May 17th and 18th

Standing in the kitchen doorway, surveying her mom's work...isn't she cute! She finally got better after her surgery. What is fun is how tired,filthy and happy she comes home every time we go to the house.

Yes, she will tackle any task...The interior wall in the kitchen is quite a mess and they are going to start pouring posts this week. I didn't get much done today, but a phone call to Dad let me know what I need to do. Lesson for the day....old bricks must be wet before they are messed with or they will suck up all the mosture from the motar as soon as it touches them, making them impossible to work with!!! The next masonary session should go much better! The underneath digout was completed Saturday. They are going to start digging the holes for the concrete piers this week. Baby steps forward! We found our auctioneer today too. The auction will be June 14th! So we should be able to clear everything out and up for Charles birthday. We had the drywall, floor sheathing, concrete board, studs, joists....delivered Saturday and we are ready to take more steps forward!

This must be a city crew...check them out...sitting on the job! Nancy pulled nails out of trim for a good part of the day. We have discovered that square nails are quite hard to remove without significant damage to old woodwork...but if we want to save the trim, out they go. Nan and Chris were a huge help on Saturday!

Ben has the important task of de-mortaring the old bricks. Hopefully we will able to save enough bricks to do the face layer of bricks since these were made on sight, they would be really hard to match.

Chris, standing on the kitchen floor and Charles talking to him from the bathroom floor....eeeeewwwwww what a mess. And by the way, how do you remove that much cast iron??

This is one of the getting worse before it gets better. Torn out kitchen, now the bathroom floor is down too. No ducts, dirt piles everywhere...unstable floor and still a pile of antiques to get rid of...Hopefully, next weekend it will start to get better.