Ugliest before the beauty?

Boy, I hope so!

It got pretty ugly there when we really started making progress.

After we got in at the cabin one evening Dave announced he thought it was time.

Time for what? I asked....

It's time to make the commitment to fixing the front of the house which starts so many projects at once, I lost count.

Ok, I said.

Let's do it.

That began a whole heap of debris and mess and.... yes, more rat poo.  *yuk*

 The lowest window set in the photo above is a 3 piece, all-in-one window.  The two side windows crank out and the middle is a picture window. It was the only salvageable window of the whole sun room because it was vinyl clad on the outside.  We tried to save the two triangular-ish windows at the top, but.... well, Dave broke one....
We DID save the main window on the bottom and MAN was it heavy!!

Ah, love having the windows open!  LOL

 what a mess...but the front's not off yet!

 More coming down...

 It's off!  It looks so naked!
It looked naked back then and now when I look back at these picture and man, I can't believe it even looked like this!!!

Time to rebuild......

Stay tuned!

Rain, Rain, Go Away....

Come again when you can rain outside only!

We used to joke around that it rained more inside our future house than it did outside!

Sad, I know.

Here's a look back at the way the roof line and more specifically, the roof condition was in the beginning...

 From this angle in the pic above your can see how thick the fireplace was.

 The vault here in the sun room cam back into the main roof at mid point.  On the inside the main roof line actually went all the way down to the edge of the room.  So the sun room and it's full view/vaulted area were not actually visible from inside the main area of the house.
Here's a pic from the inside...

The hole you see in the photo above was a skylight or sorts, over the porch.  There was no roof over the porch on the other side.

 Because there was no porch roof on this side and this side faces South/Southwest...the really nice 8' sliding doors were shot.  As were the windows you see here on the right.  The wood framing was toast and had years of baking in the hot southern NM sun.

 The dogs thought it was hilarious to come inside and out on to the porch while I was in the bucket truck!!

Lilly took it upon herself to perch herself in a chair to pose....

And sometimes I found Dave sitting on the roof.... LOL

The Essentials of Life: WATER - Part III (*specifically a shower)

I love a good hot shower!

It's how I wake up in the morning and it sure feels good after a long hike or a hard days work on your house....

But we had to wait until we got back to the cabin each day before we could have a hot shower... or even a cold shower for that matter.

Fact is, we had NO shower.

By this time we had been trolling our local Facebook group page called Lincoln County Garage Sale here and there for building material finds we couldn't live with out.

One such find was a Harvest Gold (remember that color from the 70's??) upright freezer....
for a whoppin' $30.  A nice couple had moved into a new home that had one in the garage they weren't going to use, so we picked it up... you can see it here about to enter our basement -

Still working fantastically, I might add!

Another one of our big scores to this point was our new to us shower.   The Lodge was converting a couple rooms into some new conference room space and needed to offload a one piece shower stall.

For $120!

So I drove over one day and hauled it back.... Dave was busy with some building something that was impossible to tear away from or certain disaster was imminent.....

(hmmmm. Somehow it seems this is the case a lot.  Perhaps I should look into this phenomenon...)

Anyway.  It sat in our drive area for a week or so while we contemplated not only where to put it, but how the heck we were going to get it in our house! It's huge! (it's laying on it's back in the pic)

Around this time Dave's sister, Ruth, and her boyfriend happened to be in town....Boy, were we glad!  Extra hands!
After determining the location and reconfiguration of the sliding glass door into just a single door we removed the slider from the jam and finagled the shower into place and
after a few more hours of hooking up the new tankless water heater and running still more Pex lines, two shower heads (yes, I said 2), we had a shower!   Yes!   One step closer to it feeling more like a house and less like a project....

The Essentials of Life: WATER - Part II

Once the tank was at the top of the mountain it was time to run Poly Pipe (Or Cowboy pipe as it is apparently referred to, according to the guy at Lowe's who quickly became my best friend during all the trips I made for fittings and parts....)

You see, at this time, I was working down in Alamogordo at GCRMC filling in for their SLP a couple days a week as well as working at Betty Dare nursing facility, which conveniently are both located right behind the Lowe's.

This left me to be errand girl most days.

I didn't leave for home with out a phone call to see what parts Dave might need.

