Almost Done Mudding & Taping and Still Married

I guess we can put sheetrock mudding, taping and sanding on our resume, even though we never want to do it again.

Pat read the book on drywall so that made her foreman,

and as a foreman, all she demanded was her own way all the time and a work pace that would have killed a normal man.

I have to say it's looking pretty good but it's fussy work with a lot of drying time between coats of mud broken up only with sanding, lots of sanding.

We also had a visitor.

Jane Howard is a writer for our local paper, The Cook County News Herald, and she came out to do some research, and take a ride, on tracked vehicles. There is a very fine line between breaking trail in really deep snow and possibly getting stuck and we put the tracks to a real test.

The results even shocked me! I have just under a 1000 miles on the tracks, but never really put them through snow as deep as we did for Jane. We picked some roads that have not been plowed or driven on all winter and were close to the storage building in case things went bad.

Well some of the snow we drove over was waist deep and we were able to break trail without

working the truck hard or ever feeling like it was close to getting stuck. It was very impressive and exceeded all my expectations.

Photo Jane Howard CCNH

I have to make a trip to the cities this weekend so I'll look for the paint, counter top, lighting and carpet. When I get back up I have a little plaster touch up then 2 coats of primer and paint, can't wait to get all the sanding dust cleaned up and paint on everything.

Spring still feels a long was off, below zero the last two nights but that big snow missed us completely.

Good Progress in the Warm Room

Work in the warm room is going nicely,

still not as fast as I would like but all the little detail work always take longer than planned.

We rented a panel lift to fit the high ceiling sheet rock and it worked out great! We had never used one before so there was a little leaning curve, but it ended up taking longer to run it back and forth to town then it did to hang the rock.

Here it is in action.

Back wall with the cedar ceiling beam installed

Front wall and a window with a great view of the lake.

Front door and small end of the room.

Back wall of the small end of the room, it's hard to photo a little building.

We haven't decided on what we want for windows above the header, so that space is un-rocked for now.

We also started on the outside detail work. Pat has designed and cut out the picket fence parts, and is working out the paint scheme and picking out the carpet and lighting.

Just a reminder of what we're building.

The snow continues, last weekend we had 3 straight days of lake effect snows that put down another foot, but the sun angle is improving and the days have been getting warmer which makes the snow pack settle down some.