Your little bit of pretty.  Onto the nuts and bolts…

Well, the walls are down and the whole darn thing is as open as the day is long.  It’s pretty exciting.  It still looks a bit rough, but, give it a break, it’s a little bit naked right now and very few of us look all that great naked, you have to admit.

View into our lovely kitchen.  (It takes imagination, ok.)

View FROM the lovely kitchen.

James has been hard at work rejigging, my word, not the engineer’s, the roof truss system.  You used to not be able to see past the ceiling so it really didn’t matter what it looked like.  It also didn’t matter that there were about 10,000,000 dirt dauber nests up there, but we’re just going to leave that in the past. Now, all that is getting opened up, so not only do we need a different way to support it, we also want it to look good.

Getting my inspiration from, as every good designer does, my local taco restaurant, we’re running joists across the ceiling that will remain visible when the ceiling has been tongue and grooved.

Taco Temple…pretty cool, huh?

Us…..

…getting there.

James has been doing a great job of saving everything he’s deconstructed, so these joists are part of the original structure; they’ve just been de-nailed and cleaned up a bit.

On another note….welcome to the country life-we have a beaver problem.

Beaver dam….at least it looks kind of cool.

I had to know this sort of wildlife management issue was going to rear its ugly head at some point.  The part of me that stood off to the side while my friends Sumner and Clark struggled to trap a snapping turtle over at Spotted Dog Farm and kind of chuckled, “oh country people and their country problems” is now paying the price.  I kind of liked the idea of a beaver dam and the cute little critters with their paddle tails and industriousness.  Then I read that, not only do they threaten the hundreds of trees I’m planning to plant on the property (I’m getting ahead of myself…see my post about the Craigslist plantings), they also threaten my dogs with icky diseases.  OH NO YOU DON’T YOU LITTLE BUCKTEETH RATS!!!!  You cross the line when you go after my pups!

Defenseless dog who must be protected from loathsome beaver.

So, we have to make our first of, I’m sure, many calls to Ag Extension and see what we have to do to relocate the buggers.  I’ll just add it to the honey-do list.  I have a house to concentrate on after all.