Work Day

I know Labor Day is suppose to be a break from laboring. However, around the homestead this weekend that is far from what happened. As I have mentioned before, my family (of five) lives in a 14x70 trailer. Our temporary digs for the moment, but it's been hard to contain all we have within it's walls. In fact, my hubby built an addition on last year just for storage. However, I call it the "man cave." There isn't much storage going on in there. He has all of his man toys set up in there & I really can't say as I blame him. I would have a whole room to call me own. But I digress.

We had been storing items down the road about a 1/2 a mile at his aunt & uncle's camp. They have a 2-car garage and since they only use the camp sporadically (in fact, it's up for sale now), they offered us the use of it. It's worked nicely over the year we've been back home. However, now that it's up for sale, we needed to find other storage.

We went down last month & sorted everything down there. A large amount of it ended up at the dump transfer station. There is still a large pile down there of things we think we can sell at a yard sale. We'll find out in two weeks. The rest came home. It was surprisingly little of what was actually there. It was amazing what we discovered we did not need after all these years of hauling it with us from move to move.

So back to the laboring Labor Day....

Since we no longer have storage and the "storage addition" didn't work out so well, we (that is that nice universal "we" by-the-way) are building a storage shed. My hubby, his dad & grandad all worked on it this weekend.

This is all the gravel nicely compacted to form the base for the concrete that will be added to the top of it.

This was as far as they got over the weekend. They did the foundation (mixing all the concrete themselves) & putting on the cinder blocks. And yes, I asked, this will be a wood shed. The cinder blocks are part of the foundation - to give it more stability. There are anchor bolts sticking up out of some & those holes are filled with more concrete for adding stability.

Of course, we had wet cement. I had casually mentioned to my hubby how nice it would be to add the boys hand-prints to the foundation. Unfortunately, I was down at the garage sorting through all the junk yard sale items when my hubby was ready for hand prints. I found out he only did B's since I had N with me & J was napping.

I guess my pouting asking nicely to add the other two (or smoothing over B's!) worked because the next thing I knew N was at Grammy's telling J to get a move on if he wanted to get his hands in the cement! I ran after them & managed to snap some photos of Grandpa helping J.

And we have the final products.....

When I was about 18 months old, my parents did some cement work at their house & my three older siblings & I all added our hand prints. You can still see them all these years later which I think is pretty cool.