Well I Promised Pictures :)

Of the 'half' addition and here they are :) Sorry it took me so long.

The back :) That plastic covered opening will be one of the Master Bedroom windows :) The top 3 layers of bales in this picture will have to be redone when we plaster.. they are mostly a wind break right now and bale sizing. We will run rebar through them after we straighten them to keep them in place. Because the poles hold up the roof the bales just fill in the walls not support the roof. The space between the trailer an the bales will be the hallway and the back door will be right there.

Front and Side.. There are two window frames missing from the front, one on the front wall and one closer to the window on the side. Both are kitchen/dining area windows. We still need to find windows we like for the large open area and then make the frames to size. Right now those 4 layers of bales in front have been removed and our beef is hanging there :) These pictures were taken before our big snow.. we now have over a foot of snow. The windows here from front to back are pantry, bedroom, bathroom, master bedroom. 

Work in progress :) I'm standing in the 'to be' dining room to take this picture. If you look WAY To the back you'll see a square of white just about in the middle of the picture.. that is an unfinished wall. The two sections, on that same wall, closer to the camera are finished. These are the weird 2/3 bales I've been making and annoyed with. I keep making them too small and have to re do. Thankfully most of them have found other places to live. On the left of the picture right above that blue thing you can also see an empty spot in the wall, it's bales are there on the floor waiting for Papa to place them. Those bales on the other side of the saw horses are extras.. possibly enough to do the back middle wall or the front middle wall next summer/fall. We want to move them as we will likely be making our own floor trusses this winter on this floor space. I believe we need something like 70? For the upstairs floor and the middle floor to connect the 'half' addition to the little addition where the wood stove lives. As we cannot plaster until spring that is our next large house project.

I just like this picture :) Shows how the wall will sort of look once it's plastered. Yes we are using insulation for stuffing on this side and in the ceiling and eventually floor. Looks cozy doesn't it?

The front end. The ceiling stops there because that's where it goes to a vaulted ceiling. There will be a wall there to block the large living area off from the bedrooms/pantry/bathrooms. The large open space on the right, between the poles, will be where the kitchen (straight ahead) will meet the living room/school room. About a third of the house (the front) will be open in a area roughly 37 feet long by 20 deep.

That pile of stuff there has been one of our fall projects. We've cleaned out our back little shed (stuff from when we first moved here 7 years ago. Some of it had been packed in Wa. 10 years ago!) and moved all the totes of books and boxes of jars to it. The totes of kids clothes also found new storage space in the kids bus, leaving them with tons of room to play. What you see there is what is left. Quite a bit of it is building 'stuff'!! What's not will have to find a new home before we move in!!  

A closer look at the ceiling. We're not 100% on what we will put up there but it's about 80% that it will be 4x4 sheets like our present addition. Those sheets were a PAIN to put in and we are hoping this strapping will make it much easier. Wiring on this part of the ceiling is also pretty much finished. Vents being the one exception. 

Hmm the doors in the hallway are not super noticeable in the pictures. There are 3 of them, master, bathroom, bedroom. The pantry will open to the dining area. We had trouble with the small addition and the doors getting squished, for lack of a technical term, by the bales. So this time Papa used 6x6's on one side of the door and a pole on the other.. hopefully they will keep the doors straight and not prone to trouble. 

And that's it. Some random facts. The 'half' addition is 14 feet by 68 feet. There will be two bathrooms, one off the hallway and one off the master bedroom. The kitchen window in the front will have my sinks under it. The walls in the hallway will be straw bale but all other inside walls will be stick frame. We don't plan on using any gyp-rock. EVER. The floor trusses we will be building will be 22 or 23 feet long. They will go from the 'half' addition to the poles on the other side of the trailer after the trailer is taken out and connect the two additions to become a house.

What Happened To Spring?

Three days ago I was walking down almost dry earth on the driveway chatting to E that soon they should be able to ride their bikes on the driveway! Later that same day Papa and I noticed that where the grass was clear of snow it was greening up!!  Not anymore! This morning we woke up to snow! 

The snow really is beautiful as it covered everything with it's whiteness. It makes everything look clean and nice and I can really appreciate that. 

We got 6 inches of that fluffy white stuff this morning. Warm, wet, dripping mush! It was snowing when we got up and snowed until almost 6pm!! Papa figures we got about 6 inches. It was +5C and the snow was falling off the roof and trees in chunks while it was still snowing! The snow flakes started out HUGE and slowly, through out the day, got smaller and smaller.  I took these pictures later in the evening. With the naked eye it looked like there was a fine mist over the new snow several feet high. I didn't capture it on the pictures which is making me wonder if I imagined it :)  Papa did plow it off the drive so it might not take too long to get back to dirt.

It did put a few of our projects on hold... and got a few others bumped up the list and finished! Star was going to get out of her little pen and into a halter and on a line out in the yard and we decided not to do it just yet! Instead Papa got the cream separator out of storage, washed and set up. We took the plastic off the living room window and he threw me bags of kids clothes that needed to be sorted and repacked in totes and I got them all sorted and repacked and Papa took them back outside!! SO nice to have that big job done!! I sorted out an entire barrel sized black garbage bag for the thrift store! Now I just have my own clothes to find, sort and try on. Yes.. I'm avoiding it :) But it needs doing as I've only got two pairs of pants to wear and one of them are sweats :)

J decided to do more school then I'd planned and started and finished his last PACE on science, sans self test and test. He spent a good chunk of the day at the table doing school. L and E finished their PACE's with  cheerful smiles all around! All and all it was a productive and fun day, Papa headed out to Bible Study this evening which means MOVIE NIGHT with leftovers :)

THAT STUFF MUST GO!!

The kids have a cute Berenstain bears movie where Papa Bear is trying to get rid of a stump in the yard and he keeps saying.. "That STUMP must GO!!" Well I've been going through the kids clothes, the back bathroom (also know as a catchall for all things), closets and the whole general house and bagging it up in black garbage bags and hauling it to the second hand store. I'm not nearly done yet but I'm getting there. I took 9 black garbage bags, so far, and probably 10+ boxes of stuff out of our house so far.  The boxes went on to the floor.. some of jars, clothes that will still be needed for the younger children. It's amazing how much more ROOM we have now..

You might be wondering why I'm getting rid of all this stuff.. some of it simply doesn't fit in the house anymore.. those cute foam chairs J and L used to have out in the living room to watch movies in just simply not longer FIT in the living room.. E and I are both allergic to polyester and I can't even wear clothes washed with fuzzy polyester so we are getting rid of TONS of polyester clothing, blankets and all. I plan on going through all the totes of kids clothes on the floor and culling...eventually :) SO if anyone is interested in going through some of these bags before I send them off to the thrift store.. let me know what your looking for and when I clean out those sizes I'll let you know and we'll set it up.