The Goings On

Time flies, fun or no. I realize the other day that I hadn't written a blog since the end of January. The reason is probably because we have been busy with a thousand 'little' projects. Nothing monumental has really taken place. Well, maybe one thing.

I had to take some time away from the masonry heater in order to get the house ready for wiring. So, the heater still isn't done. At first it was hard to leave that project for a bit, but I soon decided it was okay since the winter was mild and the heating season would be nearly over by the time I got to fire it up for the first time.

Once we found an electrician that we were happy with, we had to figure out the best way to put wires in the wall. Our electrician convinced us to put up furring strips in order to attach drywall on the first floor. The plan prior to that was to tie on diamond lath and do plaster. Our hearts weren't set on plastering and the furring strips gave him something to attach boxes to. So that is one of the bigger projects we worked on.

After we finished, the wiring went in really fast. If you are in the Bismarck, ND area I highly recommend Eric and his crew at Milestone Builders. Top notch guys. Wiring isn't really exciting to look at but here are a couple of pictures to show how they did it.

 We went with an external panel to save space and because our utility room will technically be a bathroom also. Space is at a premium at our house.

We have also been spending some time on planting since spring came so early this year. These are grape prunings we are attempting to propagate. We took a lesson from a friend of my Dad's and it seems to work well for him. I'm not sure of the success we will have since our pruning material was rather small.

If they do grow, we will need more space in the vineyard. So today I began setting up professional style grape trellis. More to come on that.

I used to read a lot of owner builder blogs before we started building our house. I didn't like it when the author didn't post an external picture of the house every once in a while. So ...

This year we are going to attempt re-plant some of the grass that succumbed to the construction process.