More House Projects

Today is the first cloudy day we have had in a week! The rest of the days have been warm and sunny. Although it is still quite warm today, I thought I'd take advantage of it being cloudy and try to get some inside things done. Also we have some guys milling out logs in our front yard today and I thought it would be better if I could stay out of their way while they worked. :-) I'll tell you more about that in a minute.
Monday evening one of Matt's coworkers brought his tractor (or his Tonka toy as he calls it) to our house to drill the holes for the sona tubes for our deck. We would have had to dig them all by hand if he had not been willing to do it for us, and when he started digging, we found out just how hard that would have been. There were a lot of roots crisscrossing each other that would have made for nasty hand digging. He also hit a rock in one hole, that he had no trouble with, but it would have been a big deal had we been digging by hand. Matt said he saved us at least two days worth of hard digging. In about 45 minutes all four holes we needed were dug, and the tractor was being loaded back onto the flatbed.

The auger he had on his tractor had no trouble breaking the sod or going the depth we needed him to drill. Matt just pointed a stake where he wanted the next hole drilled and the guy started drilling. It is SO exciting to have things underway for our new deck. We have talked about it for a year, but now it actually is starting to seem real!

Some of the holes have water in the bottom of them, but Matt knows how to deal with that when the time comes to pour the concrete. We are hoping to have them poured and hardened by the last week of May, because Matt has taken that whole week off work to build the deck.

The rest of our week so far has been taken up with getting some logs ready to be milled out. When Matt bought the house there was a huge oak tree in the middle of our front lawn that was leaning precariously toward the house. Not wanting it to fall on the house in a wind storm, he had it cut down, and the logs from it have been sitting on our lawn ever since. We have contacted a couple of mills, but they have either been too busy, or we would have to have the logs hauled a long distance. Last week a portable mill showed up at a property on the end of our road. Matt immediately started researching who owned it, and was able to get a name and phone number. The guy was willing to do the milling for us as long as we had the logs by our driveway in a row so that he would be able to get them on his mill. That is easier said than done because these logs were HUGE and we had no equipment to move them with. Not to be daunted, my man came up with a plan, and Tuesday afternoon he executed it.

All but one of the logs he was able to throw a chain around and tow with our truck, but one of them was just too big. All our truck would do is sit there and spin. Thankfully Mr. Jim came to my man's rescue since he had a log that needed milling out too, and between the two of them and the truck they were able to inch it along on makeshift skids to the spot it needed to be. A lot of muscle power and truck power went into the work, but finally all of the logs were in place.

As I write this post, the logs are currently being sawed into boards for us to use on whatever project strikes our fancy. :-)