July 2006

This has been a pretty crazy month. We started out with a week's vacation visiting family and some friends in the Indiana/Chicago area. When we returned Mike worked a bit on the upstairs bedrooms prepping them for drywall by adding in some scabs along the top and bottom of the stud walls. Then, Dan brought over his tractor with a front loader and a backhoe so the boys worked on making our pond larger, much larger and ripping out the second bridge. Mike has spent some time prepping for the classes he'll be teaching this fall and continued to work on scabbing the studs in the front bedrooms. Then we took a short trip up to Ann Arbor, Michigan for the Brew Festival...surely you didn't think we'd miss that! :) The last main task of the month was putting down new boards on the bridge.

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While we were back in Inidana visiting family, three inches of rain fell in one day flooding some of our front yard.

My first sunflower bloomed just around the time we noticed we had a groundhog visiting the garden.

I guess I must have grown a little tired of taking pictures. I have no photos of the sistering and scabbing Mike finished in the spare bedroom. He managed to get it all wired and insulated before I bought new batteries for the camera. Our next camera will have to have a rechargable battery pack. It's amazing how many batteries I have wasted!

Here's the den floor again. This is actually after at least 3 coats of poly. I guess the picture I had up for last month was actually of a merely stained floor with no poly.

Here it is at the beginning. Dan is operating his tractor and clearing out a lot of clay.

Mike takes control and works the backhoe.

Liz get's detailed instructions on how to use the tractor. Way to go Liz!

Our sad bridge. It had many layers of solid 3" oak planks and still managed to rot in our dank woods. Imagine that!

Dan's at the controls ripping up the bridge while Mike hauls the heavy, saturated boards off to the woods.

In a matter of hours, the guys ripped nearly all of the boards out with Dan's fancy tractor! That would have taken us months of hard labor! Thanks Dan!

Bare bones...the beams lie naked waiting for the covering. :) Mike and Dan decided to use a torch to rip off the two outside I-beams that served no real purpose, here are the final four beams.

Get 'r done! Mike covered the I-beams with pressure treated 2x6's and then screwed the 2x12's to the studs. The last few boards were actually put on in the month of August so you'll just have to wait for photos of the final bridge.

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