The first snow....

Yeah, so the forecast was for about 1-2".... and what did we get?

Thats right, 1-2 FEET.

Fortunately, we got the remainder of the decking down the morning of Thanksgiving with at least enough screws to get it spaced right. Still have a lot more to do on the posts and railings as well as the trim but at least its stable and we don't have to worry about stepping into a big pile of snow and dropping to the ground.

Halloween 2008

We took the kids to downtown Monument for Trick or Treating.  Carson was getting into his Bamm-Bamm Rubble costume while Cassidy strikes a pose as Daphne from Scooby Doo.  Lhianna was trying to be scary as a jack-o-lantern.

New arrivals and deck work begins...

Well the last couple of weekends were busy and marked with a few notable events.  

Last weekend Scott's folks came over and we took the trek up to Pikes Peak via the cog railroad - quite the experience and definitely something everyone sh

ould do a

t least once.  Some beautiful scenary but also a good foreshadowing to the days ahead with a chilly wind.  The peaks in the distance on the right are the San Juans and on the left is Mt. Wheeler (the highest point in NM).

We started decking the deck and are about 3/4 done with the

 decking for the front stairs with a lot of help from some friends.  One of whom is rather goal oriented... and didn't want to stop in spite of darkness.  :-D

The last (but more notable) event was the arrival of a couple of new furry friends.  We adopted a dog (Rocky) and a cat (Harley) this weekend - they're pretty much responding as expected.  The dog won't leave Jauna's side and appears to want to get back in the car and go home and the cat hasn't left (at least that we've seen) the underside of our bed.  

Decking the halls...

Had to throw in a few pictures from our trip over Boreas Pass between Breckenridge and Como (just north of 285 west of Bailey).  Beautiful trip over the pass and a great time in Breck.  We made it up a few weeks later for a good (albeit rainy) time catching some bluegrass at Yarmony Grass held at Copper Mtn Aug 16th (Railroad Earth was the headliner).

The old deck is now completely down and the new one is mostly up - probably 80% done.  The contractor still has to finish framing the stair platform and 

all of the stair stringers and then it will be turned over to your's truly to finish the decking and the railings.   One pretty shocking picture of the dry rot on one of the triples that was supporting it.

Here's another (much nicer) pic of the landscaping where the old stairs were - you can see a similar (minus all the color) picture from earlier in the year down a few blog entries.

First "Annual" Hop Harvest....

Yep, hops as in the ones that go into beer. We convinced Scott's parents to plant some hops (we had them drop shipped from freshops.com) and even though its only the first year we managed to rake in a good bit of a harvest. In particular from the "jumbo" Cascade rhizomes. Opted to just dry them for use later instead of trying to do a "fresh hop" brew since we're en route to the family reunion in Park City, UT.

The Cascades came out in droves - probably a good two buckets (cleaned cat litter bucket) full of them and we left a lot of smaller ones on the bine. They are on the two bottom screens on the clothes drying rack. The pile on the left top and the other screen to the right are the unknown, "Telluride" hops.

We also went up to some friends of theirs in Eckert, Colorado and picked another couple buckets of some unknown hops - Grandma is working with the CSU extension service to try and figure it out. Currently guessing either Centennial or maybe Chinook (look kind of like the Centennial's that we planted in the way of leaves, hops and smell). Theirs were several years old and the bounty there was pretty incredible - we only picked about 10-15% of what was there and still got about 4# of wet hops (figuring about 12-14 oz dried).

Oh no... time warp is getting worse....

Yeah, so... I thought April and May disappeared but June and July seemed to go faster. Scary.

Managed to brew a lot of beer and drink a little - the saison yeast culturing experiment worked quite well. The results were greeted with mixed opinions (tasting it pretty young it almost seemed like a belgian sour - lots of esters) but i think it did hit the style closely. A couple more czech pilsners got cranked out before the temp in the downstairs started climbing along with a hack at a 'chelada" style (mix of barley and corn malt extract, lime peel, and some light agave nectar). Its pretty "refreshing" but a bit too bitter (too much lime peel) and the agave is completely lost.

The hearth in the game room got completely rocked and grouted and turned out looking pretty nice. We've still got the mantel to do and have the plans pretty well down - its not going to be too fancy or complicated. Some 6/4 hickory with big finger joints on the 45s and some pseudo arts/crafts supports in a few spots along with a top shelf of 6/4 hickory.

Work outside has include the beginning of the assembly of the kids playset - we opted to go ahead and contract someone to rebuild the supports and framing for the deck (should start around the first of Sept) so we needed to move all of the parts to the playset somewhere.... might as well just try to move them once. But it required a pretty good sized retaining wall (12 RR timbers and 6 tons of fill dirt) to try and level the space out for it.

Scott took a week off from all of this fun to build a mandolin at the Rockygrass academy (http://www.bluegrass.com/rga), we were very pleased with the result. Here are a couple of pictures of it in various stages of completion...  and one with Darol Anger (bluegrass musician -although usually he's on the fiddle) playing the finished thing.

And the token picture of the kids sacked out, stareing at the tele.

We did manage to get up to Breckenridge over the weekend and came back over Boreas pass through Como - more pictures to come from that.  Hopefully not 3m from now.  :-D

Jeez the time flies....

