“To all the sparrows, wasps, spiders, ants, butterflies, moths, giant black flies, squirrels, and other critters who have or are currently making our house your home or playground: you have one week to permanently vacate the premises. Not once have you paid rent, yet you consistently make a mess of the place. If you do not leave by this deadline, the building you currently inhabit by choice will become your prison.”

It seems a tad unfair that we won’t be the first residents of our own home, but I suppose it’s to be expected. After all, we’ve invaded the precious space of our animal friends, and really, who wouldn’t want to live there?

I must say, the “McDougall Olive” is coming along quite nicely. Our window installation is getting done in stages, and the final one is coming right up. It won’t be long and our house will finally be weather – and critter – tight.

We’re so happy with both the quality and the look of our windows. They complement Timberbuilt’s cozy Spanish Olive design very well. It’s quite remarkable how with each one that gets put into place, the house comes further into its own and its personality becomes more apparent.

The windows are a definite highlight in what has felt like the very slow progression of our build since I last posted (three months ago – what?!). It seemed for a long while that nothing was happening, and then what was getting done, while important, was awfully dull.

I was warned there’d be times like this.

It didn’t help that we put work on the house on hold for a bit while we dealt with our own “eviction.” Our rental/house-sitting arrangement was up mid-July, so, as planned, John and I moved into my mom and stepfather’s place. It was a ton of exhausting work, and our garage, which should be used for storing building supplies, is now jammed with boxes and a variety of items we plan to purge before they ever make it inside the house. (If Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up isn’t inspiration enough to get rid of your junk, I recommend moving it twice in less than 12 months without a place to put it).

Since then, we’ve gotten our focus back and we take steps each day toward checking off jobs on our current to-do list. The best part for me is there’s more all the time that I can do to help: sweep, shovel gravel, move somewhat heavy objects, make phone calls, argue about appliance choices, and so on.

I’m looking forward to posting about some of our very recent projects, but in the meantime, I feel compelled to do a little catching up. Here’s an overview of the progress you’ve missed:

Basement floor
John was busy through June prepping the basement for concrete. This included digging trenches for plumbing, covering the sand in pink Styrofoam and then a layer of thick plastic, sticking rebar into the foundation, and working with the plumber to run pipe for our in-floor heat. I had no idea so much goes on beneath a floor. That said, it’s still not exactly the stuff of thrilling blog posts.

Septic
In July, we got to spend a lot of time with our friend Joe and his grandson Jonathan while they were hard at work building our septic field and installing our septic tank. The field worked out well, but some creativity was required to find a place for the tank after Joe discovered we had less space for it than we thought at its planned location.

Landscaping
John’s heavy equipment skills allowed him to borrow Joe’s machines to move some boulders around and transfer buckets of sand and gravel for us to spread on the river side of the house.

I think enough time has passed that it’s OK to tell you his skills also got him out of trouble when the mud we were working on seemingly turned to quicksand. For a while that day, it looked like we were going to have a permanent – and very expensive – yard ornament.

John continues to use his own wheel loader for a myriad of jobs, including endless tidying up.

So, we’re making progress, which is relative of course. People around here keep asking whether we’ve moved in yet. I’m pretty sure they’re actually serious.

(And no, we still haven’t picked our siding. Making that decision may very well go down as the single worst part of building this house. But we’re close, really close.)