Study Floor...a little accident

...ok it was my fault.  I asked Kevin if we could pull up the piece of plywood that he had put over the hole in the floor in what was then the dining room until we completely refinished the floors.  We thought that the job of replacing the beams under the floor was going to be a huge job, and to be honest there were other things that were a higher priority like a usable kitchen and bathroom.

I wanted him to pull up the piece of plywood as there was an odor in the room that I could not get rid off and I wondered if something had crawled up there somehow and died.

So, Kevin pulled up the piece of plywood...we looked in the hole and couldn't see anything.  I then asked Kevin to open the window to allow the area to get some fresh air....that apparently is where I went wrong.  He stood on the old sub floor which was not up to extra strain...

His leg went through the floor and he ended up standing on the ground under the house...he was fine but we thought we would try to replicate an image from the movie with Tom Hanks in it called "The Money Pit".  This is Kevin doing his best impersonation of Tom Hanks...

This is the whole that he left in the floor when he went through...

and finally we decided that we needed to fix the problematic beams...if you remember from previous posts this was the area where the roof had a hole in and the ceiling was on the floor.

So we have put down another nice piece of plywood...floor sanding and putting down new hardwood here is scheduled for spring :)...ironically fixing the beams only took a days worth of work which was way way less than what we imagined!

Fun (and not so much fun) stuff that happened this summer

Charlie got his dirt bike all finished and was totally proud of it.

Only to have it stolen....wow what a couple of weeks we had after that...chasing down everyone that had seen "Callie" who stole it riding it around town.  We eventually tracked it down to a impound yard in Mendenhall and got it back....missing an ignition, badly painted, and a good amount of damage to the engine and other parts. 

We installed security cameras around the perimeter and inside the house and got two rather noisy alarm systems who are called Bonnie and Clyde.  Bonnie and Clyde are two Labrador mixes that are quite happy to live outside and make noise whenever anyone comes close to the property.

Charlie and Kevin went fishing!

This type of landscape is one of the main reasons I was wanting to move out of the desert of Colorado - just love it here.  These pictures were taken at Simpson County Lake - which is just north of Magee - about 10 miles from home.

Kevin got his tractor!

We met some lovely people called Snow and Sheryl via FaceBook marketplace.  They had advertised a mirror for sale which I went and bought from them.  I love it - goes perfectly in the new dining room.  They also had some lathes for sale, that I knew Kevin would want to add to his arsenal.  So I took Kevin to look at the lathes and we got talking about everything in life it seemed.  Before I knew I was buying an old tractor that they had on their property too :)  

Jeff (my farrier) kindly lent us his trailer to go pick it up.  Jessica and Sam were visiting at the time and we got some great pictures of Jess with Charlie :)

Kevin had some new friends in his shed as well this summer...

Bathroom upgrade

After replacing all the sewerage plumbing we figured we should do the last upgrades to the area behind the bathtub to tiles on the wall and floor and Charlie did an awesome job all by himself.  Gotta say it looks awesome!  We put some hardwood floors down in the bathroom too.   Which wasn't that easy, as there was a beam broken which had to be replaced and the whole sub floor had to be replaced.  These pictures are not in chronologically in order...apologies

Here is a well over due update....lets start with the messy stuff...sewerage!

I am so sorry that I have not posted an update for nearly a whole year.  I feel like I am slacking in my reporting.

We have been busy though working on things.  A lot of which are things you can't see as they are behind the walls or beneath the ground.

Charlie and Dylan were rolling out a new bale of hay for the horses, and rolled over where the sewerage pipe went which was about a foot or so below in the ground.  Pretty much instantly there was water coming up to the surface as the washer happened to be draining at the time.

Well from that point onward, for about 2 weeks the whole of back yard to the north of the house, was a large whole.  The city line coming to the house was built from concrete and paper...it would not allow Kevin to create a connection to the new pipe coming from the house because it was not smooth enough.  On top of that, someone had done a "patch" job fixing the city line by cutting pieces of bucket to cover holes and then pouring cement over it!!

It was a big job, that we knew we would have to do, and it came in at about $1200 in total.  I dread to think how much it would have cost if we had to pay a plumber to come do the work.  Benefit is that we now have a lot of the materials needed and the set up to add a bathroom at the front of the house off the front hall.  Totally looking forward to not having to fight for the bathroom with Charlie in the mornings!!

Here are some pics of what Kevin and Charlie faced!