Le Cotage Conversion- When all else fails, use your backhoe.

Not much has happened this week. We went to dinner at a friend's cabin in the Narrows on Monday so nothing happened that day. Today, I went to the temple and had one hour before Mutual plus it was freezing cold. So I removed the belongings of the previous occupants from the upstairs bedrooms while Jake built forms for the final window concrete-pour. They left a bunch of very personal stuff. Pictures, temple sealing certificates, diplomas... it is sad to see. Anthony and Jake got the rest of the carpet removed upstairs and guess what! The original hardwood floors are mostly intact. That will save us some money!

(Last week) Morgan took all the dry-wall down on this end by himself as far high as he could reach.

(Last week) When your sledgehammer gets broken and you need to punch out a window... now THAT'S thinking.

Got all the walls bare. Then the ceiling. This is a weird L-shaped area that we will turn into three bedrooms. The basement now smells better than the upstairs. That is window #1, where the boys were showing off with the sledgehammer.

Window #3, in the corner of the L. That upper right corner got filled in with concrete. All the windows down here will be nice 4 x 4 in size. Lots of light!

This was the only enclosed bedroom down stairs. The original door is on that left wall. We will put it on the wall facing us in this picture. All three bedrooms will open into a common area.

This is the common area now. The washer was on that wood platform which was over top of a hole in the floor where they were draining the washer. Yeah, it's icky. But we got all that taken out now. The downstairs bathroom will be in that corner. That wood-burning stove will be replaced with a gas one, in a much nicer fashion and the water heater will go away.

Le Cotage Conversion- Go John Henry

Jake finally gets the first window opening to the point where we can use a sledge-hammer. Here is cousin Bill. I even tried it!

Here's Bub. Hey, batter, batter...

SWING!

Lest you think this is easy, that hammer is super heavy...

... and that wall is solid concrete with even more solid rock embedded in it!

Here's Porter. This is about as high as I could get it too!

Way to swing that iron!

Of course Coley has to try it.

Jake finishes it off. First window down, two more to go.

Haven't you ever wanted to kick a hole through a wall? He went clear through 2 sheets of dry-wall.

Now we're going to PUNCh the wall.

Ready, set...

Bill, telling me where Anthony is going to punch through.

He did it! There's his black-gloved hand and see the piece of dry-wall flying to the left peeling back paper with it?

This is so much fun!