Some done

Must be time for the week in re-cap.

Saturday/Sunday, lots of overtime at work so it kept me away from the gallery. And I spent much of Sunday collecting tools and cleaning up Laura's paper studio so she could get some work done for the 2 summer classes she's taking. Had to get compressors out and checked and tooled up and all that stuff. Not fair to make her do that since I'd pretty much trashed her area in the process of getting alla my other crap together.

Monday: more getting ready, started a bit of framing, watering the yard and all that stuff. Monday afternoon we finally got it all motivating.

Tuesday: Now THIS was a work day! Crystal and I got the center/main beam in the garage changed out to one that actually does the job and looks better. AND we got most of the walls framed and/or exposed for wiring and such. It was a fab day that ended late but with much feeling of accomplishment.

Wednesday: Valley View Hot Springs, all work and no play...........

Thursday: Mostly an errand and catch up day. Spent a good part of the morning getting our friend Christie's laptop working on wireless. The cable tv company dude had totally jacked up her puter so it took two of us to figure out how to put it all back. Then that afternoon was spent putting a bunch of stuff together on my old Nissan Pickup that needed lots of work and may even be working soon.

Friday: How much danged prep can a person do? Laura's professors were coming over to visit and view so we had to get the house all shined up and ready for human habitation. :) Then I went over and started getting more done on my truck. My friend Marian came by and gave me some electrical advice. I also got a stem wall poured for a wall section that needed to go in and ran errands like getting concrete, bolts, lags, beam ties and all that stuff. Didn't feel like a productive day at ALL and I was grumpy.

Saturday: Garage sales. We do this most Saturday's thru the summer. Good family visiting time. Then I watered and got the studio ready to work in. Then my boss/friend called and I went to get the windows for the garage/gallery. Then Christie and Daniel and Autum showed up to help with the truck. Laura had to crash from exhaustion and Crystal was off at a fiber meeting until later in the day. I got lots done getting parts on the truck. It's fun, challenging and such to find what goes where when it wasn't you who took it all apart. :) The good part of the day? The garage sale score of a nice 24/7 water timer so that I have very little hand watering to do. It's hard to communicate how much this helps.

Today? I'll try to get a bunch of window framing done and see if there's a parts store open to get a battery, gasket, and a temperature sensor for my pickup. That'll pretty much finish up all I can think of and then it'll go to a mechanic to check over my work. It just makes sense to do all I can before that since it's worth, like, $50 an hour to do simple stuff like install thermostats and ptu on fan belts. I'll try to get some pics today. They don't really tell the story of how much work went on since the re-beaming project involved all kinda temporary supports before the old one could be cut out and what went in now just looks right rather than shabby and wrong. But it sure does feel good.

As always I wish I had gotten more done. Folks some times tell me I'm driven. I like to think of it as focused.

Vacation?

This week is my vacation. :) I have a whole week off. My plan is to do two things. One is to see how far I can get on the studio part of my/our gallery. I/we will be renovating the garage into a pottery studio with a spot for a metals bench and perhaps even a little darkroom (little yet bigger than the present one that resides in a closet.). This will include pouring a stem wall for about 10 feet, then moving a wall out to there so that the garage is a full rectangle instead of the present cut up piece of crap. to do that I have to move the utilities out to the new wall and that will actually be one of the easier tasks. Then I'll fir out the walls of the entire garage so that they can be insulated to R19 instead of R11 thus saving us money down the road. After that we'll wire, insulate, plumb and drywall the place. I'm thiniking I'll call in some help. I also have to frame in to close off one of the two 8' garage doors and install a garage door in the remaining one. No problem that'll only take about 10 minutes. HA.

Yep, definately calling in some help.

The walls came down

Didn't get much done over at the gallery this week. I've been working at the danged power company a bit too much. We did get over there today though. Laura did a bunch more planting and I'll get to water it the next three weeks while she's in class. While she was planting I started getting the garage ready for a bunch of work that'll start up in a week. I moved every thing out of it and into a shed that sits off to one side. Then I started tearing down the temp walls that some doofus put up for no explainable reason. Thru this week I'll finish getting the walls torn down and hopefull get a footer poured and the new wall section up with the framing for a window in it. Then next week Crystal and I will see how much construction we can get done in a week. It's kinda fun to push yourself sometimes. ;) I would really love to have enough done that we could throw in there and fire the kiln at the end of June.

We'll see if my wishes are bigger than my muscles.

Planting day

Today was planting day at the gallery. Laura came over and spent a very long day putting plants into the ground and designing a landscaping stratagy on the plot I'd prepared last week. She sure did work hard. :) We took the shepard, Emma, over with us and she had a great time watching us work from her place in the shade. There are new pics up on flicker of what we got done both last week and today. It's really pretty fun to watch it come together a bit. While Laura was planting I trimmed some trees, and pulled extraneous crap off the house, and opened up the upstairs porch, and made tea, and went to work for an hour or so, and stoped at Dairy Queen, and helped plant a bit, and watered the dog, and brought over a swing to sit in.

I'm swamped. :)

Dirt

The dirt is thrown in. On Thursday the local earth moving company (friend of mine) brought in two semi loads of topsoil, 34 cubic yards. Friday night I picked up a bobcat at 3:30 PM and started moving stuff since I had to have it back at 8 Am the next morning. Got done at 9:30 PM that night. Pretty good job if I say so myself. Got the yard pretty well leveled and the lilacs moved onto my trailer to take to the dump. The dump guy even let me in and out for FREE! Life is good. Things are moving forward.