One of the things that has been giving us some trouble is the road into the property. Muddy, slippery… I had to use four wheel drive to get up to the cottage. But now, with the help of my buddy Dick (and a few thousand dollars worth of gravel!) we have a great driveway. Not only can Emily now get all the way up to the house in her cute orange car, but our other friends (read: laborers) can as well! It was quite a bit of work. Dick had to take out a few trees, and limb up many others, so he could get his giant dumptruck full of gravel down the road. Who knew that a dumptruck was 30 feet tall when the dumper was all the way up?
In other news, we have finally replaced all of the rotten floor joists. Now we can start looking onto replacing the rotten subfloor. See how you can see daylight out the wall below the windows? We have to remove some of the siding to attach temporary lifting beams to the wall, so we can jack the whole building a few inches off of the foundation to get at the rotten subfloor. If it sounds stressful, it is. Poco a poco (little by little) they say in Guatemala.
And, as expected, there is some rotting in the sill plate of the wall too. We saw this extremely deteriorated area when we pulled off the siding. We’ll have to replace all of that framing, and while we’re in there, we’ll be replacing the rotten insulation too. Moral of the story: install proper flashing when you stick a deck onto your house. Or, better yet, let the deck float clear entirely.
Sleep, one of our friends who was helping this weekend, pointed out that I’d need to get some more of the siding off to get at the bottom part of the west wall… meaning, even more of the deck had to be destroyed. Luckily, that is fun work that’s appropriate for a gaggle of friends hanging out on a sunday afternoon. Here we see destruction in progress.
In other news, this week is seed ordering. The process of picking what we want isn’t all that hard, but going through 6 different catalogs to find the best deals and varieties is laborious at best. If you have something you’d like to see us grow, let us know soon. We’re mostly sticking with what we did last year, due to the insanity with trying to get a new house built, but there is room for a little experimentation.
