Tearing it Down. Building it Up.

Last fall we decided to make the small yellow house a farm store. We haven’t really blogged much since the fall (sorry about that. I will try to do better). However, the lack of blogging may signify a large amount of work in other areas, particularly the store.

This winter my father and I have spent much of our time freezing all of our digits off working on the yellow house. Many hot chocolate breaks and painful numbing sensations later, I feel that I ought to give an update as to how this venture is going.

First off, we had to clean out the yellow house. This was not very appealing work, and the finished job didn’t exactly make us feel accomplished, but at least we were ready to start doing some work that we could be proud of.

Next, we redid the stairs down to the basement. The setup that was in there was awkward, inconvenient, and took up critical floor space. So we planned out where exactly we wanted to have stairs, and did away with the old ones. We had to build a supporting wall downstairs and replace a few floor joists, which actually went much better than we thought it would. We cut the stringers, put up the stairs, and ever since have been delighted to go downstairs for any (or no) reason whatsoever.

Then came what I hope is the most difficult task we will have to do for the whole store: we replaced the center beam in the house. This took a couple of weeks of preparation, as well as a prayer that the house would stay standing when we cut the rafters and an escape route just in case it didn’t. By the grace of God, our temporary walls and rafter ties held it all together.

We put up our beam, and  roughly 143,000 nails later (my arm is s
till sore just thinking about it), we had completed our task. We were then able to wipe out all of the walls and have a wide open building to build in as we saw fit.

Naturally, the next step was to build the other walls. We built a wall around the steps, a couple of archways into the two rooms in the back, and framed in the bathroom. This week, we are looking to build the counter for the store, and then the skeleton of the store will be complete. It is already so different than it was in the fall.

There is still much work to do, however. We must replace a window or two and put in our main entrance when the weather is kind enough to let us. On the inside, we have to run electric, plumbing, and heating before putting up insulation and the finished walls. We also have the floor to finish. On the outside, we have some scraggly trees to cut down, a deck to build, and a small parking lot to make, so there is no dearth of work ahead of us.

Our goal is to have the store ready for a grand opening in the Spring of 2017, but in the meantime, we would be delighted to show anybody who stops by what progress we have made. We may even have the store as a useable work in progress later in the summer.