another full weekend of work

So this past weekend we got an extra day of work in. Andy & the kids got to fly in a private plane early Friday morning with one of Andy's client's who was headed to Lake Placid. Tosh and I met them @ the airport and we were working by 11am. Uncle Frank was busy clearing the trees and boulders in what will eventually be the parking lot.

This is a sample of the gravel we may use for the driveway and parking area.

Here is Tosh looking over all the site work going on. He is sitting on the new well that was installed this past week and looking down towards the leech field. This, in the winter, will be where the Toboggan run starts and you can kind see how it will wind down and around the trees.

This is the old well pump they took out when they installed the new one.

It was a beautiful day and the sky and clouds were so cool, I decided to take some off angle pictures of the castle and here they are:

So, I think I told you in a previous blog, that after we carry those 80lbs. bags of cement up the 45 spiral stairs, we were mixing the concrete by hand with rakes and shovels. Well, Andy saw that we have a small cement mixer on the first floor and decided to see if it worked and it did. so we disassembled it and carried that up the 45 spiral stairs and now that is doing the mixing for us, here is Rex watching over it to get the perfect consistency

We get so busy running up and down the spiral stairs we often don't get to use the other staircase. When I decided to take the other way down I realized I hadn't really seen, or taken a picture, of this staircase since we opened it up. When you look at Andy's sketches, this is where the draw bridge type stairs are.

OK, you've seen the cistern before, but never this clean, cause Ruby & I cleaned up about 20-30 Big Buckets of debris from the walls and floor and carried them all outside. Remember this will eventually be the wine cellar wine.

Last week I told you how we started to mark the entire 20 acre property, well it was time to finish this weekend. Here Andy is debriefing us and showing us the shape of the property.

and the crew is ready. Ruby has the marking tape, Rex has the chainsaw, Andy has the plans, and I have the camera!

we found some of the property to be very dense. If you look hard enough you can see Andy looking directly @ us.

Here is Tosh and Rex waiting at one end of a marked area for Andy to find the other end, so we can mark everything in between.

We weren't lost, really, we had the plans and just needed to figure out if we go straight or turn to find the next survey pole.

Half way through our expedition we came up a big open area on top of some huge rocks, it was really cool and made for a nice resting spot.

Rex was marking and tagging away

and these are my artistic fern pictures, it is amazing all the different shades/colors of green you come across in the forest.

Ruby found other creative ways to use the marking tape. Cute Ruby!

I was talking to a friend who thought we were out in the middle of nowhere, so I though I should show you that we have a dirt road in from a main road. Notice the weeds are nicely trimmed along the way in, that was last weeks project!

The kids caught a ride on the trailer as we moved concrete blocks from old fire pit to new fire pit.

If you look close in this picture you can see Andy in the top floor window. He rigged up a system to lower Big Buckets of dirt down to us. These are the buckets we filled back in May when we were cleaning up the piles of sand that they were using to mix concrete. We needed to fill in the well hole and Andy was going to buy some sand and then remembered we had all those buckets right up on the fourth floor. Here is the well almost full. We had quite the system, Andy lowered them down, Rex was on 3rd floor pushing them our so they didn't get caught in the 2nd floor window, Ruby unclipped full buckets & re clipped empty buckets, and I carried full buckets over to well and dumped them in.

Later Saturday and Sunday, when Rex & Andy were pouring the second & third stair of the weekend, Ruby & I cleaned up 3-4 piles of big brush in this area.

and here is the 9th stair being completed. It is getting close, 6 more to go, Andy said it is hard to get tools in there to do what he needs to do.

and that was last weekend. We had a few visitors, expected and unexpected, but either way, it is always fun to have people stop by and see their reactions to the place. It's even more fun when they stay and help, so again, that is my open invitation to anyone who wants to help out.

We go up this weekend, just for a day, for the block party. We are going to finally meet our neighbors & have some fun in Tupper. Somehow I think Andy is going to find a way to squeeze in some work!