When Mom's away...

...Dad will play, which at our house involves a tool belt and some noise!

Leah and I and a few friends took 22 kids (including Reuben) on an all day field trip to Lake Superior, leaving Matt home again with no (major) interruptions, and look what he got done!

The east side of the front porch stairs now has the white skirt boards!

And the original house now has its siding reinstalled! He'd gotten the first seven rows or so on first thing in the spring, and then there it sat until yesterday!

And with that, I think I'm finally up to date! After six months of trying to post current progress and fill in the gaps since construction started in earnest last summer, I *think* I'm finally caught up, and perhaps can now spend the time I get to invest on things like this blog on current updates, which means maybe I can stay on top of things better! (? Maybe. We'll see.)

All my babies...and a couple more

 Yesterday I got a most precious gift. ALL TEN of my children were at church with us! It's a rare occurrence to have *everybody* together anywhere. Even at Christmas we're not always guaranteed that no one will be in the hospital! 😁 But somehow, this happened! Our good friend Scotty brought his camera along and we took the opportunity to get some nice pictures of everyone.

And *everyone* everyone. Owen is back from Montana! Earlier than he'd expected. We're super happy to have him back. And he brought back with him Sophie, whom he met while working at the ranch. We're looking forward to getting to know her better, too.

And Bobbi is back with us again - not here because of a picture, but here because she wanted to come along to church for the first time since February.

And Gavin, who's always at church anyway, but it's been such a joy to have him with us at church. That's a beautiful story.

