Since my last post we've had little completed, but some forward movement on several projects. Most notably, we finally got poured so the new garage is totally enclosed, (except for the lift door which will go on after the driveway gets finished, since concrete guys are not known for their finesse and we don't want to have to strip and sand and repaint the door.) The guys poured the slurry on Thursday and it looks great.
Something else popped up this week. Remember Dan's desire to address some of the outside beams? I had Bob Sr. take a look at them just in case it was too much for Dan to handle and guess what - it was! The first picture is of the bank of windows in the dining room. There are two rows of five sashes, one on top of the other. This whole unit is flanked by two massive 10" x 10" posts that go all the way up to the roof. These had been jongineered with caulk and a 4x4 piece of pressure treated with a strip of aluminum (painted to match, of course) and when we pulled off the metal strip, lo and behold ROT straight through and through. The second picture shows the base of the post on the right - the 4x4 isn't actually sitting on anything, the wood behind continued to rot beneath the patch job. (That's my foot for perspective.) While we had noticed some water damage on the post on the inside we were kind of hoping it was from condensation or window leakage. 
No such luck... the wood has actually rotted all the way through to the inside. That's 10 inches of wood! Oh, and that's not the bad news. The bad news is that these posts are structural. We will pull out the entire window unit and both posts all the way up to about a foot above the adjacent roof lines (since the rot extends up from the gutter line about that far.) Bob will then build a whole new post and beam structure and stand it up, marrying it god-knows-how into the remaining posts that hold up the roof hip over top the girls window above. The good news is that we will probably finally find the yellow jacket nest in the the process. Small victories.. that's our saving grace.
This is a picture of the guys lathing the new walls in the old garage door openings. We should be stuccoed today and Monday. Bob Sr. finished the window openings and ordered the windows yesterday and they only take a couple of days. We are still waiting on hardware for the walk thru door but Bob rigged up a handy cross bar so we can get in and out without having to walk all the way around the house and opening the door with a drill-driver. I sort of finished my part on the girls' bath windows... I got the sashes out of the frames and Bob and I will meet with yet another art glass guy on Monday. He'll give me a bid on doing the windows one by one, (important since we have the ten in the dining room in the pipeline now.) We aren't sure if we want the art glass guy to do the whole restoration or if we want to take the steel frames to a metal shop to be stripped, primed and painted. I was thinking there's no reason why we can't use a marine grade or automotive grade paint on the suckers and never have to paint again. I refuse to paint windows every five years - with over 80 of them it's just ridiculous!
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