Front porch started to go in today. Jake, Nate and Simon spent the day cutting joists, figuring out how the rafters will fit in, and making me jealous by using a nail gun (I remember a lot of hammers and very few nail guns out at Habitat sites). It's looking good though. Probably a turning point for folks viewing from the road because now they can see we're building something; no longer tearing it down.We're trying to mimic the old front porch from the 1889 photo of the house. We'll be pretty close to it, although we believe after close examination of that photo that above the porch was a door that led out to a small enclosed landing on the porch. Decided that we didn't need that kind of future water problem in the design. I think the new porch is a tad narrower than the original porch, but we're staying pretty true to the photo.
The stone masons completed work in the basement - the crawlspace has a nice brick veneer too. They started the chimney today. It's looking good.... Excavators finally finished up too.
Received word from Grant that there's a high correlation between the core samples from the main house and the core samples from the smokehouse, indicating that the smokehouse and farm house were built at the same time. That's pretty big news.