The funny thing is that Matt and I look at this photo, and he said to me, "It doesn't even seem like that many people!" Not a day goes by that he and I aren't so very grateful that God's plan for our family was bigger than ours was! He wanted two. I wanted a "big" family - three kids. Good thing we were both wrong! 

~~~

Ha ha - I was re-reading this and realized I should share this photo, too. Above is the pretty one. THIS one is the one we enlarged and have framed on the wall in the dining room! 😂 

(Matt and I missed the command to make a funny face, which is why we're serenely smiling amidst the fun around us! But *THIS* is our family!)

Garage doors

 The installation ended up getting pushed back a week after one of the installers called in sick, but nevertheless, here we are now with garage doors!

In progress:

only a few panels in...

And finished!!

As the workers left, Matt mentioned how exciting it was to be able to close the garage doors as it had been a long time. The man looked at him kind of funny, thinking, well, that's kind of how construction goes, but what *Matt* was thinking is how it's been YEARS since we've been able to close the garage doors because the old garage (with no foundation) had been slowly sinking into the ground at the southeast corner to the point where it was so out of plumb that it was physically impossible to close the doors!

Good thing we don't put our trust in locks to keep us safe. :) Every single thing that does or does not come our way is in the hands of our God who controls the minutest details. 

But it does look prettier with the doors closed. :)

Exterior landscaping

 Matt and I hate the idea of paying money to remove dirt, so with all of our construction projects, we've found ways to keep our excavation soil on our property. The main way we're doing that on this one is raising the grade in the side/east yard, which prior to the project sloped down from a high ridge on the east side of the yard (with a steep slope down to the street on the east - a wild-growing hillside) gradually toward the garage and down the driveway to the street on the front/south side. Not only will doing this let us keep the soil on site, but it also should reduce the amount of water run-off down the driveway. Bringing the foundation walls up on the north and east of the garage lets us nestle the building itself down into the ground by raising the level of the soil all around it. I love how it looks (makes it not quite so big feeling when we're out in the yard) and I also, as a gardener, love the transitional zone it creates as you leave the driveway and step up to "enter" the garden. But to accomplish that, there's one location where we needed a retaining wall. All of the other retaining walls we've put in around the yard over the years have been done with rock we had on site. This one, because we needed steps for access as this is a main thoroughfare in the yard (to get to the chickens, the veggie garden, the clothesline, the shed), we decided to do with purchased stone.

The stones we purchased were BIG. (The price tag on those was just much prettier than some of the other options!)

And while some of them we were able to cut to size and maneuver into place, those three steps were big. Really Big. Too big for me and Matt and Leah to move. And Owen's still in Montana. And Krassi's got some serious biceps (really, he does!!) but not a lot of bulk (he still weighs under 100 pounds at 21 years old) or real coordination.

But, thankfully, we had help. 😁

As you may have noticed in a handful of pictures since June, Gavin's been around. A lot. 😊 And it's a very good thing. (And he's not coming here to hang out with Owen like he did when he was a kid!) AND, as an added bonus, he's good at lifting heavy things. (If you don't remember, look back at that BIG laminate beam he helped with last fall!)

First we think. (I did a calculation later in the day, and a piece of Kasota stone the size of each one of those steps weighs about 350 pounds.)

Then Leah and I put on our "working hard" faces while Matt and Gavin move the first step off the pile down onto a pallet.

Then we think some more.

And then we* slide it off the pallet and into place.
*We being Gavin and Matt. Leah is supervising while I photograph.

While I was at the Fair...

One of the best parts about being away from home is coming back and discovering what Matt has managed to get done while I was gone (in addition to keeping everyone left behind at home alive and [mostly] happy!)

Yesterday I was at the State Fair ALL day, either dropping kids off for project judging (4H is a big deal in our family), or there myself with a whole crew of other kids from church who are also in our club. I brought Reuben along because he enjoys those sorts of outings (Bobbi has come in past years, but didn't want to this time around) and because he's the hardest one to keep tabs on at home.

This is what happened while I was away:

Trim around the garage door openings! Because the doors are scheduled to be installed later this week! (Garage door installation was another item Matt decided he was not going to do by himself, in particular because the door for Thunder's stall is a pretty hefty door.)

And the white skirt boards at the base of the stairs...on the front side. :) The east facing side isn't done yet. But at least now from the front elevation, it looks very pretty.

 See: not so pretty around the corner yet!

What this old lady does for fun

 So, when your Grandma decides, for her birthday, to give each of her grandchildren a generous monetary gift (so she can have the fun of reading the various thank you notes!), what do you decide to do with it? Well, I can tell you what *I* did! "Hey, Matt - do you think we could hire Korey and Kelley to sheetrock the entry and mudroom??" Oh yeah. But, really, I couldn't think of anything more fun than a pile of sheetrock in the driveway...

...that slowly (well, not that slowly!) turns into sheetrock on the walls and ceilings! We told them the budget we had to work with, and they were able to not only do the mudroom and entry, but also the entire ramp and garage. Matt will still need to do the taping, but they got an incredible amount of work done in a very short amount of time!

Up on stilts to easily get the ceiling over Thunder's stall

Working down the sloping ceiling over the small stall and onto the walls at the back. Notice that the BIG beam (the installation of which is still my favorite moment of the entire construction process!) is still visible. Sadly, it needs to be covered up for fireproofing reasons.

The little access hatch into the storage space above the big garage stall

The ramp (and bike storage on the other side of the half-wall)

And the interior spaces - now have walls! Not just insulation with vapor barrier/plastic stapled over it! That means that even if Matt doesn't have time to tape and mud and paint, we can still put up hooks for coats for the winter! Amazing!

And the view from the kitchen into the front entry. Still definitely under construction, but MUCH more inviting than it was (and I'll be able to get coat hooks up for guests, too, before coat season is in full swing!)

This was such a beautiful gift - thank you to Grandma, and thank you to the God who knows how to bring these little smiles to his children at just the right time.

A little bit more siding

Look. Now there's a little bit more siding on the back (north) side of the garage! If you look *really* closely, you can see Bobbi's cat climbing the shorter ladder on the left! You can also notice that the bathroom addition (just to the right of the garage/entry addition) still only has the wood slats on one band around the windows. We now actually *have* all of the wood to finish the bathroom as well as where we're using it on the mud/entry/ramp portion of the garage addition, but having it and installing it are two different things. Maybe next spring???

Today is also a big day as it marks 25 years of marriage for me and Matt. :) It's been a busy 25 years! As many of you may know, we try to get a photo of our whole family on the Sunday closest to our anniversary, but this year wasn't good for that. First of all, Gloria left for a week of camp this week, so she was not around. Secondly, Bobbi hasn't been coming with us to church at all since February and wouldn't be up to coming just so we can have her in a photo. Thirdly, Owen unexpectedly came home a few weeks ago from a trip to visit two of his friends who are working on a very up-scale ranch in Montana for the summer, and announced he'd gotten a job there himself (work was slow here, and he had his boss's blessing to take a few months off to take the ranch job through the end of October) and he was leaving in six days to start work! So he wasn't here, either. And the Sunday *after* our anniversary we'll still be missing Owen and Bobbi, and *Rinnah* will be gone. We've often had family photos that are missing one of the kids (because they're still in Bulgaria, like this one):

Thirteen year anniversary in 2013 

or because one's in the hospital like in this one:

Bulgarian Christmas party, 2017

or because one just wandered off, like in this one that I posted at Christmas years ago!

Christmas 2018

...but missing THREE children is just not okay. So no photo this year.

It makes the family photo we got back at Leah's graduation that much more special!

And here's another photo we took on her graduation day that is also very precious to me. Two things I want to point out. First of all, Baby was with us in this photo. It is very dear to me to have a family photo that captured that brief window of time when we had eleven. Second of all, this one has a friend in it who you may recognize from construction photos last fall...