Once our living room was painted and the carpet installed - progress on the house slowed WAY down.  Between a long weekend in Easter, a week in Oxford and nearly a second week abroad due to the volcano - we pretty much took the month of April off.   Now we're right back at it and diving into new projects.  Our focus right now is two-fold -- get the hallway looking the way we want it to AND plant a garden!

It's amazing how much work a hallway can be.  We're realizing just how long our hallway is and how many doors and doorways line it.  In the last ten days we have removed 10 doors from their hinges, removed the brassy door knobs (new ones should arrive today!), primed the entire hallway from top to bottom and started the very slow paint work.  Painting of door frames is a very slow and tedious task, but as of Saturday afternoon - 10 of the 11 door frames have been painted. And thanks to the miracle couple (Knute and Rachel) the first coat of our beadboard wainscoting is also finished! The best surprise of all was our ceiling - it required only one coat of paint this time instead of three! Woo-hoo! So we're almost halfway done with the hall.  We like how it's looking and hope to finish it up before heading out of town on the 14th. Pictures of the hall to come once it's finished.

Our initial plan was to ignore the landscaping and exterior of the house for the first year or so until we got things under control inside.  After my being stranded in Europe, we decided we should at least stop work long enough on the inside to plant a garden. We watched the sun one day and marked out the perfect place for a garden.  It required cutting down a couple of bushes and one large tree (that was inappropriately planted to begin with) to eliminate unwanted shade - but that was the easy part.  We farmed that out to our new favorite landscaper, Alex.   When we came home on Friday our back corner of the backyard was free and clear of the trees.  What a fun surprise!  The best part about it is that it didn't require a minute of our time!  :)

The next step was to demolish the rotting playhouse and remove its concrete foundation.  To do this - we called in reinforcements.  Captain Destructo (a.k.a Knute) and Rachel sacrificed their Saturday to help us.  We rented a jackhammer, a rock box/construction bin and purchased a cart with load capacity of 600 pounds.   Knute came with his sledgehammer, pry bar, rakes, muck buckets, post-hole diggers, clippers, chainsaw, shovels and probably more.  We all took a couple of swings at the house to bring it down to the ground - but the boys did the majority of the work.  (We were busy painting door frames). Destroying the house was the easy part -- the concrete foundation was another story.  The boys spent all afternoon with the jackhammer breaking up concrete and loading up the rock box.   They joked about finding bodies in the 2 feet thick concrete  - and although none were found, we had a much worse surprise.  To the right of the playhouse foundation is a concrete pond hiding beneath the surface of the yard, filled with dirt.  There will be as much concrete to remove from the pond as there was for the playhouse.  That discovery cut our garden vision (for this year) in half.  With a rock box filled with 4 tons of concrete at the end of one day - the pond will have to wait for another summer.

When we learned of the pond, Rachel and my painting efforts came to an abrupt halt.  Out we went to the backyard to haul concrete and speed things up a bit.  With the house down and the concrete disappearing, our increasingly sagging fence was nearly toppled over.  Our neighbor's vines have all but pulled down the fence.  Little did we know that the house was keeping it upright.  So off Knute ran to Home Depot to buy what we needed to reinforce the fence.  The boys then had to focus on digging post holes (which also required a jackhammer - there is WAY too much concrete in our backyard) and we focused on clearing out the rubble.  I then spent the last couple of hours breaking concrete -- I wasn't about to have us return the jackhammer without all the concrete (associated with the house that is) gone.  We're proud to say that we achieved our goal for Saturday of tearing down the house and removing it's foundation.  We're excited about the unexpected fence reinforcements - but very disappointed that this time next year we'll be repeating our efforts to rid ourselves of the concrete pond.... 

We can't thank Rachel and Knute enough. Pictures of the day can be found here.