Whoa! It's been a while since I did any blogging. But then I have lots of good reasons and there's no reason I can't take all the "bloggy breaks" needed. :)
One of the main reasons I've not blogged is because our house has been a construction site again....or has been more of a construction site than usual. Ha.
This month the crew was back. Plastering, digging, digging, plastering, and pouring cement and tiling and in general making a very big mess but at the same time getting a lot done in a short amount of time! THAT has been the huge praise in all of this.
They dug a BIG DEEP hole at the corner of the house to see what is wrong with the foundation. We've had huge cracks in the walls all because something settled or moved (or both) on that corner of the house. They were thinking it was a giant rock that was under the foundation that maybe settled and caused things to move, but they never found the rock.
Here's Dane working one day while all the guys stood around watching. :)
Also, the one guy laid tile and put in a proper drain with a cover for our "plumbing room". So nice to have that main drain covered...it's basically where all the sewage goes. So yippee no more stink!
The guys also got this vent for the bathroom bricked and plastered. Little things that all needed to be done.
So that all sounded nice and easy to report. But it wasn't quite that way. Pretty much from the first day they had to wet down the walls and take the bedroom windows (and all the other windows) off in order to plaster. We lived for a good week without windows and really all ended up sleeping in the family room in order to be warm enough. Yeah, I know you are thinking it's South America! It's gotta be warm. Nope. It's the coldest time of the year here and even though it never gets below freezing, it has been a cooler year and some nights were down in the low 50s these past few weeks.
We all did end up with colds, which I think we also shared with friends. Rats. :{
And let's not even talk about the dirt, because, did I say it's windy this time of year? It is.
I know, complain, complain. But, something I've been learning lately is to use the word AND when talking about things sometimes. While it's good to think positively, I don't think it's good to "stuff" things and try to talk yourself into ignoring things that are going on. Sometimes even though there are hard things going on, there are ALSO great things going on. Even in just one situation. So....
It's been very windy and dirty with the windows off while the guys work on our house...AND...the house looks great all plastered!
It is amazing how Abba provided so we can get these projects done...AND...It's been stressful to have guys watching you cook, clean, homeschool, parent, etc while they work.
I'm pretty tired these days and ready for a break....AND....I am very thankful for all Abba has done to provide for our needs and EXTRA blessings.
AND I am thankful for all Abba is teaching me. I might not have learned these things any other way.
What "things"? Well, sometime I might share more but then again, I might not. But let's just say it's been an intense year or so (leaning more on the 'so" here) and that has also been another reason I've not blogged a lot lately.
But I'd like to if I can and I am looking forward to more studies we'll be doing. Right now we are mainly trying to wrap things up here before we head to the States for our "Home Assignment", aka "furlough". That is just around the corner!
A lot of excitement around here to see family and friends. A lot of excitement to do or see things they did last time we were in the "states". In Heidi and Liam's case there are things they don't remember or haven't seen that they are looking forward too. The two of them go around talking about "When we go to the 'nited States.....". A few days ago Heidi came in the room saying/singing "I want to go to Canada, I want to go to Canada.....What's Canada?"
They can't wait to see snow and make snowmen and snow forts. My mouth is practically watering just thinking about Fall apples and apple cider. Mmmmm. Salty peanuts still in the shell and just getting to be in the Plains where there's no mountains.
And these days I am thinking a LOT about seeing family members that I can't wait to hug and talk with.
I hope to post soon about how school is going for the two older boys. Some encouraging things there for me as their teacher.
Thanks to those who read and I hope to write more in the coming days as I can. All those other homeschoolers on HSB and The Homeschool Lounge, I am looking forward to reading your plans for the coming school year too.
Signing off for now. Have a good day!
As we've been working on the house here in the city, another house is being started in a Quechua village. The past couple of years we have been unable to spend time as a family in the Quechua village where we have decided to focus our language study and ministry due to the lack of a place to stay. We could stay a few days at a time possibly with some Quechua friends, but not for several weeks a month.
Our good friends from that village made the decision to let us use a piece of land they own to build a house for our family and one for our partners. Last year we had hoped to get that started but the deed to the land and other important papers were not in order. This was not good because it came to light that someone who had heard the news that houses were to be built on that land, was planning to claim the land when the houses were finished! (apparently he did have some sort of small right to do this) By the time the papers were in order it was well into the rainy season so we've all been trying to patiently wait until the rains ended and it was dry enough for the building to begin.
Last month things got underway and now the walls are going up on our partner's house! Shane and our partner went up a few weeks ago to check things out and take pictures. So here's what it looked like then.
You will notice the trench dug in a rectangle there. That's the start of our partner's house.
Things are done differently for a Quechua style house. It's all made of rammed earth. They first dig a foundation trench and put in rocks and maybe some cement for a solid base to work from. Then they used a rectangle form to make the big earth "blocks". (as we take pictures of the process I will post those so you can know what I'm talking about later).
