I have been excavating to expose my sewer line.  I am adding another bathroom in the house and I need to tie the bathroom drain lines into the sewer line.  I have plenty of free time and a scanty paycheck as a school teacher so I excavate by hand.  I am also putting in a new window in my foundation wall so I made my excavation wide enough to accommodate the form work for a concrete window well and footings.  The dilapidated porch and door to the right of the photo is coming out when I frame in my new bathroom

I formed the footings for my new window well.  You can see the foundation to the right of the photo hanging off in mid air.  This is due to the fact that the original foundation was poured without footings and not below the frost line-that is bad.  Previous owners have gone back and dug the basement out and poured concrete walls to contain the soil under the foundations.  I have added a block wall around the perimeter of the basement on the inside of the house as another line of defense against water entering the basement.  I am going to continue this chunk of missing foundation down to my footers- like it should have been done in the beginning.  I mixed all this concrete by hand because it is too expensive to call a concrete truck out here in the middle of no where, Colorado.  I mixed all this concrete (probably 2 cubic yards) by hand one Sunday.

I put tied re-bar to the re-bars sticking out of the footings.  Now all I have to do is build my form and pour the concrete for my window well.

I have the window well formed.  Now I am ready for concrete.  My neighbor let me use his concrete mixer so the 3 tons of concrete I mixed was manageable.  I hired a kid from one of my high school classes to come and mix the concrete while I poured it in the forms with a wheelbarrow.  We started mixing at about 1 pm.  We were almost done at about 8 pm and the FORMS STARTED BLOWING OUT!  I  had to pull them back together on top with bar clamps and put additional bracing on.  I didn't get to bed until 11 pm that night.  There will be some bow in the window well but most of it will be buried anyway.  I got lucky that all 3 tons of concrete didn't end up flooding my hole and burying my sewer line!  Next time I will have to brace the forms better.

I got the forms stripped.  Since I used OSB for the forms, the impressions of the wood flakes were left in my concrete walls.  Also, I laid up cinder blocks under the new concrete header to hold it in place.  I didn't like the look of cinder blocks next to poured concrete so I plastered everything.  I just used a mix of concrete sand, Portland cement, and masonry lime.  It worked really well and I am pleased with the new window. Now I have a source of daylight in my basement.  If the electricity goes out I can still have a little bit of light down there.  Now I can vent the basement whenever I want.  I also have another point of egress in case my house blows over with a tornado and we can't make it up the main stairs.  The only think I have left to do is back fill the window well, put in an egress ladder, and a metal grate where I left the indentation in the window well wall.  The nice thing about this project is that it has given me the confidence to form and pour an entire basement foundation on a new house if I ever build one.

I went to my parent's house this spring break and made this built in computer desk and bookshelf.  Last year I tore out a closet in one of the bedrooms and re-did the entire basement floor with tile and laminate flooring.  I did not get to the desk at that time.  This time I was able to complete the desk- except for staining.  Some guests arrived and stayed in the bedroom before I could get the desk stained.  This summer I will have to finish it.

Remodling work in my house

The Kindergarten teacher wanted a bed built for her daughter.  She had a man do some metal engravings and wanted me to build the head boards and food boards.  I accidentally discovered how to raise the grain in the wood when making this bed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uPcThgDNAM

So here is the set I designed and built for our fall play: Cyrano de Bergerac  It was a lot of work but very rewarding when it was all done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_JBkghl3ZM

 I took a Spanish teaching job over here in Colorado and they made me teach Drama as well.  So this is the set I built for our Christmas play.  Good thing I brought all my tools with me or my play would have been poor quality.  The kids did a good job and people enjoyed seeing it.  I got my start in carpentry as a worker in a scene shop in a  Theater in Jr. College and never thought I would be building sets again.

Well I finished my son's bunk bed I have been working on forever.