Monday, July 23, 2012

Busy, busy, busy.....

It has been a whirlwind of activity around here this summer.  Once school was finished we really got into the house.  We are at this point under roof, soffit up, plumbing and electricity rough in completed, ceiling drywalled, and 1/3 walls drywalled.   We are so close!

We did have a stall in work due to the storm that hit hard.  It was a MESS.  By God's grace alone, most trees fell between houses or on outbuildings, but hardly any on actual homes.  As I'm sure you heard in the news, West Virginia was a mess.  We had no power for 13 days due to a power line down in the front yard across the driveway, and the next transformer is 2 miles through the woods down to Hamilton Ridge.  We also had no water, which was the hardest.  Without electricity, we couldn't get water from the well, so we had to boil it on the grill or go into town to fill up jugs/buckets of water.

We all did fine through it all- we have had "pioneer weekends" up here before and didn't mind not having power.  We did our laundry out of tubs and clothesline, and cooked on the grill.  We had rain barrels of water for the livestock, and garden. We even had little E's 10th birthday and baked a cake on the grill, which came out great.  We used solar powered light that you would use to light your pathways at night, and we did use our generator to power on and off through the day to keep the fridge going (although we still did lose some food).

Our life in pics since I last wrote:

    
      Eric and Rabbit shelling peas


E's grilled birthday cake (10th! Hard to believe!)





laundry day!

cavalry's coming!
The storm twisted this outbuilding 4-5 inches off the foundation- actually, that's what happened to alot of the trees.... they were twisted around and left hanging, or else completely uprooted.  We had an impassable driveway due to 8 downed oaks across just in one spot

Hard to see, but it's a black bear at the top of the driveway
Monkey see and Monkey Do-  finally weaned off the bottle!