As you can see this piece of land is on a major slope. This has caused some challenges in planning where the houses are to go and how to work with all the different levels. But I think we figured out something that should work out well for both families.
The houses at the top of the picture are the style of house that we are making too. Each house is two levels tall with a tin roof. Our house will be down below the dug up area off to the right of the picture where there's still grass and weeds.
I am sure it looks quite different now!
And speaking of looking different, here's our little friend who was born in July last year at our house! She's getting so big!
Last month we were able to have the bricklayer and his crew come and get the perimeter walls raised on the second floor of our house.
Getting things going.
One more step towards a finished house. At this point we will not be working on the second floor until we have the money to finish all the inner walls support beams and ceiling/roof.
Our next project will be to work on things in the back yard to help water drain away from the foundation of the house. As we save up money for that we will work on it in the next few months. Thankfully it's dry season now so we don't have to worry much about too much water.
Shane has made a bathroom door and now two bedroom doors! It sure has cut down on the dust flying into our rooms and the mosquitoes eating us alive at night.
Wow! It's been a while since I posted. I really meant to post before this. But I had a really good excuse.
We are all moved in to the new house!
We ALL ended up getting the flu bug the kids had. NO fun anytime, but especially when we were trying to pack and move. However the Lord provided helpful friends to take care of us.
Also the week we moved (last week of Jan.) our co-workers and some Peruvian friends too all pitched in to help us pack, clean, and move everything in record time! Oh, and I am able to post this from our new house because the Lord did a miracle and got our phone and internet hooked up in one day! Almost unheard of for this neighborhood. That was sure nice!
What a relief it is to be in here and not have to be juggling living in two different houses at the same time. That is harder than packing or the actual move!
As is typical of moving into a house that is still being worked on there are adjustments and things we'll just live with for a while. Shane is trying to get some doors made for rooms that really need it. I am so thankful for the plastic and screen windows that are already up. That is really helping cut down on dirt flying in but we still have a LOT of sweeping and dusting to do every day. :)
The major perk I am most enjoying to this new house is hot water! Something that is just standard in most North American houses is hot water in all bathrooms, kitchens and laundry rooms. Not so here. In the old house we only had it in the upstairs bathroom. So when we built this house both Shane and I made plans for hot water pipes. Now I have hot water in the kitchen, bathroom and for laundry. It's the first time I've ever washed my clothes here with warm or hot water. The "little" things that can be such a blessing and really help us!
The kitchen sink is also lower and easier for the kids to use so here's Liam washing dishes for the first time in our new house! Let's hope he keeps that smile with dish washing!
Thanks to all who were praying for us during this time. Pray now for us as we settle in and continue to finish projects. We decided to start school again this week! After unpacking most everything I could tell that our kids needed to get back to something more normal that will help them adjust to this place as our new home. School seemed to be what might help them the most right now. It is proving to be true and we are only three days into it! More on that soon.
Here's a few more pictures of our move.
Dane and Arel painting their old room
Having breakfast the first morning in the new house.
Dane making himself at home after finding a box of books.
Clothes lines up!
All tuckered out after a hard day of moving.
This week our family has been working together to get things done at the new house. It's been a great week! And it sure feels good to get some things finished!
The back yard is coming along. Garbage picked up and burned,
Compost areas made and some weeding done.
Shane made a counter for the kitchen and installed the sink! Thanks Honey!
Arel and Dane have helped Shane get some things sanded and painted a piece of plywood to go on the front door for more privacy. (Hope to get a picture of that soon)
The boys took turns helping me work on temporary windows. Dane was especially helpful and we were really getting the hang of things by the end of yesterday. Here's Dane cutting mosquito netting for the screen part of the window.
We have 10 windows done and three more to go!
When they aren't busy helping, the kids can be found playing in the sand pile outside our door or in the yard or next door in the empty lot or if it's cool and rainy, in the bedroom on Dad's cozy warm wool poncho. :)
Look! Our truck in the garage!
Praise the LORD! He's really done amazing things and provided for us in amazing ways!
It is a sort of daze I'm in during this time of organizing and packing and preparing the new house. I thought I would just share a little picture journal of this whole process. Some of it is impressive and exciting (at least I think so. :) ) and some of it is rather boring and well, real. Ha. This is life right now.
Last week painting sealant on the bathroom grout.
Finishing some knitting projects
Fingerless gloves for the boys, here are Liam's
A sweater for Shane! (we won't talk about how long it took me to make this) And as I finish this sweater that completes all the knitting and crochet projects I had going. That's pretty amazing if you know how many I have going usually. :) ....I started one last night, let's see if I can just stay with it.
Getting the little "garden" trimmed up. It looks pretty pitiful here because the grass was so long that when we cut it, underneath it was getting quite brown. (and of course the never ending battle to keep up with laundry)
Here's our lovely pepper plant that has turned into a little tree. Beside him is the baby but both are full of peppers that are green right now but will turn a bright orange-red when ripe.
These are SPICY! (slurp)
Washing and re-doing curtains for the new windows
Other things not pictured include the boys and I taking apart a bunk bed, packing up DVDs and books, going through the kitchen cupboards to throw things away or organize them...now my kitchen is ready to pack up when the time comes...maybe in another week?
On the "To do" list now:
Mending before I put away the sewing machine.
Write thank yous before we move and forget all about them.
Paint a few walls around here that need it: boys room, stairwell, etc.
Shuck some dried corn we have, clean and dry it before storing it or giving some away.
Toast peanuts and peel skins off to make peanut butter.
Spend some time with Shane at the new house seeing what things the boys and I can do to free him up to do other things. Today his has some little friends helping sweep and the electrician is putting in as much wiring as we can afford right now. The bathroom is the first room to have a light and a switch!
I am thankful today: Thank you, Lord for giving me the time to be able to organize things for the move so moving day doesn't have to be as confusing.
Thank you, Father for a hardworking husband who is doing a GREAT job getting our house ready to move in.
And thank you for Your provision this past year for this house! It's amazing to think that last year at this time there was only a foundation!
It's time for a picture update on the house.
Last week the crew was plastering up some of the last walls and around windows and doorways.
Then the electrical crew came through and installed the tubing in the floor for electrical wires.
And now they are pouring the floors this week.
Shane's focus has been on security. He has been laying brick to bring the walls up around the perimeter on the front of the house on the second floor.
The metal worker finished up two of our metal doors. This one will go on the front.
They are saying the floors will be finished in the main part of the house and they will be halfway done with the rest by Sat. We still don't know what day moving day will be. We'd like it to be before the end of this month, but there is a LOT to do yet so we'll see what happens.
This is what's been going on lately:
The platform Dane is climbing onto there was all set up for plastering!
This is the crew working on the kitchen ceiling
And at the end of the day finishing the kitchen ceiling!
More pictures to come since they have a lot more done than just the kitchen! Once the ceilings and walls are finished they electrical tubing goes on the floor and the sub floor is poured. Then we just wait for it all to dry a couple weeks and the process of installing things and moving can begin! We are praying that it works out to be in the house by the end of Dec.
Liam said to me a few days ago: "I wish the super workers would work super fast so we can move into our new house right now." The excitement is mounting!
So with the house getting done I have been focused on sorting, pitching, organizing and packing things up for the move. Some days that's all we are focused on around here and other days, like today, we are able to get in some Math, English, Reading, etc.
Even in the midst of all the busyness we are amazed at all the God has done to get this house to the point it is and amazed that we will be moving in soon! Yeah God!!
Another reason for my lack of blogging has been because we were away for a week in the big city to buy some things we needed for the house and just to get a change of scene and a little R&R. We stayed at another mission's guest house. Wow! What a lovely place! The first morning I woke up as the sun was coming up and could only hear little twittering birds. About a half and hour later all I could hear was Pidgeons. SO nice to enjoy some quiet even in the middle of a HUGE city like Lima.
Yesterday I was finally able to go over and stand on the new roof!
Sorry about the fuzzy pictures. It was just starting to rain. This is the storm coming down the valley.
Right after this it reached us and POURED! We had to drive some friends downtown. This is what downtown was like and worse! There were crowds of people standing at street corners wondering how they were going to cross the "lakes" of water. This all happened in a matter of 15 minutes! Our first major rain of the season. Good for our new roof though. It needs to be "watered" every day to help it harden.
It's happening!! Praise the Lord with us!!
All of this has to be mixed in those machines...
Hauled up the ramp in the cans...
And poured in the proper place. Here they are working on the beams first.
Pretty soon here we'll go give them a drink and a slice of banana bread.
Here's the main boss. Isn't he hansome!
Pray for the water to stay on! The pressure was very low this morning. Hopefully it will pick up here soon.
Here is some of what was going on this past month. They built the wood frame for the area where the floor is to be poured.
Those boards are supported by poles underneath.
The forest of poles supporting things.
Then they lay the roofing bricks on the boards like this and the re bar goes in between the bricks. Then the cement is poured over the entire thing.
Here's what it looks like down below. A forest of poles. These will stay there for about a month after the floor is poured to support the floor while it dries and hardens.
Here are the stairs being made too.
The latest look at the roof today.
Notice the tubing where the electricity and plumbing will go later.
The cans the men will use tomorrow to haul cement up to the roof on ladders!
Tomorrow is the big day - Pour the Floor Day!!
The floors are poured! Here's the garage area all finished.
Here's the hallway by the office looking towards the garage.
