt's dad's cousin, Ray, who grew up in the house next door to the one we live in now (which is where Matt's dad grew up) worked in the excavation/earth moving industry for years, and we joke that he's got an internal radar for big holes in the ground. 😊 More importantly, as we're approaching the six year anniversary of Matt's dad's death, Ray is someone Matt really enjoys sharing these sorts of things with because he *can't* share them with his own Dad anymore.

June 11:

Back to work. Daddy's framing up the floor of the crawl space and Reuben's working on filling up the sump basket with gravel. Two happy boys.

June 14:

A friend from church who does framing (and other construction work - we paid him to do all of the framing on the house addition a few years ago) agreed to work with Matt for a few days to get the bigger stuff done. He's also got the benefit of lots of experience. Matt can absolutely DO the framing, but Mike's got all the tricks of how to do it faster and straighter all figured out. Here they are framing up the main floor structure.

By the end of the day, this is what it looked like! This has got to be the best part of construction - the whole skeleton is there all in one day!

From the inside, you can see the back corner where the recess for the flush-entry shower pan will sit.

June 21:

Mike came back again, and today they got the plywood sheathing on the exterior and framed the ceiling/roof structure.

A fun action shot.

June 23:

Matt took a few shots of how the junction with the existing house turned out. This is always the "exciting" part, when things are half finished, and now the actual finished house is subject to things like...rain.

All neat and tidy, and the hole for the scupper to drain the flat roof is cut and framed out, too.

Matt spent 14.5 hours out there working on this day! Most of the work was really a one-man job (because of ladders/access/etc), but there were a few points along the day when he called Owen back home to hold stuff...because, you see...he was racing against the threat of rain on Sunday.

Tyvek housewrap to keep water off the untreated plywood...and no photo yet, but he was out there until the two-days-past-the-solstice sun finally went down putting some basic waterproofing membrane onto the roof to protect it (and the existing house!) from water until the flat roof contractor can get out to measure and then back to install the real flat roof membrane.

Sunday, June 24:

It rained.

Matt had gotten everything done the day before except the tyvek over the parapet. After the short burst of rain on the way home from church, he popped back up there to tack down the last bit over the parapet. Good thing, too. That roof is now holding up to 1.5 inches of standing water. (The hole for the scupper is sized for after the rigid insulation is put down under the final roofing membrane, so we've got a shallow swimming pool up there!)

Standing water. A bad dream waiting to happen for any home owner! (I was reminded of this post: Rain, rain... from our last construction project, and in re-reading it, see that I did NOT write down Matt's thoughts upon waking in the night and looking down from our bedroom window at that "swimming pool." "Maybe we should just call the excavator back and have him just push it all back into the hole and we'll forget we ever started anything!!")

BUT, despite the wading pool up there, there are only four leaky spots, and all at junctions that do not surprise Matt considering the state of things, so we're not going to think too much about it.

The rest of that day was spent monitoring Mira, who was rapidly going downhill, running Owen and Bobbi to a graduation open house for someone at church, running to Menards to get a pump to put into the sump basket, and then Matt getting a quick shower after that so he was clean to take Mira down to the ER to be admitted to Gillette.

June 25:

Matt, despite a good solid eight hours of (interrupted) sleep after Mira's 2am transfer to the ward at Gillette, was exhausted upon getting home Monday evening. There wasn't quite enough time for him to take a nap before supper, so I suggested he just spend a few minutes outside with Reuben by his fountain while I finished getting the food ready.

When I went to call them in, this is what I found:

I think my favorite detail is the Superman* shirt. 😏 Even Superman gets tired after pushing hard all week!! He informed me that he intentionally had his leg over Reuben's so if Reuben tried to get up and wander away he would notice.

That gets you pretty much up to date! The last two days have been mostly Matt catching up on his "real" work (the stuff he gets paid for) on his computer while hanging out at the hospital with Mira.

*Bobbi's gift to Dad for Father's Day last year. She started calling him Superman soon after she got home because of how often he scoops her up and carries her where she needs to go.