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....