Soon after, this arrived
Re bar! That stuff is expensive!! And the price goes up almost daily on the thickest re bar. This is one of the main reasons the price of our entire house has gone up. Just since last summer the price of re bar alone has tripled. So thankful to have this bought.
The crew has been busy cutting and tying it in preparation for the second floor being poured. When I can I'll get more pictures of this prep. process. I hear they are setting up wood supports right now. In just another week or two they could be pouring the floor!
Since we have all that sitting out on the job site Shane has been sleeping there at night to make sure nothing gets stolen. Thankfully he is getting some sleep and our dog stays with him to help him hear any noises.
Sorry to be so silent again. The flu went through the family for a couple of weeks. Then all the crazy busyness of the past few months caught up to me and left me tired out. In the process I have been learning a lot about letting go of habits that are not good for my physical, emotional or spiritual health. Maybe I'll share more about that another time.
This week a young couple arrived to visit us and see all that is going on with our team here. All this has not left a lot of time for blogging even though I've had a lot to blog about!
I shared last time that we are able to start in on some house building again! We were given a large gift of money to be able to go ahead and get the first floor enclosed! These past two weeks Shane has been overseeing the job of tamping the ground so that it's ready for cement floors to be poured. Most of our house is built over what used to be a sort of neighborhood land fill. :) Back when we were pouring foundation posts some of them had to go very deep to reach solid ground.
The tamping is hard work! Very tiring and very boring. But it must be done so that we do not end up having to repair floors that have caved in because of ground settling that was not tamped down properly. Shane spent a lot of time during that job checking in several times a day to make sure the guys were tamping each room enough and spending some time tamping himself just to show them it can be done and must be done! They were in a real hurry to finish the tamping and get on with pouring the floors.
Here's what they were using to tamp! A metal bucket that's been filled with cement for tamping by hand!
They did use a machine one day but it really couldn't do much better unless maybe you were a really big tall strong guy! Things are normally done by hand here so the crew does a better job since that's what they are more experienced with. Whew! Makes me tired just thinking about it!
Once there were some rooms that were tamped to Shane's satisfaction they poured some floors that did not need re bar.
Here is the office and rooms off the kitchen that are done. A bathroom was done too and the area that will be the stairwell. Last week they did the two bedrooms, living room and kitchen floors.
Here's Heidi showing off the kitchen/living room space that has re bar tied and ready for pouring.
Right now the crew is preparing the garage area. Making sure the floor is tamped, re bar tied (this area takes thicker re bar) and then they'll be pouring that tomorrow for sure!
Praise the Lord for his provision!
So the crew who last worked on our house really left a mess! We've spent some time in the last few days picking up garbage, cutting down weeds that think they need to be trees and hauling wood off to be stored for future use. Tomorrow preparations begin for more work to be done!
Stay tuned for pictures and details in the days to come.
For now it's time to rest up!
The Lord has provided some money over the past few months that we've been saving up to do a little more work on the house. After a bit of a rocky start with the crew of guys we hired not always being on the job, and several days of waiting for materials to arrive, the crew is back to work. The walls are coming right along!
This is the main area they are working on right now. Laying brick, fixing some mistakes on the foundation beams, pouring the columns at the appropriate points along the walls and where there will be doors.
Here they are working on the far corner bedroom.
It's exciting to see the walls go up and have much more of an idea of what things will look like now. There's still a lot to do on this first floor but it is well underway!
Joining in on the Friday Show and Tell. I think it's such a great idea!
Today I wanted to show a little bit of the progress that went on this Summer building our new house.
In July we first had a group of Peruvians help Shane get the foundation trenches dug to the proper depth. Talk about hard and dirty work!!
Next came another hard job of pouring the foundation into those trenches and pouring the footings (some of those pretty deep!) The team who was here from our supporting churches were the ones to work on that. The guys sort of worked out a system of mixing the cement and making a line of wheelbarrows full of cement to the trenches until it was all done.
This is what it looked like when that was finished. I know it looks like just dirt in that trench, but it's cement!
Next came tying that re bar (like is all laid out above) for pouring the wall bases on top of the foundation trench.
Here's what the wall bases looked like when finished.
This wall here is also ready for laying brick which is what they worked on next.
Here's Shane cleaning up some brick that's just been laid.
I got to get in on the action too!
And here's what it looks like now. Some of the walls are up but only about halfway. The floors will actually be right below the brick line. We have a lot of filling in to do before the floor is where it should be. Our land is on a slope so a lot of work will be going into getting that all even.
I am so amazed at what the Lord did to make it possible to do all this work on the house this Summer! He provided the money through gifts from friends back home in the US and He also provided the willing servants (we also call friends) who came down to help do all this! Praise the Lord!
Thanks for joining me for Show and Tell Friday. Check out Canada Girl's site and join in if you want or click on the "Show and Tell Friday with Canada Girl" link on my sidebar any time.
