WEEK 28

This past week has been absolutely INSANE. I'm pretty sure that we took what could have easily been a few weeks worth of work and crammed it into one. I just calculated it out, and counting our hours from last Saturday to this Saturday, David and I worked a total of 108 hours on our house in just 8 days (7 if you minus Sunday). And poor David, he also worked an additional 40 hours at his real job. Whew. No wonder we are tired beyond belief. What were we thinking!?!

So this week's real fun started on Friday evening when we had to finishing prepping all the yards for our Sod party on Saturday.

All of the families came out, along with some volunteers (Thanks: Mom, Dad, Sara, Kari, Joey, and Barbara!) and we started raking and tilling and finishing up sprinklers: (David was pretty proud of this little set up...knowing nothing about sprinklers I guess I just didn't quite understand how cool it was...but he made me take a picture, so here it is! David's magnum opus. he he):

Prepping the yards was a pretty overwhelming task, and I'll admit that it didn't take me long to become completely discouraged. It was so overwhelming! We had 6 huge yards, and none of them were close to being ready for sod and all I can say is that I very much dislike Saratoga Springs soil! It is so hard, and rocky...and did I mention rocky?!? We filled up wheel barrow, after wheel barrow, after wheel barrow, with rocks, only to discover that we then didn't have enough soil. ARGH!!! And after David and I put in our combined 18 hours of work for the day I went home (around midnight) feeling exhausted and completely discouraged about the whole thing. Wishing that we had a lot more time (like how about an extra week?), and wishing for a nice plush layer of topsoil...

And then we got up at 5:30 AM (yup we really did) to try to finish getting ready for all of the volunteers we had invited over to lay sod at 8. We were so far from being ready...can you sense the stress and panic in our faces???

But then a few miracles happened:

Our supervisor actually showed up to help us. (FYI: the skid steer was a bit better than a wheel barrow)

and then we had roughly 75 FABULOUS people show up to help. And all I can say is THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!

If it wasn't for all of you...we literally NEVER would have finished. ever.

I am sooo glad this past weekend is over. It was probably one of the hardest couple of days I have experienced throughout this entire house building process, and that says a lot, because I've definitely had a lot of hard days. Though perhaps it is just because I have forgotten how truly awful it was to shovel 4 feet of snow out of 3 basements, or how miserable it was to work outside in the rain for 5 hours when it was only 35 degrees...not sure :-) All I do know, is that it was such an incredibly hard day, both physically and emotionally. And I'm glad it's over.

Thanks guys: