More work on the addition

We let the project vegetate for most of the winter. Come spring, though, we had saved up a few dollars and were ready to resume, when the IRS said we need to send them more money. So we let the project vegetate until summer! At least we got a lot of the veggies in the ground, and some other work done.

Val always gets the gardening bug about February. I strung up a bunch of grow lights and the seedlings pretty much took over the south end of the living room. This is less than half of them. We had several hundred seedlings. As usual, the local herbivores got a lot of the produce, including the deer on the Jerusalem Artichokes. Fifteen-foot tall sunflower-looking things, leaves half eaten away. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Back to the addition. We decided to make the downstairs into a new kitchen. the existing kitchen is hard to use. Bad ergonomics. However, the new kitchen needs to have an island between two of the posts, and the island needs utilities: gas, electricity, and water, not to mention a drain.

We cut a trench through the concrete floor, which turned out to be almost twice as thick as specified. We had to go rent a larger diamond saw and use a jackhammer, but we got it done. the part you can't see underneath the photo is a hole about chest deep. We had to connect to the drain under the house. Fortunately I took a lot of pictures back when the floor was poured five years ago, so we knew where to dig. The guys who did most of the work knew what they were doing, and we now have four properly-installed tubes coming out of the floor right where the island will be.

All spring and summer I kept whittling away on the mound west of the house. It started out as high as I am tall, and extended from several feet south of the hydrant to the front of the near shed, about to the barbeque in the back of the photo. By the time I left for Columbus (more on that in a future post), it was gone. I removed the entire thing myself with a shovel and garden cart. Good exercise! You can kind of see the remaining two feet of one small corner of the mound to the left of the hydrant. Speaking of the hydrant, I also installed the hydrant. You can see the rain-collapsed dirt where I had dug the trench to the water line that goes to the shed where we keep the chickens. The board you see is holding a tape measure. I needed to make sure the hydrant was more than eight feet from the house. We planned to build an eight-foot-wide deck along the entire west side. More on that in a future post, too.
As summer progressed, we got the place painted and insulated. I'll show you some pictures of that in the next post.