Updates

I'm back! It's been a long time, but we've been on vacation. Or, rather, we were supposed to be on vacation, but we spent the two weeks working on the house instead. I wouldn't exactly say that it's been relaxing, but then again, our vacations rarely are. 

We started out by visiting a few nurseries and acquiring some greenery. Once again, the trailer came in handy, as we hauled home our loot.

Trailer full of plants

Here are the kids pillaging our new blueberry bushes. Not sure if it's their voracious appetites or Brock's and my black thumbs, but these bushes haven't yielded much fruit since this picture was taken.

Kids and blueberry bushes

We planted a few trees...

Maple and Hemlock trees along the driveway

Natchez Crepe Myrtles on the side of the house

and a few shrubs:

Coastal Leucothoe in front of the house 

Finally, a few items for our rain garden. There's a story here, but I'll save it for another time.

Rain garden plants

I guess I forgot to take a picture of all of it together. As you can probably tell, it's still a bit sparse, but we're taking a break as we evaluate our ability to keep this stuff alive. Oh, and speaking of sparse, maybe you noticed our grass in the above pictures? It's trying.

Moving inside...here's our loft fence, which is still not complete, but kid-proof, anyway. We continued with the goat fence theme, and used up some extra wood that was left over from our steel shipments last summer.

Loft fence

With limited closet shelving there was only so much that we could unpack (as an example, we had to resort to stacking food on a book shelf in the pantry), so last weekend we hauled the trailer down to Brock's dad's house to pick up some leftover closet pieces that he generously donated from his closet-design business. Yesterday Brock finished the master bedroom closet, and we've started to move in:

Closet shelves and drawers

More closet shelves and drawers

The remaining closet shelves are currently decorating our living room floor, but will hopefully turn into pantry and linen closet shelves shortly. 

More closet pieces to assemble

Now for Brock's biggest project over the last week or so: connecting the hot water heater to the floor heating system Since I don't really understand what's going on here (other than that I'm going to have warm feet in the winter), I'm not going to try to explain it, but Brock would be happy to, if you ask him. In the meantime, you can just look at all of the buttons and knobs and gauges and tubing, and be impressed like I am. 

We had our final plumbing inspection late this morning. Technically we failed, due to a missing piece of paperwork from Sam the excavator, but Brock and Mark took some measurements and filled out a form which might have taken care of it. Mark went by the county this afternoon to drop off the paperwork, which was going to hopefully keep us from having to be re-inspected, but I'll have to update you when I find out the result of all of that.

Tomorrow the glass for our shower is supposedly going to be installed (forgot to mention that when they brought it by two weeks ago, it wasn't cut right, so they had to re-order it). We're also hoping to have our final inspection, which would grant us our Use and Occupancy Permit. That's right, we're still squatters, but maybe not for long.