Day 9

Today they worked on the south wall. Doesn't the front of the house look twice as long now?

Here's the new front corner close up. You can see the small bathroom window and the larger window in the master bedroom.

If everything goes as planned, we'll soon be in our comfy bed looking out the bedroom French door at our new bass fishing pond when we wake up in the morning.

Here's an inside look at the progress looking across the house from the kitchen.

Starting tonight, we're supposed to have flooding rains until Saturday so the next update may be on Monday. This evening we already had a river flowing down the road at Sage's house. However, it should be clear and dry all next week so expect to see the second floor soon.

Day 8

Today they finished topping off the 13th course of logs for three walls and started to put up the last side for the master bedroom and the master bath.

Tomorrow they should finish this last side up to course 13. Then they start putting up the second floor.

Day 7

Today they topped off the first floor (13 courses of logs) on three sides. The fourth side is still open so they can move the long logs around for the top.

Next they'll close off the last side, put in the floor for the second story and start putting up the roof and the second floor.

Day 6

Today they worked on the kitchen and the dining room walls.

How do you like the pastoral views from the dining room and the kitchen windows?

We also got our temporary pole for the electricity. They said they will add the electricity in about a week.

Day 5

Day 5 worked on the front porch wall.

Here you can see the front door, the window to the music room, the window to the mud room and the door to the mud room. The first view is from the front porch, the second from inside the music room and the third looking from the dining room/kitchen.

The house is looking bigger all the time.

Day 4

Day four moved to the dining room and kitchen.

Here's a closer view.

The new skill we watched is putting in the dowels where the logs meet in a long stretch so air doesn't leak through. You can see the drilling, glueing, and pounding sequence below.

Here is how they put in the frame where the dining room window goes. What do you think about the view? It give a new meaning to "picture window."

Here's where the door to the mud room will be.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter from Florida!

The titles on the two pages from the Children's Songbook are "Did Jesus really live again?" and "He died that we might live again." The display is complements of Easter Bunny Sage.

For Diana

Diana, come visit us from Idaho in April and you'll feel right at home surrounded by potato fields--Florida potatoes, of course.

It's getting close to harvest time. They're already harvesting the cabbages.

Worker bees.

Of course, we've had lots of worker bees visit these last two months hoping to help out building our log cabin. Too bad the building is behind schedule so instead of lots of work, they had lots of food and fun. See who you can identify in the pictures.

Getting Electricity

You might remember last February when we hurried to dig a 3 foot deep trench for our underground power line so we wouldn't have to cut down a beautiful big tree and clear a twenty foot wide easement through the trees that form our natural privacy fence.

Two months later Florida Power and Light said they were ready to bring the power onto our property. We quickly dug our new trench from where the transformer will be to the house. Doesn't Oliver have a great way to check if it is exactly two feet deep?

The next day, subcontractors for FPL appeared to bore under the road and our trees to connect to the electrical conduit we had buried two months earlier. First they bored from our new telephone pole under the road, our drainage ditch, and our trees to where our buried conduit ended.

Then they pulled the tube for the electrical line back to the other side.

The following week, another set of subcontractors came to connect their newly bored conduit to the one we had buried months earlier, use high pressure to send a weight through the newly connected conduit under the trees and the road to the power pole and then pull back the electrical line. They then pounded in a 30 foot copper ground wire and went home.

The next day the same crew brought the slab for the transformer and the transformer and another crew attached the electrical wires and powered everything up at the pole on the street.

The transformer is now live with electricity. Now we have to wait for another crew to put in a temporary pole so the workers can use the electricity rather than our generator to build our house.