The guy at Lowe's came to know I could find my way around the fittings and parts and he would help me on occasion to fill a large order or to create some fittings to solve a problem we were having.

Once we had our pipe and fittings it was time to run the pipe starting at the lower end/well head all the way up the mountain - 500 feet UP.   And this pipe had to go straight up the mountain, not following some nice cut road.    Oh, and we had to run electrical line in a poly pipe too! 
*if you're counting we're up to 3 poly pies running up and down our mountain!

Oh, no... it was over the rocks and under the trees and around the brush... well, you get the picture.

So up we went.    Then we had to cross our drive way - twice. 

Which have I mentioned has 2 switchbacks in it? (a subject for another post)

After we made it up to the tank we had to run another poly pie back down to the first driveway crossing and turn to get water to our house.  Another 150 feet!    Then we continued on down to the middle driveway, crated a shut off and turned to get water to our travel trailer, now the barn area.

(*see the cute little Airstream back there in the back??  Yah, that's my future project!!)

The electrical line was needed because we bought a really cool in tank monitoring system for allowing our well to kick on and off as needed to keep our holding tank with enough water in it that

• a) we weren't going to suddenly run out during a shower, and 
• b) so we didn't have to be running up the mountain constantly checking the level, and 
• c) so we wouldn't have to be turning the pump on and off manually 

(thus forgetting to shut the pump off, conversely ruining the pump and causing us to pull the well....etc. etc.)
Well you get the idea. It was worth the investment.

Now the water is to the house....

However.

I like the water to be free flowing through the pipes IN the house!
(I know, I'm picky this way)

So Dave ran water lines through our basement wall, hooked up our water softner and pressure tank (because I also like water pressure and our gravity feed just wasn't going to cut it)

 
Sometimes Lily helped on the tractor:

 Sometimes we both helped run the tractor:

(See, sometimes I make it into a pic or two....)

Then he ran Pex lines all through to the kitchen and bathroom. (which of course has now shower yet at this point....more on this to come)

Finally running water!

But winter was fast approaching and our waterline was now completely exposed, laying above ground.  What do you do with that much water line?  You bury it!

Ok, that only works if you live on flat terrain or gentle slopes.  We have neither.

We buried what we could...and worried about the rest.

Time for research.

Heat tape!

But would that work?? 

We bought heat tape and some polycell foam pipe isulator pieces to go around that.
And a ton of Gorllia Tape®
And we set out to insulate our water for the winter.

And what'd'ya know?  It worked!

We've had water since then and *knock on wood* it keeps working!

Water is good.... 

Sometimes it's just doggy insanity

Sometimes our dogs think they run the show.....

There are no words.....

*except we are no longer owners of this abandoned loveseat, thankfully.

The essentials of life: WATER - Part I

As I mentioned before the house had pipes (copper mostly) and was plumbed...sort of.

The toilet was precariously set and attached to the septic line.

The pipes were run under the crawlspace to areas unknown and there was a sink in the makeshift location set in a really nice cabinet base that matched the door leading into the bathroom.

But we had no running water.  Not sure if there ever really was running water here.  The rumors we heard from fellow colony neighbors was that they hauled water in, in 5 gallon buckets.  Mind you this wasn't 1960 either.  This was the 1980's by this point.


So it was time to tie into our well way down below us and run waterline to way up above us to get water to a holding tank.

Oh, did I mention there was no holding tank up there yet?   There's wasn't.

So we spent most of one day navigating our drive and part of the neighbors drive to reach the top edge of our property.

Navigating it in the tractor was the easy part.  There was a road.

Navigating it while holding a 3000 gallon holding tank.   Well, that was another story.

 It was so big it blocked the view of the tractor!

But it was possible with a Shiner in hand...

Dave's mom gave us a hand in moving it.... Everything was going well until he about rolled the tank over onto our heads!!

And we made it!  *Edit - I completely forgot that Dave had to cut the last 50 yards or so of road and create the level spot for the tank to sit on.  He cut it out, leveled it off, hauled in some base course, set the tank and then we buried around it 1/2 way up by hand with shovels.  Then we had to connect the lines, but that's for another post....

 

*edit -Oh, and as always: Jack was supervising:

 

soon, we would have water.....

...but it would be a long process trying to get it everywhere we need it and winterized before the first cold spell!