While Scott and I worked on flooring upstairs, Jeremy cut our leftover car siding into trim for the upstairs. This way it matches the ceilings and the beams and we don't have to buy more stuff.
Stack of trim waiting to be installed
Once the trim was made, he moved on to finishing out the windows. We used cedar boards milled from trees we cut off of my mother's family farm (where she was born) to finish out the deep window wells and do the window built in shelves in our room. They are absolutely beautiful thanks to Jeremy's amazing attention to detail. There is something really special about being able to tell my kids that when their grandmother was a little girl, she probably played around the trees that are now in their windows. You can read the story of us cutting those trees 5 years ago here: http://thelehrmans.blogspot.com/2012/11/logging-again.html
Sealing the boards after they were cut to fit.
The first finished window!
Cedar under our window waiting for the built in
While Jeremy was busy with that, Scott and I hung the ceiling fans in the bedrooms, finished out the rest of the upstairs electrical and hung the doors. Doing the trim was somewhat tricky in that our beams are not square thanks to the trees growing on the side of a mountain. That meant that the trim around every beam and collar tie had to be custom cut which was a very fiddly, tedious process. The end result is beautiful though!
Doors hung
Finicky trim
They were predicting a very cold couple of nights and we really wanted to get the kids into their rooms and out of the RV before that happened, so we were all in on getting the rooms done. We just made it! The kids got to sleep in their own rooms for the first time on the first near freezing night of this fall. Whew! Then we started moving the rest of their furniture in and put the finishing touches on Jeremy and I's room.
Jacob on moving day
Our room with actual furniture!
With everyone in a more stable sleeping place, it was time to get the power on to the house. We had been running our refrigerator and a single lamp off of an extension cord from the outlet in the shed since August. Now that we had all the circuits upstairs and in the bathroom tied off and ready, we started the process to cut power over to the main house panel. First, we dug a trench and laid the heavy gauge wire in it inside of electrical conduit.
Trench with conduit starting
Then we killed the power to the power system in the shed - inverter, batteries, everything - to make sure no one got hurt. Then my amazing brother took care of connecting the wires to the appropriate ports on the inverter and in the house while the rest of us buried the conduit.
Covered trench and Scott working on the cables in the shed.
Then it was time to flip the switch! As you can see in the sneak preview above, it worked! There was much rejoicing that we didn't have to keep wearing head lamps around the house to see. It was a pretty awesome feeling to get to pull the extension cord out of the house for good!
No more extension cord!!!!
Let there be light!
Due to the impending cold weather, getting the place for the wood stove ready to go became the next top priority. The first step was to finish out the electrical by the front door since we needed to close up that wall. That involved installing the outside light and outlet. Scott and I knocked that out in about 2 hours last Wednesday.
Outlet and door light
Inside view of the wood stove corner
Now we are focusing on getting the corner ready for the wood stove. It is going on a platform which Jeremy is busy building. One step at a time, we're getting there. It is starting to feel a lot more like home now though.
