Finishing Touches

Well, we continue to get items taken care of off the punchlist for the house. A couple of these being rather big items such as constructing the stairs off the deck, paving the driveway, installing erosion control measures, building the front posts and new shutters, and staining all of the exterior wood. They all look wonderful!

The installation of silt fence and building of the shutters was done by myself, and let me now tell you from experience the installation of silt fence by yourself with hand tools is not easy.

Hopefully our landscaping will start tomorrow with plantings around the house.

Tire Swings

We spent a wonderful morning/afternoon with our good friends the McCoys. All the kids had a great time playing together as the McCoy's graciously shared their toys and showed our children "the ropes".

Besides the tire swing, the trampoline was another favorite

And well, my boys can't go anywhere without causing a little excitement. Though this pool may have not been ready and fit for swimming Carver really didn't care as he dives in head first with all his clothes on. Of course, Kinnick laughed hysterically and soon joined in with his own belly flop. Thanks to Caiden for lending us some clothes for the ride home!

We Love Minnesota!

Well, I'm going to try to finally get to some blogging here as I know it has been quite some time. What better way to get started then to share some photos and stories about our recent trip to up to Birch Lake. As some of you know, this is annual trip for our family and I have been going there ever since I was born. Lucky for me my wonderful wife and children love the resort just as much I do! As alwasy we greatly enjoyed the wonderful week and were grateful to be able to spend it with my parents and sister's family. Many thanks to my parents for making this vacation possible once again!!!

As is now tradition we stop in the Twin Cities on the way up and stay near the Mall of America. The kids (and adults as you will see) enjoy spending time at what was once Camp Snoopy but is now Nickelodeon Universe. Though we were disappointed to hear it is no longer Camp Snoopy, we were soon reminded that sometimes change is good as they added a couple of new rides for the adults that we really enjoyed.

There are many activities that we all enjoy doing at Hyde-A-Way Bay. Some of these include swimming, biking, fishing, boating, and just playing around the resort.

Of course, you can't be out in nature at night without a campfire. And you can't have a campfire without smores. And you can't have smores without closeup messy face pictures!

Finally, I leave you with our annual family pictures in front of the Lucette (Paul Bunyon's girlfriend) statue in "downtown" Hackensack, as well as a picture of sunrise on the lake as Dad and I go out for some early fishing.

Moving

As always, moving was an adventure. Many, many special thanks to the following people for helping us last weekend:

• Vineyard (church) friends - Bill and Katie Iverson, Ty Coleman, Bryan HR
• Parents - Both Amy and my parents
• Knutson Construction - Casey and others for loading and unloading the container (pod)
• Jeff Koenig - Our builder who also helped with unloading the Knutson truck
• Culvers Landscaping - Helped with moving wood play equipment from a house down the street.

Without your help we could have never made this happen so quickly and smoothly!

There were a few funny stories along the way, but all in all things went much quicker than expected and fairly smoothly. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm still a bit sore and recovering slowly. You can see a couple pictures below of our Beverly Hillbillies style moving. This is a long and funny story that you'll have to ask us about sometime.

Another highlight would be part of the "moving team" getting to ride in the cargo area of the U-haul to try to go fetch some playground equipment. Shhh, don't tell U-haul as I later spotted a sticker on the front dash restricting use of the cargo area to passengers such as this.

Grading and Landscaping

Culver's has completed a couple of large retaining walls and they did a fabulous job. Not only do they look great and structurally are what we needed, their staff came in full force and completed this work in a short amount of time which was much appreciated.

Following the completion of the retaining walls, Big Timber came in and did a wonderful job with grading out our lot (which was a bit of a challenge).

Near Completion!

Well, I know it has been a long time since posting so where do we even begin.......Let's start with the fact that we are moved into our new home!!!!! I apologize for the lack of postings and any recent pictures of the house or kids but it has been beyond hectic here with the floods, finishing the house, moving, etc. However, we are so excited as Amy and I spent our first night together in the new house this past Saturday and all of us as a family Sunday night. The house is wonderful as are our peaceful and beautiful surroundings. I plan to make additional posts in the near future with regards to the kids, the flood, and moving; but I'll start with some overall pictures of the exterior of the house. I do not have any finished pictures of the back but will get those soon and add them to the post.