Work continued at a fast pace on our new additions to our house. Below is a picture of Mario, one of the hard workers. He is taking off the old trim in the front of the house so that they can begin framing the new front room area. Here is a picture looking out of our old front room windows which were removed after this. On Friday, the space where the windows were was covered with sheet rock.

Here is picture of the floor of the new great room addition as it looked at the beginning of the week.

The heating and air conditioning person came and marked the places where he wants to put new vents in the great room.

They then began to frame the walls of the new front room and cover them with wood.

You can see that they have the wall covered on the east side of the great room partially against the old garage. They then started to put up some of the roof joists for the great room.

Below, you can see that the new front room walls were framed and covered with wood.

They also began to frame the addition to the garage. In the back, you can see the part of the roof that was built last week over the great room.

Below is a picture of our existing stairs to the basement that will eventually be removed.

The above stairs will be replaced with these new stairs that will be just inside the new front door area.

Below is a picture looking down at what will become the new wrap around porch. They put metal down that will hold up the cement and become part of the porch when the concrete drys.

They also put the subroofing on part of the roof of the new great room and put in temporary braces to hold the walls up until all of the roof and walls are tied together.

By the end of the week, the new third car garage was framed and covered with wood siding. The great room addition was framed and also covered. Part of the new roof over the great room was also covered with subroofing.

The new front room was framed and covered. The new basement room was also framed and the stairs were roughed in. This next week ought to also show great progress. They plan to pour the cement for the new porch and take off a large part of the existing roof so that they can install the new roof joists and cover it with wood.

This last week began with the new foundations and walls poured. This is a picture from our front door showing the new basement in front of the existing living room. You can also see the door that will go into the cold storage room under the new porch that will be pored.The next picture is from the sliding glass door off of our dining area. You can see the walls for the crawl space for the new great room on the left. To the right, you can see a little of the wall for the new garage that is being added to the existing garage

Robyn and Zach came by to see what was going on last Sunday evening and Haley and Emmy just could not resist climbing the dirt pile. By the end of this week, they had taken away 14 dump trucks full of dirt.

On monday, they came and sprayed the foundation with a water proofing coating. Marla said that it only took about 10 minutes to do. They also began to get to pour the cement floor for the basement and the new garage.

The excuvators also came and backfilled around the new foundation and walls plus removed a few more dump truck loads of dirt. Jill drove by to see the progress and much to Dallin and Daniel's dismay, the dirt pile was gone and they could no longer climb on it. What a disappointment!!!

The digger is backfilling around the crawl space for the new great room. In the front of the picture, you can see the walls for the new garage.

When they poured the basement floor, they used the doorway that they cut in our basement family room for access so they had some place to go when they finished.

Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, they began work on the great room floor.

This coming week they will finish the floors and start on the walls. It is moving along pretty good.

After the digging, last week was spent poorer cement for the foundations and the new walls.

After thinking about remodeling our house for a number of years, we recently decided to go ahead. The end of June and first part of July, we removed the patio and patio roof. We really appreciated the help of Jedd and the Jacobs. Haley and Emmy were great brick movers.

Then we had to move most of our stuff out of the garage, which was another hugh project. Thankfully, last Friday, Jill, Dallin, Dan, Kemry, Ian, Robyn, Haley, Emmy and Luke came to help us. We really appreciated all of there help.

Even with all of our prep work, it didn't seem like we had really started until last Wednesday when they removed the concrete on the north side of our house along with the back porch. On Thursday, after being gone all day, we returned home to see our house as shown below and we wondered what are we doing????

As you can see they began digging the basement and getting ready for the foundation in the front of the house. It might be a little difficult to see, but the roof over the sandbox is also gone.

This is picture from through the sliding glass door where you can see they are digging and getting ready to put the foundation in on the north side of the house.

Here is another picture of the north side.

Here is picture out the front room window. If you look carefully, you can see the front yard light in the middle of the dirt pile.

Well, I think we can say we are really doing it.

Monday in Ireland

On Monday morning, we drove into Limerick City and met with the genealogist for Limerick Genealogy to see if there was something they could do to help us work on the White line and the Canter line. It seems they are set up to work more on a county basis and the White research will probably take a multi-county effort. She did say that she could help out on the Canter line and so I will probably write up a description and see what they can do on the Canter line.

