And on we move….

They started the deck!!! I am so excited! They dug and cemented and pounded all day. The frame is up, and he will be back next Saturday to put in the posts and start nailing on the boards. Next weekend we should have at least the platform. This is all weather permitting. He might come out one evening during the week and work also. It is going to be great, and when he is finished with the deck, he will do the front porch. This will cut down the mud and dirt that is coming into this house. We have given up worrying about it for now. When the deck and porch are finished, we will have the carpet cleaned. Until then we are just ignoring it.

On to the photos….

The cats take over building projects. The men left to get lunch and the cats immediately had to check things out. Look closely and you can see Boogie practicing her balance beam routine on the lumber. This is the deck lumber, and it is also the lumber to finish the framing of the windows inside.

This is Pippin, whose balance beam routine is much further along than Boogie’s. Pippin is confident at a four foot height.

Pippin and Brando like each other a lot. As aggressive as Brando can be to the other dogs, with the cats he is fine.

It is difficult taking a good representation of the deck. I need to go down the back hill to do it, but it is so muddy that I don’t know if I would be able to climb back up. The back of the deck will be about seven feet above the ground.

The deck builder, Mike, was worried that the dogs would mess with the concrete while it set. I was confident that they would not find it interesting enough to bother it. Well, the did not bother it, but found it important to walk on each and every filled hole. No damage, just foot prints.

This picture was taken from the office window. You can see two of the four bird feeders I have in the tree above the deck. Our trees are so tall that there are not many available branches, so I have to lean out the office window, with a shepherd ’s hook, to fill the feeders. The fly though feeder is filled by using a length of a flexible downspout that I put into the feeder and pour the seed from above. Pretty clever, huh?

The bathroom has been started also. The man came and ripped up the floor to see what he had to do. He was here a total of two hours. Grrrr. He will be back Monday with the needed pipe. Hopefully we will have a new bathroom next week. The shower floor is not connected, but placed so that he could see where the pipe would go. The corner shower is going to fit perfectly there. We found one that is 38″, which is a bit bigger than most of them. It has curved glass doors and I think it is a pretty one.

And finally, a picture of Boogie only because I think she is a pretty cat. She is really a sweet cat too. We found her in Emma, at a gas station. She was named Dame Tess, but the nickname Boogie stuck with her more.