We began the three window project in all seriousness this week. During the past couple of weeks, Michael had taken off the chimney to our wood stove, then the siding, and then we began tearing down the interior wallboard.

Finding the screws holding on the wallboard was challenging in that the whole purpose of taping is to hide them. Michael devised a clever trick of using niobium coin magnets to find the screw heads. Worked like a charm!

The next part of the deconstruction portion of this project was figuring out which breakers went with the wires running through the walls. We could trace three of the five wires, but the next two ran into the part of the house we are not yet tearing apart. So Michael turned off the main breaker and cut the wires, capped the live ends, and turned the breaker back on. We now know what those wires powered.

One powered the refrigerator and the other the washer. We’ve been dancing around extension cords ever since. Michael pulled those wires downstairs and hopes to re-route them under the house one of the rainy days they are promising…perhaps tomorrow.

We could tell that the sill plate and part of the flooring had rotted away. Before taking down the wall to the corner, we built a support system for the roof trusses. No having the roof fall on our heads!

I was too busy to get a photo of the joists we installed to support that portion of flooring, but they are there!

We got the window framed, the rest of the wall reinstalled, and put up OSB today. It’s been a couple of pretty intense days. We will frame in the next two windows before actually installing them. We haven’t found any more rotten areas, which is better than we expected.

In between times we have been graced with visits from children and grands. The babies are jockeying to see who begins to walk first.

We have begun harvesting potatoes. It’s our first year growing blues. They are best fried. They crisp wonderfully.

Our neighbor gifted us about 60 straw bales, which we gathered from our field.

While we were out, we checked on my deer stand. At the bottom of the oak it’s built around, we stumbled on this magnificent hen of the woods mushroom. It is now dried, waiting to go into stews this winter.

We found a sackful of aborted entaloma in the Mushroom Woods. They usually don’t appear until October. We also found lobster mushrooms. We usually find them in July. The fungus that turns the mushrooms red will infect more than one type of mushroom. Since I can’t be sure the underlying shroom is edible, I’ll make dye baths from the lobsters.

We’ve eaten tomatoes morning and night.

And today was the Grand Girl’s first day of school. She reported having a good time. I can hardly wait to see her and find out what she has learned.