I'm so exsided!

...and we're back.

Last week we both took some time off to get work done on the house before the madness of public education swings into full gear.

Siding. I can't believe it, but we've actually started putting it up. We are using James Hardie fiber cement siding. This stuff is pretty weird and awesome all at once.

Will nailing up the first piece.

Tim and Will making some progress on the west wall.

Pretty much done!

The color is just the unpainted color...it will eventually be yellow.

We almost finished siding on the east wall, but decided to call it quits with only two pieces left to go. Sometimes preserving your sanity trumps checking something off the to-do list.

Making some progress....

All finished. Well, except those two boards.

You probably noticed that the front of our house is looking just a tad bit out of sorts. The last major part of demolition that we have to do is the front, which is probably also the most difficult. Thankfully, we had some help from our good friend Seth Rowe. The whole time he was helping out I was wondering to myself what would compel a person who is on vacation to work on a toxic demolition project for fun. I quickly found out that Seth really just wanted to break things, i.e. our window.

Oops.

He's trying to act all innocent about it, but we all know that Seth Rowe is nothing but a violent window-breaking monster*. Thankfully our victimization was minimized by the fact that the window is being replaced anyways.

Onward and upward. The Rose bros. trudged on with insulation and OSB...

Josiah and Will took down the rest of the upper siding...

...and at the end of it all I forced everyone to smile so I could take a picture:

Don't look too closely at their actual expressions.

I have to admit. Morale was low by the end of the work day. Maybe one of the lowest yet. But we were able to accomplish quite a bit over the course of 6 days, mostly thanks to Will, Charlie and the help of Sunset Hillbillies and other good friends (God bless you Seth and Rob). We are no where near being finished, but I think we are starting to get a vision for what we have to look forward to living in and sharing with others.

At bat: electricity, prepping the front for siding, siding the back wall, and framing in the upstairs.

*Seth Rowe--you and your wife are actually pretty awesome. You can break our (old) windows anytime if it means getting you back to Bloomington.