Perhaps no more shoveling....

Although this winter has made progress very slow, we had a slight break in the snow last week. We were able to see some progress, particularly on the roof! Last weekend we took our friends Tom and Pilar out to see the house. This was about the 20th time we had tried to take them out there, and finally the weather cooperated! Here is Bobby giving the tour:

Pilar is excited she finally got to come out and see the house!!

Tom is checking out the view from the living room window. The next few pictures show the roofing that has been completed. The first is a view over the living room:

This last one is looking out the living room window on to the front porch towards the dining room. 

We really enjoyed getting to hear from Pilar and Tom, as they just finished building a house in the past year, so they gave us some good advice on some things we had not even thought about...like where to put your air vents!

And here was the view from the bottom of the driveway:

On Tuesday of this week, the day after his birthday, Bobby took his sisters, Anita and Kyra, as well as 2 of our nephews, Cameron and Brandon, out to see the house. Here are some pics from their adventure!

From left to right are Anita, Brandon, Kyra, and Cameron

This is Anita in the living room, but notice Kyra peeking through from the Breakfast Area :)

Here are the boys looking out towards the front porch

This is a picture Anita took from Castleford Road. On this date, they had roofing over the garage, master bedroom, closets, and bonus room, plus the front half of the rest of the house. Since it is snowing today, we hope that the shoveling will be a little bit less this time! We are so glad they've been able to work at all on the house, but we are ready for winter to release its grip on Boone so we can really get going on the rest of the house!!

Shoveling Out, PART II

As the winter here in Boone continues to pound on us, I am very excited to report we are still making progress on the house! Bobby and I are amazed that we are as far along as we are given that this has been the worst winter that Boone has seen in 10 years or more!

When I last blogged, we had most of the framing up and some of the plywood had been hung. The following pictures are from January 29th as we saw more plywood go up and the garage begin to take shape:

Then the next day we got another winter storm. Fun times.

So on January 31st we went and shoveled out our house, again!! This time though it was much tougher. In December when we shoveled, there was no framing up, so we could easily push all the snow off of the sides. This time though, there were 3 openings that we could use to semi-easily push snow out: the front door, the back patio door, and the doorway from the mudroom into the garage. The back guest bedrooms, our bedroom, our closets, our bathroom really had no easy exit, so we were doing a lot more lifting and tossing the snow out windows. Last time it took us about 2 hours to get the house almost completely cleared off. This time we quit after 3 1/2 hours. Everything was shoveled out but there were many spots where we left clumps of snow because there was no easy way to get it out. Here are some pics from our shoveling day:

Those last 2 pics show our master bedroom and closets, one of the last places we shoveled and one of the most difficult to get the snow out!!

Here I am, bundled up in Bobby's coat, hanging on to that beam to just stand up because my arms were hurting so badly after shoveling for 3 1/2 hours!!

A few days later though, Bobby and I were rewarded for our hard work because the guys were able to get out to our house and work on it! Thanks to our efforts, they didn't lose any time, and on Wednesday we went out to our house to find (dramatic pause here)..........

ROOF TRUSSES!!!

The first step in us never having to shovel out the house again!!!

We were so excited to see this part of the framing go up!! We had our dear friends Greg Ragan and James Shook with us, and had a lot of fun showing them around our construction site! Here are some more pictures from February 3rd:

Greg is checking out the view out the front window:

I am a lucky lady :)

and

The Three Buds:

We also went up the hill to look at the house for sale next door that we are trying to talk our friends and family into buying so that we will have good neighbors! This was the view of our house looking down from next door:

As I am writing this blog, it is pouring snow, sleet, rain, and ice outside, so we may be shoveling again sooner than I would like, but atleast we are still seeing it look more like a house every day!!