July and August saw the final building of the house, which was incredibly exciting and stressful beyond most projects I undertake. Not only was there all the paperwork and last minute well issues (who is going to come up with $5000 quick?!? Builder? Owner? Lender? etc.) but we had to paint the entire interior and exterior of the home. That was a seriously huge undertaking on our part, yes indeed. Not only did we save over $4000 doing it ourselves, it was something we got to physically contribute to the building of the house. Sinse I had the dream of building my own home for over 15 years, I think I needed that involvement and control physically and emotionally.
We spent the last half of July painting the interior, meanwhile maintaining 3 4x15 community garden beds, 3 4x8 garden beds at the upper meadow that needed water hauled in (yes, it's true), 10 chickens and 2 cats that needed looking after, 2 kids that were under a lot of stress themselves (but they did awesome, those guys!), keeping the ice cream business afloat, and working on my resume. After a completely grueling 5-day stint scooping ice cream at the Hood River Fair (Columbia Valley Cone's official last event...sniff) I was out starting on the exterior. Bless the boys; they really did a lot of work. Ealom and Gil pretty much did all of the interior ceilings, and Aidan and I painted walls. Outside, we all pitched in, working our butts off in blistering hot weather to get the paint done before closing. The timing was excellent though; painting in extremely dry weather is a true blessing around here.
Things got really crazy when on August 22, I took a new job as the Head Cook and Food Manager for Skamania County's Senior Services Food Program.
We did our final walk-through with the builder and signed the closing papers with USDA on September 1, and we spent Labor Day Weekend moving in. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday we moved most of our belongings and Sunday was the big day of bringing over the beds and cats. So, September 4 was the official starting day of living at Bramblewood. The cats are happy here, and of course, so are we.
Here are the garden beds at Bramblewood:
And here are the guys with our community garden bed that won "Best of Show" at the county fair:
