Month: July 2018

July 30th, 2018. I just finished the final cleaning of the rental and locked the doors for good on that place. I have to run the keys over to the office this afternoon, but we are no longer residents of 1644 Blountville Blvd. We live at 268 Highfield Road, Bristol, Tennessee. It is HOME!! And we love it, despite the lack of air conditioning (I’m sure we wont’ mind that so much in October through April), the mess everywhere, and having to carry the dishes to the other building to wash them and then carry them back for them to dry in the clean space. It is an adventure and we love it!

Hopefully we are going to take a bit of a rest from the remodeling and just settle into our new home. We need to save money for a few months to pay the HVAC guy to finish the heating/air conditioning on the right side before cold weather sets in. We’ll also want to get at least one wood stove set up in the right side, with the necessary chimney work. I think any extra money will probably go to insulating the right side a bit, particularly over the bedroom.

But we are both ready for a bit of a rest – it has been a wild couple of months!!

We had to knock out all the concrete floor with a 65 pound jackhammer, and then dig out as much as 24 inches of packed clay. Then we had to lay the pipes and attach all the fittings so that it would hold 10 lbs of air pressure. We got the east room finished and inspected, so we are putting concrete on that half of the house, but the drains are not yet actually attached to the sewer system! That will come later.  We also got the bathroom window replaced.  And Luke and Krista came to visit in early June.  Although this much work was done by June 1, we did not get the first inspection done until early July. It took a while to get rid of all the leaks!

The gardens got off to a good start early this year and we were harvesting beans  in June and had a couple of tomatoes in early July. This pictures show some of the early stages of both the raised vegetable beds and the flower beds to the south east of the front of the house.

These pictures show the beginnings of work in the big house – opening the ceiling to get at the heat runs and breaking the hole in the wall for the bedroom window in the back. There are also a couple of shots of the tiny house with more furniture in it – we use it a lot now for preparing food and relaxing in a clean place. But it is hot!  There is also a shot of the nest that we found in the grill one day.

A couple of these pictures came out sideways and I don’t know what to do about that, but these show the transformation of the old shed into the tiny house, the new paint on the front of the big house, the new floor and paint in the bathroom, and a shot of the filling up of the workshop side of the big house.

When we transferred the photo programs to Don’s computer, I didn’t know how to get into this program on his computer, so I stopped posting. So I haven’t posted anything, particularly pictures, since April 29. I’m going to do a series of catch up posts, highlighting thing things we’ve done in the interim. I’ll begin in the next post with the early part of May.