A veranda in the making!

July 30-August 1, 2010

With the wonderful help (AGAIN) of our wonderful son, Chris, we installed the front door, two lake-side windows and the french doors onto the porch.

Each window was several hundred pounds!

In order to do this, of course, we had to get them from our porch at home onto the trailer and up Interstate 94 safely. No easy undertaking!

 Then the trailer was unloaded and each window put into its approximate location for installation.

This WAS our view of the lake from the inside. No, it's not snowing...

The wall opened up and the first window and SUMMER poured in. Woohoo!

Doug prepped the front door opening.

We're already welcoming you in!

We got the final pieces of roof decking in place on the stoop.

We also added a few feet to the concrete piers, then placed the corner posts and built the stoop frame. The next step here is to install the cedar decking.

Note the mess!





Now, look again!

We love our fun red front door with leaded glass and a side light!

We got everything moved inside and cleaned up since Ivan will be coming this next week to do the final grade. This will raise the elevation on this side several inches. The lake side will need to be raised several feet to bring the soil up to the appropriate level. We are really looking forward to having things leveled out.

Last weekend, we arrived to find that our mound septic system had been installed. It's HUGE; much larger than we thought it would be. We'll make it work though.

Before the weeds take over this area too, we added some grass seeds. Here's Sandy raking the seeds into the soil. Maddie is working diligently to unearth a pocket gopher who's doing his best to move our mound elsewhere. Maddie stuck her head in the hole up to her neck. Let's hope she doesn't meet the fella face-to face as an uninvited guest!


Special note...this weekend was the first time EVER that we arrived to find absolutely no standing water in the basement! Praise God!