Week Five

The porch revealed . . . 

It finally stopped raining long enough for Andy to be able pull the straw and concrete blankets off of our new porch.  It was still extremely covered in powder so you can't see it very well but it is looking great to me.   Andy formed 45's where the corner should be.  There has been a lot of controversial opinions if this would look good or not but I'm really happy with it and it is my opinion that counts.

While we were ordering concrete we were going to have a "short load."  Neither Andy or I wanted to pay extra for nothing, especially when the money could go towards something we need.   Our fire pit was in desperate need of repairs, last sumer Andy I talked often about replacing it with some stamped concrete.  The time was right - our yard is in such disarray that Andy even let the concrete truck drive back to make the pour (do you think our sprinklers will ever work again?).  Andy was also planning on ripping out our current porch but when he started digging it was 10+ inches thick.  Andy wasn't too interested in breaking that much up and didn't have the time to do so.  This made it so we still had a little extra concrete and so I also got a stamped concrete pathway through my flower bed, it is under the blue tarp in the picture, (this path is what we use to get to the trampoline when the waterslide is up).  I have been wanting something for a few years -- I try to leave a path in the flowers but it just ends up looking like I ran out of flowers.
The sheet rock made it to our home.  We were told that when the drywall guys came it would only take them about two hours to install it but then they would spend the rest of the day cooking tortillas.  They didn't end up doing this to both mine and Andy's disappointment.
The drywall didn't stay off the wall for very long.  They came and were gone and the mudder has started to fix the joints.  Andy also terrorized the bedroom that is being transformed into an office.  We did have one complication, the chimney.  We don't currently use our wood burning stove but it gives me a great sense of security knowing that it can be used. Chimney's need repair on occasion so we wanted to hide it but still leave it accessible.  Our solution -- a bookcase.  I'm totally thrilled with it.  Andy did an amazing job.  We are putting bead board on the back - easy to take down and hopefully cheap to replace.  

My favorite part of the weeks accomplishments - BRICK!  We have brick on our house and it looks totally amazing.  I've been pretty nervous on how it may turn out but it currently exceeds my expectations.