In the afternoon, we when to the Bunratty Castle and folk park. It consists of a Castle built in the 1400s and a bunch of old historical shops, houses and farms similar to the Pioneer Heritage Park exhibits, except for Ireland.

Here is a picture of the restored Castle. It is not as glamorous as it originally was as the wall coverings, etc. no longer exist. Thus, you have to use your imagination of Disney pictures.

The Castle also served as a defensive fort. We climbed up one of the towers and took a look around.

Above is a view of the landscape from the tower. I think this is the Bunratty river emptying into the larger Shannon river. Below is a look down from the tower. Notice how small the people are. We could imagine Daniel, Dallin and perhaps Ian and Luke in their armour defending the Castle.

Above is a picture of the Castle's main hall. We could imagine seeing Haley, Emmy and Kemry at the Prince's ball. We couldn't use flash photography so the picture isn't the best.

The ceiling in one of the rooms was amazing and below are a couple of samples of the beautiful cravings in the Castle.

We only took a couple of pictures of the folk park. There was one very unique feature in the park; these old historical trailers. We were blown away to see that these were owned by the Parrys. Are Uncle Jeff's ancestors Irish?

Charlie was facinated with the thatched roofs and took this picture of a worker thatching this roof.

There were also some pretty gardens in the folk park. Here is a picture of some flowers that we liked.

Sunday, July 26

How did we find it? The name of the road was spelled wrong. There were several roads with what must have been the right spelling in the middle of Limerick along way from home. Amazingly, we found the local branch for Sunday meetings while driving on the wrong side of the road.

On Sunday, we attended the small Limerick branch for Church. It was almost a miracle that we found it. The address was just Dooradoyle Road with no street address and there were several roads with that name --- one main road with several branches off of it, all with the same name. We put the road into Uncle Brent's GPS and took off only to end up at a bunch of soccor or rugby fields. I remembered that there was also a shopping center on Dooradoyle Road, so we told the GPS to go to the shopping center. We had to go all around the shopping center to exit and just as we were about to leave, we saw the church just across the street. We enjoyed services. There were almost as many visitors as members. There was a couple from Arizona, one from Iowa (the husband worked in Iraq and was just on holiday) and there were a few from Nigeria besides us. I asked someone about why it seemed like everyone was named Kelly and he told me that his mother had 15 children when she joined the church back in the mid-70s.

No, Dallin and Daniel. This is not a picture of the church building. It is a picture of an old castle/fortress. You would have enjoyed seeing this.

King John's castle was first a Viking stronghold in 922. A castle was built there under orders from King John about 1200. The Castle endured multiple sieges culminating in the siege of 1691 when the English Williamite forces lay siege on the Irish and French held up in the Castle. This led to the famous Treaty of Limerick.

In the 19th to the early 20th century, it was the home of British forces with Irish town across the river. Turrets were only placed on the Irishtown side.

To the right is a picture of Irishtown across the bridge from the castle.

The castle also provided a great view of the city and the surrounding landscape.

The last picture on the right shows the river towards the city. Notice that they have constructed a rapids where kayakers were out having fun in it.

You can read more about the castle's history at the following link if you are interested.

http://www.teachnet.ie/mmorrin/castle/history.htm

2009 Adventure --- Day 1

At the risk of disappointing Natascha and ruining our standing as the most out of date blog on her list, we are going to blog about our trip to Ireland and Sweden to see Caleb and Johanna.

We arrived safely in Shannon, Ireland, on July 25, having survived a 6 1/2 hour layover at JFK. Our flight was delayed 1 1/2 because they said that they couldn't find a gate to load the plane. They said that they had the plane and crew there and there was just a traffic jam for gates. However, this didn't seem to add up as there was no plane at our gate. Nevertheless, we boarded the almost completely full Delta flight and tried to get some sleep, which was hard since there were game and movie consoles on the back of every seat. Grandma exercised her supper natural powers to withstand the urge to continue playing games and was soon sawing logs.

The above map shows our starting point, JFK airport and Shannon airport in Ireland. (The map also shows our later flight to Sweden with a connection in France. We arrived about 11:00 am in Ireland, picked up our baggage and rented a car.

For the next three days, we stayed at a bed and breakfast between the airport and Limerick City called Headley Court. We had stayed here once before and it is very nice with great breakfasts.

After a short nap, we drove into Limerick City, looked for a couple of shops that were mentioned in our guide book and had lunch.