July 2020 Part 2: House Progress

 We worked on the house some more in July. There was still lots to unpack and organize. And since we sold our dining room set to the people that bought our house, we needed to get a new table and chairs. We ordered both in July, but only the chairs made it. I had to laugh at the brand. 

You can see them, minus the seats in this picture. I didn't like the seat color, so I added a coat of poly stain to the seats to get them the color I wanted, so we had seatless chairs in our dining room for a week or so. 

I had to figure out where to put all my birds. I've collected lots of birds over the years. 

The first room we put together was the living room. This is where we have church, so it was a big priority to put it together so that we wouldn't be distracted by the clutter when we worship. 

These shelves that were a big part of our fireplace focal point in the last house got assigned to the office. That kind of changed their function. The drawers got filled with officy stuff, but the shelves have been a struggle. That's why they were still empty as July came and went. 

We wanted to get our downstairs storage under control before things really got rocking and rolling with the basement finishing. We got shelves at Home Depot

And I tracked down a couple of rotating shelves from KSL. Brian didn't feel like building one this time. Plus, we didn't really have the time. I was pretty pleased that I could find these since they were out of stock at Thrive/Shelf Reliance. 

We worked hard with unpacking, and we were able to pull one car into the garage by the end of the month! Yay!!!

In July, work officially started on our basement!!! Framers came over and had the whole thing framed in just a few days! It was amazing! When Brian framed our last house, it took a long time because he could only do it on free nights and weekends. We felt like we were master multi-taskers that the basement was getting framed while we were doing other things. 

Once the basement was all framed out, Brian got to work on wiring in every spare minute. This time, he couldn't take his time...the rest of the basement and inspections hung on him! Michael even pitched in and helped some. 

In our Saratoga Springs house, we hired someone to install the basement panel, but in this house, Brian did it himself! He felt pretty confident about doing it after wiring our last house and the old part of my mom's house. 

There were many days when Brian regretted saying that he would do the wiring instead of paying an electrician. The sweat equity was meant to save us money, but sometimes, he wasn't sure it was worth it, especially with all the shortages on electrical circuits and stuff, thanks to Covid. Amazingly, we were able to track down what we needed, but it required trips to Home Depot in Ogden and lots of internet searching. 

The hardest thing to do was getting power and lights into our cold storage. Brian had to drill through a concrete wall, all the while avoiding rebar to do it. It took lots of tries with the drill, but he was finally able to put the light in the storage room on it's own switch and get a plug in there for future electronics for our theater. 

Power is such a beautiful thing, isn't it?

While the basement was happening inside, we had yard work starting on the outside. We talked to multiple landscapers and finally went with a crew recommended by our neighbors. Here's our rough landscaping plan. 

It was a bit of an untamed weed jungle in our backyard by this point. 

It was fun watching from our air-conditioned house while the workers cleared out all the weeds in preparation for leveling and grading the backyard. The boys couldn't resist helping. 

After the weeds were cleared, trenches went in for sprinkler lines. 

And then the sprinkler lines went in. 

The whole thing was highly entertaining apparently. 

They brought in dirt and machinery and got the backyard graded like we needed. 

We couldn't wait to get the grass in so it wasn't so dusty! But we were happy with how much progress happened in the backyard throughout July.