Yang Ming and Assorted Miscellany

Another day, another dollar spent on this house. Lauren is working late at the hospital, and on top of that her sister, Kelly, is just about to start pushing out her firstborn at the same hospital. My good friend and mountain guide extraordinaire Kurt Hicks (kurthicks.com) left his wife and the rainy weather in Seattle to come to our little slice of heaven for some volunteer construction work.

I don't know if he's dumb or I'm lucky, but either way he's swinging a hammer. We did take some time off from the house last weekend to head over to Eastern Kentucky and do some sports rocks climbing in the Red River Gorge. I'll throw up some pics of that sooner or later but let me just say: damn. that's some good rocks climbing. 

Meanwhile, back on the home front. We bought a shipping container! I needed some storage and a secure place to put tools. Our house is seriously not secure. I shopped around looking at sheds, and building something, and turns out these containers are relatively cheap and very portable. I think eventually we'll use it as the base of some kind of workshop in the backyard. 

This guy dropped it off. He trucked it up from Nashville. The first time he drove up he got part way and then his truck caught on fire. "My truck burned plumb up!" is how the phone call went. Round two, with a borrowed truck, he successfully left here in Paducah, driving away with a handshake and a fatter wallet.

We immediately put the trailer in front of it and started our backyard trailer park.

The framing is almost done. Sort of. I'm waiting for a design to be finished with an engineers stamp. I have to get city approval for the serious structural work I'm going to do. I'm going to tear off the back of the house and rebuild it. While I wait for approval, though, I and my guys are framing in the interior of the exterior brick walls. Got it? It'll give me some extra R-value and a place to run my electrical and plumbing. They should be done in the next couple days despite my lack of pictures.

And Brickmason, Daren, is killing it on these arches!

I really ought to just leave the original framing, right?

I have an 'after' pic of the closet above. I'll get it in the next one. It looks so good when it's clean, plumb, level, and square.

Lastly, we pulled off the window covers upstairs. It's so much lighter in the sunroom. It's also a bit drafty since the windows are falling apart and the glass is falling out. One more project!