New back door...

I don't know for certain but I'm quite sure that the previous owners of our house found the back door on a driving range - probably about 50 yards or so from the tees. It's ugly and pock marked with many, many dents and dings of varying depths. It is without a doubt the ugliest door ever made. It is a steel door - very secure, I suppose. It doesn't pretend to be anything it's not. There are no fake wood panels or anything else even the least bit appealing to the eye. I can't even describe the color - it's a nondescript greenish, whitish, beige-ish... It's basically a 3x7ish piece of steel... In retrospect, I can't believe we put up with the thing for as long as we did. If you think I'm exaggerating; check out the following picture:
Do you see how ugly that thing is? I don't know what that round thing is near the top. (The hippies who lived here before us had some kind of a yin/yang thing on there which never really came off...) You can also note that the bottom third of the door is somewhat discolored - that's from dogs sleeping against it. (I can't blame that one on the hippies...)

Where am I going with this? Well, if you didn't pick up on it from the title to this post, we got a new back door! New for us anyway. Good old craigslist came through for us again!

Today after work I took my trusty Milwaukee Sawzall and sliced the old door out of there. (We'll try to unload it on some unsuspecting hippies via craigslist.)

Once we had the old door out we realized that we didn't have any shims and so we lived without a back door for several hours while Grace went to Home Depot to get a pack of shims. When she got back it was fairly late but we were still relatively excited about getting the door installed. Our enthusiasm waned in a big way after about 20 minutes. We wedged the crooked, non-closable door shut and went to bed convinced that tomorrow would bring better things. It did! Voila!

I'll trim it up on Friday and then we can banish the memory of our driving range door forever.

So how's the addition coming along?

The title to this post is the question which we are most frequently asked these days. Short answer: The addition is coming along just fine. We haven't really worked on it for the last three months but it's coming along just fine.

Tomorrow will mark the one year anniversary of this blog. I was supposed to be chronicling the trials and tribulations of adding on to our home. As I quickly scanned the entries of the last year I noticed that by no means are all of them about the addition. Granted most of them are but not all. We've been doing a lot of other stuff too and that's kind of where we're at right now.

Last year our building project was pretty much all consuming; then the weather turned really lousy; then we got an extension on our building permit; (now the pressure is off for another six months); then when the weather got nice again we noticed that we had kind of let things slide around the place. We've been busy doing spring clean up kind of things. I recently found a fence that had disappeared under a tangle of blackberries. Grace discovered that our side yard was also being (re)consumed by them and she reclaimed it. We had cleared all of this stuff out when we moved in and it was beginning to revert to its "pre-Al&Grace" state. We also set up a fence after we discovered that lambs don't swim well. (Oh yeah, we also had lambs earlier in the spring.) I finally put up a curb using treated 4x6's so that Jesse's friends would be able to distinguish between lawn and driveway. (The first time one of them came over he ran over it and dug up the yard...)

We've done other things too. Things that don't even involve our property or house or barn... (We do have a bit of a life...) So that's the state of the blog at one year. Don't worry faithful readers (both of you) - more addition adventures are just around the corner!

Next up, interior framing! Then rough plumbing and electrical. It's going to be a fun summer.