Week Ending 05/31/2008

Down and dirty. Friday our builder stopped by to offer some fill dirt from another local project he's working on. Hey, it's free. So after he used his backhoe to fill the dump truck, he drove it over to our place and dropped off two truckloads of good old New England dirt. For those who don't know, there's lots of rock in the rich soil of New England. For the next three days, armed with shovels, a rake and empty 5-gallon plater buckets, the kids and I moved the piles to where we wanted them in an effort to level out the back yard. I offered the kids $1 per bucket of rocks they extracted. While I ended up paying them $47, we hardly made a dent in the rock situation. Nonetheless, the piles are gone and the lawn is that much bigger and more level. Our aim is to move back into the woods about 8' to our property line and to level off the back yard (which was tiered), giving us roughly 240 square feet of new lawn, and all of it useable.

In addition, this week there was interior painting, layout work for the 2nd floor wainscot, we tried installing the cable but need one more CAT5 to install that, and had work done on the kitchen cabinetry.