The Colors Come Together

Well, the house is really starting to take shape on the outside as siding is getting completed and the stone is being installed. We are really happy with our color choices after worrying about it for months!

The septic sewer system was getting installed yesterday and some remaining framing was getting completed (stairs in garage, screen porch).

Construction Kids

With daycare on a week's vacation, it gave Amy a chance to take the boys out to Mommy's jobsite today. This equates to heaven for the boys at this age as they love any type of big equipment and dirt.

Below are some pics from the job.

Live In The Now

I was lucky enough to enjoy the true wonders of nature and God's work the past four days as I joined three other high school friends (aka The Handlen Group) to the New River Gorge in West Virginia. We enjoyed whitewater rafting and kayaking (duckies), a 3-mile run on the Endless Wall trail (1000' above the river), the beautiful scenery, fabulous food, and each other's company.

From Left to Right: Doug (guide), Me, Mark, Mike (Jiggs), Ben, Tom (guide)

A hidden waterfall found through an old train tunnel

The view from where we ate breakfast

The Handlen Group behind the falls

Ben and Mike in the duckies

Looking at the New River Gorge from breakfast lookout

Looking back at some rapids we just conquered

Smokey's Restraurant

Ben and Mike view what they battled up front

The after picture from Day 1

Thanks to Ben for organizing and seeing this trip through, it was truly amazing. Thanks to my wife for letting me go and dealing with all the things going on with the kids, new house, temporary house, etc. Thanks to the good Lord for providing such a wonderful place to visit.

It's Coming Together

We now have drywall, and things look much different now will solid walls. We continue to pray for dry weather so we can get some necessary grading and utility work completed, but are excited to see the continued progress!






With regards to the old house, we finally closed last Friday and things are complete! We are relieved and truly happy to have this taken care of. We will greatly miss our house on Briar Drive but are glad that all of the closing items are taken care of.

1 Down, 1 To Go

Above is our temporary home at 1210 William in Iowa City. It was a long grueling weekend, but thanks to Pat for taking the kids to Davenport and thanks to Norm, Rob, Brian W., Drew, Dave P. and Jeff for all the help with the move. We really appreciated it!

We were able to get in and mostly settled (at least enough to sleep) by the end of the day Saturday. Even had time to eat some yummmmmmyyyyy Pagliai's Pizza. Hmmmm so good. Anyway, enough daydreaming, Brian and I spent all Sunday morning cleaning the old house, still have a little bit to do but did most of the hard work already. The pool table is scheduled to move on Wednesday and carpets cleaned on Thursday.

We were planning to store most of the stuff we weren't using in the basement at the new house, but mother nature didn't cooperate very well last week with the 2"+ of rain, so the site was very muddy. Luckily our temporary home has a 2 car garage so we stored everything in one side of that.

The kids did pretty well adjusting to the new digs yesterday. I guess Grandma Pat tired them out pretty good, plus we didn't have them take naps yesterday so they were all pretty tired and were in bed by 7:15 and slept all night. What a relief!

New House Update: On Friday and Saturday of last week they hung drywall on the ceilings and today the insulation is being blown in to the attic space. Tomorrow they will start hanging drywall on the walls and hopefully by Thursday we'll have permanent power and water so we can fire up the heat and they can get busy taping and mudding the drywall. Looks like we have a good chance to be painting by the last week in April. The screened porch and deck should be framed later this week and if the siding is in, we could be putting that on next week.

We finally decided our siding and stone colors a few weeks ago and have moved on to the next hurdle, flooring and paint. We have chosen the carpet and tile and are waiting for the estimate to come back in to see where we're at. Hopefully close to our budget. We will probably meet at the house in the next week or so to discuss paint colors with our painter. I hope that is the last thing we will have to decide! The decisions have been many and it's not like Brian and I disagree, we just realize we're choosing the colors for quite awhile so we want to be comfortable with them.

We met last week with a landscape designer and the meeting went great. He had a lot of good ideas that go along with our desire to design a sustainable and native to Iowa landscape. I'm sure we won't be able to afford all of it right away but at least with landscaping you can do it in stages. We will definitely do the stuff around the house right away so the kids have some grass to play on.

Who Chose The Gray Walls?

With the insulation in it seemed that we had already chosen our color for the walls as everything appeared gray. Things continue to move along in the house as the framers and geothermal guys finished up some items, the garage is backfilled and almost ready to pour, and final colors have been selected for siding and stone.

It's All in the Story

We make it a practice to read to each of the children every night before bed. Now, with Taylor reading, she has decided that she can help us with these duties as she read the whole Green Eggs and Ham book to Kinnick the other night before bed. It was so cute!