 Its hard to believe its almost June, not sure where the rest of April and May went.   Most of the time has been spent on landscaping and planting outside - see pictures below.  We built several small rock retaining walls for planting beds and put in a mix of xeric plants as well as some herbs and annuals for the larger pots.

Crawfish boil went well this year - much smaller invite list which was kind of nice in that we actually got to visit with folks more including a few of the neighbors.  

Jauna's keeping busy with work, Scott has been working on deck plans and beer brewing plans as his work has been pretty slow.   He's currently trying to culture a yeast for a summer (saison) belgian beer.

The most recent work inside has been rocking the game room fireplace (with slate) currently about 80% done with getting the rock up.  

Still need to seal and grout... and get the mantel designed, built and installed. Additional inside work going on at the same time has been on the master bedroom vanity. The cabinet was shoehorned in this afternoon/night (it was tight enough that the sides had to be shaved down by about 3/16" on each to get it in. As typical, we scheduled the countertop measurements for this Thursday which didn't give us too much time to daudle on getting it plumbed and installed.

Random musings and progress report...

The Boy needed a haircut... so he got a bit of a trim but will likely be getting a little bit more of a real cut here in the next few weeks - he's got great Einstein like hair though (its fun for mom and dad to play with).

Have been brewing beer in prep for our annual party - the Imperial IPA had a "robust" fermentation.... very thankful it was in the shower pan.

Work on the trim for the columns continues - got the shelves up and the ply facing stained, cut and installed for the upper part of the columns. The lower pieces are cut and 3 of them are about 50% done with finishing - they have a slight taper (1/2" over about 3 ft) for a very slight kind of pyramid effect.

Not that its real hard but we seem to do a bang-up job of finding/creating new projects for ourselves.  We'd been planning these for a while but with the nice weather the last couple of weekends we were able to get started in earnest with some of the landscaping work building rock walls for some planting beds.  The large pile of small river rock will eventually be scattered along the back of the house to prevent (or at least reduce the frequency of) little muddy footprints around the house.  

Lhianna's Birthday Party

Lhianna turned six in February.  We went to a local Gymnastics gym for the party and invited a bunch of Lhianna's friends from her Kindergarten class, neighbors and other friends.  Lhianna liked the whole gym the best...watching the kids in the foam pit was a riot.

Done, Done, really done.... well almost

The hardwoods are completely done.... finally. Still will have to do a bit of touch up staining/finishing where we milled custom length pieces to fit in with the surrounds on the tile work but relatively minor altogether.  Finished up with the second closet (to the right in the first photo) and the catwalk where we used some of the remaining travertine tiles from the woodburning fireplace surround (second photo).

We found several pieces of furniture off of craigslist that were right in line with what we were looking for and got them for reasonable prices (definitely vs. new).  They were all in very good shape and we managed to get everything moved in before the snow hit on Sunday.  We've still got a bit of trim to knock out, most of it is ready to go with the big exception being the columns to either side of the den.  We have the lumber but it'll require a bit of work to get it milled down and stained/sealed prior to install (hopefully within the next month). 

Deck planning has started but with any luck (doubtful) we'll get some of the master bathroom done before we tear the deck down..... stay tuned.

The end is in sight (at least for the hardwoods)

Work continues on the hardwoods (picture #1), particularly the tricky part of wrapping the sections of tile around the hearth (picture #2) and side entry (picture #3) and then matching the lines up in the hallway to parallel the wall with the closets relatively close. Ended up running different widths on the west side vs. the east side as the widths were about 3/4" off between the two (picture #4 from the laundry room).

It seems to be going a bit easier now but its taken a good bit of time and dry fitting to make sure all of the joints match up as we had to do some custom milling on quite a few of the pieces. If you compare the pictures from last week to this week you can see where we had to fit in several just to the left of the picture by the wood burning stove.

Also got most of the trim milled up and stained to wrap the structural beam in the game room but its still sitting down in the garage waiting to be installed (more pictures of that later).

Hardwoods continued

Hardwood installation continues at about the pace its been going at (maybe 20sqft/hr), we're getting better with controlling the adhesive so we don't have little dabs of goo (outside of Carson marking most everything he touches) but keeping all of the joints nice and tight has proven to be challenging (still). Clamps in a variety of configurations seem to be consistently the best way to pull in any bow/warp in the wood.... although the 8" wide boards are a heckuva lot hard to massage into place.

We finished up the family room on Sunday (the pic with then smaller pile of hardwood flooring) and got some trim put up in the dining room and knocked out quite a few of the really long runs from the family room to the den/away room last night. We'll have to do quite a bit of dry fitting around the tile on the side entry and hearth to ensure tight fits but have it close enough now that we should be able to get most of that done without putting any additional strips down for a bit.

Semblance of Normality

The latest deadline for action was super bowl Sunday as we had a few folks over for the game.  The game room was the biggest milestone and its fully functional but not quite done as the rock on the fireplace is still waiting in lieu of the hardwoods in the family and dining rooms.  

Heres a shot into the dining room and kitchen from the family room, you can see the hardwoods and a series of progression shots of the kitchen from original mess to latest (2/4/08).