adventures in building a home: building in, hauling out

On Memorial Day, we made another trek up the hill, after a bit of a break. It's hard for me to describe just how good it feels to drive up to something that looks like a house. It's so much nicer than holes. Or concrete block foundations. Or even a frame of a house.

Since I was up last, Dad went up a bunch of times with the HVAC people. Now there are more ducts. And a giant contraption down in the crawl space.

Here's Emily and Dad, admiring some ductwork.

Emily and I built some little walls to hide the duct that goes up to the second floor. We'd been hopeful that we could skip this little step, and somehow fit the duct into the wall. We underestimated the size of these things--they're big ol' ducts. But now they're encased in little walls.

We followed it upstairs, too, adding a little wall into the closet. Someday in the future, we'll have to figure out the walls above the closet and over to the bathroom.

While Emily and I were making walls, Mom and Dad did some heroic cleanup work, hauling a pickup load's worth of old wood down to fuel a neighbor's fireplace in El Cajon. The scariest moment was when they *finally* got to the bottom of the pile of stuff on the garage side, and wondered what creatures might be lurking under that last board. Happily, nothing of significance was there.

We hauled it away from the side.

Just look how clean this area is now--I think it's been 3 years since it looked anything like this! :) The Julian neighbors seemed happy about these efforts, and even volunteered to help with our weeds.

Plus, in honor of Grandpa, we set up a little low-impact watering system for the apple trees we planted just before Matt left. Buckets, with little holes in the bottom. Hopefully, these will help us keep the trees happy without using too much water (or requiring too many trips up the hill!).