Previously, I posted this picture of Max and me in the hole I dug for the sewer line work.

I thought that the line was going to be burst in place and there would be no extra digging required. Boy, was I wrong. Below is the picture of what I came home to on Monday evening.

Monday Night

By Tuesday the company had completed the work and refilled in the trench (mostly). They left a very tall stand pipe for me to cut down to size.

Tuesday Night

The kids and I spent some time listening to the water flow through the pipe. One would run in the house and flush the toilet and then run outside to listen. Then we discovered that we could look into the pipe with a flashlight. Tomorrow night, we will *watch* the contents of a toilet flush move through the sewer line. I bet you all can’t wait for the pictures from that adventure!!

We are trying to get all the windows in so that we can get the siding on the house so that we can get the roof covered. To that end, we are now in week 3 of putting in windows. Grandpa Seal has been helping us these past 2 weekends, so I have been pulling stucco off the house while he and Poppa put in windows. Mark was here this recent weekend after a few weeks off for hand surgery. He helped me out with some rough stucco.

Taking off the stucco

GPa Seal peeking out of the window

Replacing the Front Window

YaYa woking on getting the window sill clean

North Close up

North West view

West view

South view

South East view

Notice how shiny all those windows look? Many thanks to YaYa for her cleaning of the windows. On Friday, I saw some guys working in the alley behind our house on the sewer lines. I asked one of the guys, in nicer clothes, what was being worked on and they said that they are going to replace the whole sewer line that runs down the middle of the alley. Since they were going to be in the area working I asked if they could replace the line from my house to the main line. (It is currently old tar paper and runs under the slab of my garage.) We worked out a deal that they would replace the line (in-line burst method) and I needed to expose the line where it comes out of the ground. So, Sunday afternoon was spent digging a hole. It ended up being about 3 feet down. Max is standing on the pipe.

In a sewer line hole

On Thursday afternoon, Max was eating a burger and his tooth finally fell out.

Missing tooth

Pop and I were alone this weekend, as Mark had surgery on his hand on Thursday. We worked on getting some windows in place and putting up more plywood. The easy plywood has all been put up, so now the plywood attaching is difficult (sometimes scary).

Up high on shaky scaffolding

(building the scaffolding was a mini project unto itself for me and Pop, something Kevin would have probably knocked out in 2.5 minutes) The tarps are almost off. I say that because the super heavy canvas tarps are still wadded up on the roof, but not covering anything. They are just so heavy I’ll wait and move them later. Since the tarps are not hiding the loft balcony anymore, I took a panorama shot of the south east side of the house. You can tell I took the pictures from right to left because I have fewer ‘missing’ areas on the right (east) side. Click on the picture below to bring up the full sized image (about 870k download).

South East Panorama

Also, last week Pop worked on the corbels on the west side and I finished up the plywood on that side as well.

West Side

Here is a panorama shot I made while standing on the roof rack of Pop’s truck. Click the picture to get the full sized image.

It is a big image, so open your browser all the way up and zoom out to see the whole thing.

The skeleton of the frame is complete. There are just a few (relatively few) pieces of plywood left to hang. Kevin was here on Saturday and kept us all working like fiends.