Building @ MindSay

YEAH! Finally!
After being married for 27 years and for the past 15 or so years begging for it, I'm getting my Laundry/sewing/mudroom built!!!
I'm so excited! My washer and dryer have always been in my kitchen since we built the house in 1980/81. I have never liked that! Now they will be moved to my new room! We took the existing deck and are turning it into my room. It will be huge! 12'x12'! Lots of room! Sewing machine will go in there, washer, dryer and a new laundry sink! Yeah! And I have a huge walk in closet designed for the room for craft storage and such. 3 windows and a new door with a canopy roof over the doorway entrance. Before our son left for college, James took the deck railing down and sawed off the posts.This past Friday he added wood to the existing deck sides and put the floor down. This past Saturday James went under the deck and built 3 reinforcement walls with block and 4'x6'x16' beams.One on each end and one directly in the middle. Under the deck gets very shallow up near the driveway, so he was under there crawling around on his belly and back all day. I was too, helping whenever he needed it. He looked like a pig by the end of the day! LOL   All muddy and nasty!
Then Wednesday, yesterday he framed out the first wall and got it up. Today, he and his brother got the rest of  the walls  framed out. Tomorrow the roof framework goes up cause Paul can help James tomorrow all day, so James took off from work. I am taking pictures as it goes along. I wish we had done that with our house as it was being built. We built it ourselves back then only getting someone else to do fireplace,wiring and plumbing. We built our house for $22,000 back in 80-81!  That in today's numbers would probably be quadrupled!         Here's the first picture:sides added and floor down.                                                                                         This is a picture of the support beams added in. Here's two of them.
Here is the third added support beam.
Should have showed a before picture! LOL It was just a deck with a rail and now all railing is up around my deck off our bedroom. Moved the table,chairs, and umbrella to the very back deck with the grill. James will put a rail up for me around it this Spring so I can hang all my hanging baskets of flowers from it like I did on the upper deck.
This picture shows the deck off our bedroom with the new rail from the old deck!

My whicker chair pictured on the far left was chewed up by my daughter's dog! A Siberian Husky! She is still a puppy and she has shredded a lot of my things! She started chewing the siding off the house so we moved her away from the house now! My chair looks horrible doesn't it?! Bad dog.....
Another picture of our deck from below:
We bought this canopy a couple weeks ago and put it up there. it helps keep it cool and now its my favorite place to snuggle up and read a book.
Here's James adding the framework of the first wall!
and here's the first wall framed out:
 
Here's today's pictures of all the walls framed out:

another one:
 
and yet another:

Tomorrow I will post the roof pictures and whatever else they get done!
I'm so excited!

Here is another excerpt from the book I've been reading, Brother Andrew's Light Force.  In this chapter, Andrew talks of visiting a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon.  There were about 400 men living in absolutely horrid conditions: wet, cold, and rainy, living in tents up the in the mountains.  This absolutely blew me away:

    As we continued on our tour, I asked the imam, "Do you have your prayers every day, five times a day?"
    "Yes, of course," he answered.
    "So, where do you pray?  I do not see a mosque."
    The imam stroked his scraggly beard for a moment, then answered, "Every tent is a mosque."
    The answer shook me.  It suddenly dawned on me on me that Islam didn't rely on a building.  For many Christians, the Church couldn't function without buildings.  What difference would it make in our world if we believed every home was a church?

What difference would it make, indeed!  You all may recall a couple posts I wrote about this subject a few weeks ago.  I've been thinking more and more about the implications of this.  In Dan Kimball's book, They Like Jesus, But Not The Church, he talks about "escaping the church office" as he puts it.  My new pastor/boss and I had a conversation about this.  Within a couple of weeks, the church will be able to take occupancy of our new facility, meaning that we could meet in the church office each week if we chose to, but instead we're going to continue to meet in the coffee house.  It's a better environment to work in, far less stale, and it puts us out there in the world.  What could be better?

How can we make a transition in the church to function without our buildings, to the point where we could someday say "Every home/tent/person is a church?"

Alright, I promise to stop blogging about work... after tonight, lol.  I turned my keys in last night... today was my official last day, but I had absolutely nothing to do, so I turned in my keys last night and didn't go in (yet another think that makes working for a church different than almost any other job in the world... my list continues to grow).  On the way home, I gave my parents a ring, just to give them the update.  Mom (who has also worked in churches), made a comment about how it's "always hard to turn in your keys," but truthfully, it wasn't at all.  As I explained it to them, I will not miss the building, or my access to the building, one bit.  There are two reasons for this.  First, I don't believe that the building has anything to do with the actual church.  It's just a convenient place for Christians to gather in worship and fellowship... nothing more.  The second reason is actually very much related, because there were far too many people in that church who were far too worried about that silly building.  Now certainly, I understand that many of these attitudes came from the culture of the area the church was in, but it was still very frustrating for me.  No, I won't miss the place at all.  What I will miss are the people I worked with (most of them, at least, lol), the friendships that I was able to form with a few of them, and most of all, the children whose smiles always brightened my day.  I will miss the church, not the building.

In other news, the other church that I applied at called back today.  They wanted to set up a second interview, which I think is promising.  They also took the job posting down off their web site today, and it didn't run in the local paper this week... which I think is also promising.  Continuing to hope and pray on that one, but the interview isn't for a couple of weeks, so it will be a little while 'till I know much more.

My arm felt good enough to play today... but it hurt pretty bad by the time I was done... dang.

Home-buyers of tomorrow could find themselves walking across floors made from manure. Researchers at Michigan State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture insist its no cow pie in the sky dream. They say that fiber from processed and sterilized cow manure could take the place of sawdust in making fiberboard, which is used to make everything from furniture to flooring to store shelves. And the resulting product smells just fine.

The researchers hope it could be part of the solution to the nation's 1.5-trillion- to 2-trillion pound annual farm waste disposal problem.

This is not something I really wanted to know about.  If you have to use manure to make things, fine, but don't tell me about it.  I don't want to think of items in my house being built with manure.

You can read the whole article at Yahoo here.