Buying Lumber

This week was a pretty productive week for us at the house. The floor was poured on Thursday. The steel beams were set on Friday. Saturday I finished putting most of the plywood up on the walls. We left a small section open so we didn't have to crawl through the window to get into the basement. Dad did a lot of work alone Saturday afternoon while I attended a friend's wedding.


Sunday started with a trip to Menards to buy some lumber. We needed some 2x10 boards to finish the plates along the top wall. We also needed some 2x4 boards to build a couple walls for the basement stairs. If you've never been shopping for lumber with my dad, you might not fully appreciate this. We were at Menards for 2 hours. We went through EVERY stack of lumber they had. We needed multiple lengths of both 2x4 and 2x10. We did find the best and straightest boards Menards had to offer. Sometimes I feel sorry for the people that work at these stores when Dad and I walk in...for they don't know any better. The poor young man at the barn that was so willing to help us pick out boards and load them when we pulled in was taken aback when Dad said, "No thanks, I'll pick them out myself." Many men came up to ask if we needed help as we were piling many, many boards up that were not worthy of the Crower house. I'm sure they were thinking that they were going to have a heap of work waiting for them when we left. We are conscientious though and re-piled all the crooked and warped boards back in their original piles when we left. So hopefully those employees realize that we just saved them a ton of work and frustration by picking through the boards ourselves.

Sunday included putting half the top plates on the walls, cleaning up extra concrete around the footings, and cleaning the pea gravel out of our sump and waste crocks. A neighbor came over to visit and told Dad that he has been so impressed with our house and shares Dad's opinion that the house next door is not quite up to our standards. :) We then cut our day a couple hours short to go home and have a birthday dinner with Grandpa and Madonna.

Hopefully the floor joist will be here early this week and we can get the floor on and do some back fill. The quicker we back fill, the less I have to dig clay out of the hole after it rains. That is getting to be a very tiresome and messy job.

So that's the update for today...