At last a real entry way!

Well the busy beavers have been at it again, and they have now completed the steps to our front door! We seem to have kept a bit of momentum after my dad left, and there has been some great progress this week. Dale and Rina finished the stairs on the deck so we can now walk up and down to get in and out of the yurt. Quite novel since we have been using a step ladder for months.
I put up the heat shield for our stove today so we are close being able to have a full blown fire, though there are a few other things stove related to finish before we really heat things up. We have had a few small fires this week since they are quite helpful for dry out all the drywall mud I've been using.
The big news for me though is the finishing of taping! I still have finish coats to do, but it feels great to be done with that step. It's gone well up to this point, but I'm glad that I had some prior experience. I'm mostly hoping to not have to do much sanding, and so far it's looking good.
We've also seen some progress in getting electricity. They have installed all the poles, and run support cables as well as trimmed all the trees that needed it. With any luck they will be running the supply cables tomorrow, so we may see power tomorrow! No rain please!
I may not have mentioned this earlier, but we have been without our skidsteer for a couple of months. The starter conked out, and I have not had time to get it pulled out until now. I did manage to do that the other day as well which is good with colder weather coming. It is just sitting in front of the yurt, and I was not relishing working on it if the weather got any colder. It turns out there is a place not to far from here that rebuilds starters so hopefully that will be fixed soon as well. Things are coming along.

Rocked up and ready to burn

Hey all,
Well we haven't gotten around to posting anything for quite a while again, but there's been a lot going on so I thought I had better get back to it to fill you all in.
My folks came to visit this past week, mom on Wednesday, and dad late on Friday night, which was great. Mom headed back on Tuesday, but dad is able to stay until Saturday. It's been great to share the progress with them, and having some new energy and excitement has been a great help. Mom got to spend a good amount of time with Abrahm which he loved and dad has been helping out with anything that needs doing around the yurt.
We managed to finish the sheet rocking today which is a great relief, the last piece went on the ceiling in the bathroom this evening just before packing up for the day. If that wasn't exciting enough, we also managed to get the stove installed today and finish the chimney! Now we just need to get a piece or two of sheet metal for a heat shield and we will be ready to warm the place up. Big progress! Also in the past few days we've managed to get the front door in, and the on demand water heater is mounted, though not hooked up. We'll have to see how the weather is in the next few days, but the plan is to get going on the front steps.
Leslie is of course excelling in her studies, especially the clinical areas where I think she is definitely the star, and Abrahm is enjoying the bounty of fall. He comes over to the yurt most days after daycare, and promptly heads out to scavenge for apples along our driveway. He loves finding and eating apples, and there are many to choose from along the way down the drive. He is also quite fond of our recent acquisition. He loves anything related to tractors and every time he sees ours he gets a big smile and wants to get right on.
As you can see from the photos the stove is indeed black with a green pipe before it exits the yurt through a nice shiny insulated pipe. The color scheme is courtesy of scavenged pipe from Leslie's folks garage. Can't be to choosy. You can also see that dad had a chance to get well acquainted with our wonderful rocky soil while digging the hole for the supports for the chimney. And yes we did manage to extract him.
Well time to get ready for bed. Better sign off and crawl upstairs.

Of plumbers and tractors

Well it's been quite some time since the last post, and things have been rolling along relatively smoothly here. Much of the drywall is now down, though there have been many challenges, and I'm afraid there will be many more where ceilings are concerned. Rooms that are not square on three sides, and curved on the fourth are quite difficult I must say. Our room is finished though, and I have started on the bathroom. Saving Abrahm's room for last as it presents the additional challenge of have insulation in the ceiling which makes finding the centers of floor joists for measurement that much more difficult. Oh well, one step at a time. None of this is helped at the moment by the fact that I managed to give myself a very sore neck today trying to hang a large piece of Sheetrock on the ceiling by myself. Dumb! Hopefully I'll be back at it tomorrow, with some help.
Some other excitement of this week was the purchase of a tractor! We've been faithfully watching Uncle Henry's, which for those of you not from Maine, is a buy sell, swap publication put out weekly with just about anything one could ever want in it. I spotted a good looking Massey Ferguson 65 Diesel, and went to look at it last Saturday. It turned out to be a nice machine, though a bit faded and tired looking. It should be great tractor for us as it is large enough to do most jobs that we would like including plowing. It also has an oversize bucket which is always a bonus. I brought it home yesterday, and with it a shop manual and an operators manual in which Abrahm has fallen in love. It was of course pouring rain the whole day which made the loading and unloading of the tractor quite pleasant, and no sooner had I gotten it off our trailer than I got it stuck in a big mud hole. Luckily Leslie was there to pull me out with the truck.
The biggest excitement of the week for all of us except Abrahm was the arrival of the plumbers on Monday. They took about two days to finish the rough in plumbing and install the bath/shower combo. That means as soon as the well driller comes back to finish the pressure tank installation we will be able to close all of the walls and finish mudding the joints. Then it's on to floor sanding and finishing and then kitchen installation. We're getting closer!
Well I think I'll call it a night and go nurse my sore neck.

Rock!

I started sheet rocking today, which feels like another big step in the drive towards moving in. So far things are going well Our plumber is supposed to bring over the shower/tub combo tomorrow so that I can build the walls to surround it. He's coming back on monday to do more installation so that I can keep going with the dry wall. There's more electrical work to do, but I'm almost there.
We've been thinking about how to finish things off inside, and have come up with a plan to build in book shelves in the loft. They'll face out towards the main living space, and be accessible from the ladder. It will give us quite a bit of storage space without using up much of our highly valuable floor space.
It's nice to be thinking of things like that and knowing that they are not so far off. They feel like finishing touches. Along with things like that are things like the floor which still needs sanding and finishing, but that will happen as soon as the drywall is up.
We are also thinking ahead to cold weather and needing to get the stove set up. I think that we have a pretty good idea of how that will go, but it is a bit intimidating putting a hole in the side of the yurt.
Well we'll keep you posted as thing progress.