This Is Our Joy!!!: 3/52 The Edition

In March of 2011, We began one of the craziest adventures of our life..... We started adding an addition onto the back of our house. Someday's we look at it as an amazing achievement, and others we see it as the biggest mistake of our lives, but it is now almost completed! We have done all of the work ourselves, and with lots of help from family, which has saved us a TON of money, but it has also included Tyler basically working a second job, We have put a lot of time and a lot of sweat into it, but it has turned our house into our dream home and I can't wait to finally be able to move into it. Hopefully, within the next couple of months, we will be completed and living in it.

The hole dug (courtesy of Ty with a backhoe) and the foundation poured (courtesy of Ty, Me, my Dad, and Ty's brother Nathan.)

Ty and Brock playing on the skid steer while they were back filling the basement. Brocky fell asleep just a couple of minutes into his ride.

And then all of the framing commenced.....

We had to tear off the roof to put the new roof on, so we waited for what was supposed to be a gorgeous weekend, invited a bunch of people to come and help, and began the process of building the new roof. We had to cut out a four foot wide section at the peak of the roof that extended the length of the roof, and a 1 foot wide section at the bottom of the roof at the back eve in order to tie the new roof and the back wall of the addition into the existing part of the house. Things went well on Friday and Saturday and we were cruising, but Saturday night it looked like we might have a pretty good storm coming in, and our roof was still completely open, so we decided that we would have to get up bright and early Sunday morning and try and get us covered. Sunday morning we woke up to a cold and overcast day, and you could smell rain in the air. So, we called as many people as we could and got to work trying to seal in the roof, but at about 10, the rain came..... and it was a monsoon! Best rainfall we received all year, and it came down hard.... for hours. We were drenched! We went through two or three pairs of clothes each, and every coat and jacket we owned was worn that day, and drenched. I kept the dryer going all day trying to have warm dry clothes for people to change into. We were miserable! Then, it began to rain inside of the house! We had 14 buckets, bowl's, pans, and trash cans placed through the house, all of which were dumped numerous times! Then, if things couldn't have gotten any worse, they did...... Our lights started to spark. We had to turn off the main power to the house, so we had to run an electrical cord over the fence and plug it in at the Beaver's house next door so that we could continue working. We had to constantly be sweeping pools of water off of the floor in the addition, and were constantly pumping the water out of the basement. I have no idea how much rain we got that day, but i know it was a lot, and enough to have a lake in our back yard, which the boy's had to trudge through to get lumber off of trailers to continue the project. Looking back now, it is an amazing memory, but when it was happening, all we could think about was how cold and miserable we were.

The Damage:

The next week, we continued on with the rest of the roof. We had to tear off all of the old sheeting because it was rotten. You would step in places and it would shatter beneath you. I thought I was going to fall through numerous times.

Ty and I spent two days roofing the roof. Ty's Dad, my Dad, Fielding, and Sean all came over and helped for a little bit. It was a lot of hard work, but I love it. I am so glad we decided against doing tin! We ended up being 1/2 a bundle shy and had to order more in to finish the that half of the last row. That was REALLY frustrating!

We got all of the windows in, the house wrap on, and started on the siding. We only got the back side on before it got too cold. The siding is brittle in the cold so we have to wait for it to get back up above 45 degrees before we can continue with it.