Well, we had yet another death in the family. This is the fourth one in four months for us. As I stated in my last update my mother had come to live with us. She stayed with us five weeks and went down hill very fast. She was having trouble getting around and asked me to help her find a Nursing Home where she could get the help she needed. She was at the Nursing Home 8 days when she passed away. While not unexpected we never expected it this quickly. This site is about my house so I will not dwell on this.

The tile shower is not complete! Well I am waiting on the shower door to arrive but It could use it now. That was a job I never want to do again. Lots of frustration and aggravation involved in tiling a shower. I know why they cost so much to have built. They are a LOT of work!

The pool is finished too! Below are some photos of the construction.

One of the things I had decided from the beginning was that I wanted a big pool. I have swam in a few 16' x 32' pools and I found that I dove in the deep end and three or four strokes and I was at the other end. I decided if we were going to have a pool I wanted one I would enjoy and not regret latter. We settled on a 20' x 40' sized pool. I have regretted not spending a little more on a few purchases before and since this was permanent I didn't want to do that!

As the time neared we laid it out in the yard. After some price comparisons we decided to go with the 'L' shaped pool. The cost was not that much more for the extra space it provided. A couple of years ago I was at a clients house and they had an L shaped pool. They were convinced this was the only way to go. After the first swim in ours I knew we had made the right choice!

We started the house two years ago in October. My goal is to have it finished by then. Of course no house of mine is ever finished, but I want it to when someone walks in they don't see anything that is not finished. There are too many things I want to do to the house for it to ever be 'totally' finished.

You would think we had had enough in this family! Hurricane Katrina has left my sister homeless. She lived in New Orleans and is now living with us. She was one of the fortunate ones that could and did leave the city. She called us Sunday morning and said I just woke up and saw the news. It's a CAT 5 and I getting out of here and headed your way. Little did she know what a good choice that was! Needless to say she is going to living with us for a while. From what she is seeing in the news it looks like her home is in one of the few places that is not flooded. Regardless, if she is lucky she might get to go back in a month to get clothes and some personal possessions out.

Katrina came north and blew past us. While it go windy here there was nothing but a lot of leaves to deal with. My heart breaks for the people on the Gulf Coast!

I have been busy working on the trim form the dinning room in the evenings. I have most(??) of it cut out I think. I still have to make about 50 stiles but all the rest, the chair rail, base boards and plate rail are cut. Below are photos of the first pieces I made. These are for the shortest section of the wall. Once I got them like I wanted laid them out on the table as a story board. I can measure off these and use them as my masters.

Still not finished but I finally have one of the two front columns in place. I just glued it up and while waiting on the glue to set I decided to do this update. If you have been reading this all along you know I have wanted these in place for close to year now. It's so nice to finally see one in place. And as you can tell from the photo it is not done. I still have a good bit of work but it's so close!

Well, we had yet another death in the family. This is the fourth one in four months for us. As I stated in my last update my mother had come to live with us. She stayed with us five weeks and went down hill very fast. She was having trouble getting around and asked me to help her find a Nursing Home where she could get the help she needed. She was at the Nursing Home 8 days when she passed away. While not unexpected we never expected it this quickly. This site is about my house so I will not dwell on this.

The tile shower is not complete! Well I am waiting on the shower door to arrive but It could use it now. That was a job I never want to do again. Lots of frustration and aggravation involved in tiling a shower. I know why they cost so much to have built. They are a LOT of work!

The pool is finished too! Below are some photos of the construction.

One of the things I had decided from the beginning was that I wanted a big pool. I have swam in a few 16' x 32' pools and I found that I dove in the deep end and three or four strokes and I was at the other end. I decided if we were going to have a pool I wanted one I would enjoy and not regret latter. We settled on a 20' x 40' sized pool. I have regretted not spending a little more on a few purchases before and since this was permanent I didn't want to do that!

As the time neared we laid it out in the yard. After some price comparisons we decided to go with the 'L' shaped pool. The cost was not that much more for the extra space it provided. A couple of years ago I was at a clients house and they had an L shaped pool. They were convinced this was the only way to go. After the first swim in ours I knew we had made the right choice!

We started the house two years ago in October. My goal is to have it finished by then. Of course no house of mine is ever finished, but I want it to when someone walks in they don't see anything that is not finished. There are too many things I want to do to the house for it to ever be 'totally' finished.

For a change no bad news. As I was afraid progress on the house has slowed down to a crawl. Of course there are spurts of activity. I never intended to let the web site go this long without an update but..... Of course I have been very busy lately starting a new business. After 11+ hours in front of the computer, working on this web site has taken a back seat.

The dinning room trim is installed. I worked on it for several weeks. I had to do a lot of hand planing on the boards to get them flat. My planer was leaving a lot of chip-out on the boards. I decided the only way I would be happy with them was to smooth them by hand. Lots of work but they turned out well. Plus I leaned a lot about smoothing with a hand plane. All that it is left to do is apply the shellac finish to it. I hope to do that in the next couple of weeks.

The columns on the front porch are in place. I need to spend about an hour on them to finished them up. It has turned cold and I haven't been motivated to work in the cold. Besides you can't see what needs to be done unless you look really close.

The inevitable has happened. I quit working on the house and started working in the shop. Thats why I never wanted to move into the house before it was done. Of course I needed a break anyway and I have been working on things for the house too.

I built a bench and coat rack for the laundry room. And I started on the garage doors. They have taken much longer than I expected. They have not been hard to build, just slow. And of course it doesn't have that I have my lathe up and running. It's an addiction!

These photos show the process from conception to almost completion. I am staining the doors and should finish that today. I hope to put at least one set up this weekend and connect the door openers. I have had lots of questions about the door openers and how they will work. But that will have to wait till I get them in place and the bugs worked out.