hm, weeks later and the promised post has failed to materialize. it's been a busy summer.

about that promised surprise under our new front porch....here's a hint (look close):
in the meantime, we ripped up the rotten boards, knocked down a wall, cleaned out the dirt and put in a foundation.under the porch we now have a 300 gallon food-grade container that formally held kosher cooking oil. we hooked it up to our gutters and the new drains on the front porch and will use the collected water to keep our front yard nice and lush. FYI, in a recent summer rainstorm (before we had our gutters hooked up to the tank) we collected 5 gallons of water in about 10 minutes. we're thinking we need a few more of those containers for the backyard...

since then we've finished the front porch (still need to seal the wood, but that's next weekend's project), installed gutters and given one coat of fresh paint to the front of the house. i've also rekindled a dormant distaste for prep work. oh, and C built platform on the top of our hill.

this summer is almost over and i can hardly remember when it began. i've been lazy with posting, mainly because it's been kind of busy around these parts. i'll try to post some more photos this week. we're pretty darn excited about all of the work...

remember way back when we bought all of that redwood off of craigslist?

we deemed august the month for using up that wood and we (well C, at least) have certainly lived up to that promise.

we knew that we would be using a good portion of the wood to rebuild our rotten front porch. what we didn't expect was that we would not be doing the work ourselves. after ripping up the all of the wood porch, we took one look at the non-existent foundation and the one rotten loose 4x4 that was holding up THE ENTIRE house and knew that we needed some professional help.

first a few pictures of the porch before: we interviewed a few people and picked the one who seemed least frightened by our floating house and most willing to put up with our constant questions. now we have a beautiful concrete seismically-sound foundation and a water-proof basement.

to save ourselves some money, we opted to finish off all of the non-structural work ourselves. at this point, the porch is still unfinished and waiting for the redwood decking and railing.

we saved the siding (it was all redwood!) when the guys tore down the wall and asked them to reuse as much as possible when they rebuilt the front. we just spent 3 days patching old holes and cracks, caulking gaps and sanding the surfaces so when we repaint the house it won't look so frankensteinian.

i won't bore you guys with gobs of construction photos (just a few dozen), but i do think it's pretty darn exciting...

also, there's one very cool secret hidden under the new porch that i'll share with you later this week.