A Gathering of Friends...

About a month ago we had a gathering with our building crew. A funny thing happened during the eight months they all spent here and somewhere along the way we all became great friends. I always felt welcomed with open arms and jokes. Richard, Mike and Lee always had time for questions from Rick and Andy about the garage. They all made the experience of building this home one of the most rewarding times of our lives. The true dedication of these guys can be best understood by this little story:

Late Fall (last year) a Sunday night and Rick and I decide to just take a drive to the house and enjoy the way it's coming along. We drive up the driveway and see lights shining in the windows. We are baffled but enchanted that it's our first time coming up the driveway and seeing lights in our new home. Well, the lights were Richard, hard at work at 8 PM on a Sunday night, getting things done and ready for the crew to start the next day. That was true dedication on his part!

We could not have found a more perfect building crew!!! Thanks guys!

Eric (Mike and Wilma's son) with Laurie (Richard's wife)

Left to right: Laurie, Wilma and Janet (Lee's wife) and of course that's Eric standing behind his Mom. They are holding pictures of the view from the deck!

I'm not really sure what is going on here, but there were some construction discussions going on. They may have been discussing the ridge beam...It was the hardest part of the entire build!

Mike, Richard and Lee

Eric (a college student really needs those left-overs)

And I must add that Eric was my favorite photographic subject all summer. He always smiled for the camera.


Everyone leaving...

Well, this was a SURPRISE view...

We were so enthralled with the river views, so imagine our surprise to turn around and find a never before seen view of the back of the house.
It was certainly a shock, but a very nice one!

We never realized that while clearing out all the dead wood and brush to open the view of the St. Regis River, that we were also creating a new view of the back of the house. A view (I must add) that we absolutely love!

Welcome to Fall on "our" River...

We moved into the back yard...

Well, we've told you all that we live on the river, thing was you mostly couldn't see it for all the dead wood between the house and cliff.
Rick just started taking down all the dead wood with the chain saw, lots of dead branches that were just blocking the view.

This is now the "new view" off the back deck...

We did it a little at a time. We didn't want to take down any good trees. So he chained and dragged and then walked back to the house to see the results.
We mostly did lots of branch trimming and the rest was just hauling the dead stuff away.

And our grass grew...

We really wanted to go into fall and winter without all the mud.
Next spring we'll be landscaping the entire front with shrubs and flowers. We'll re-seed the bare spots then. But this makes us feel really good about bringing less mud and dirt into the house. We may know where to step, but the dogs actually go looking for the mud puddles. Go figure...Eh?

Another project...

This door kept bugging me every time I saw it...One could say I should have been seeing "red" and wasn't...
Finally I took a few hours and painted it. Boy...was I glad to cross this off the "to-do" list.

Wood for the wood shed...

All the wood from Schrader Logging that had been drying in the meadow needed to come up closer to the house.

During construction this was our tool shed. Two weeks ago it got emptied of all tools and converted into a wood shed. We hope next spring/summer to actually build a real wood shed closer to the house, but this is going to work just fine for this season.

We filled it with all the wood...Now we pray we have enough!