Technical Difficulties

I am posting on all of our blogs to let everyone know that all of our photos were accidentally deleted from all three of our blogs. Please forgive this error. I am working to get them back on as they were before but it will take lots of time to get this accomplished. I will start with the most recent posts and work my way back. Thank you for your understanding!

Coal burning stove installation

Well, here it is...the moment many of you have been waiting for, definitely a moment we have been waiting for! We were able to install our coal burning stove just before the really cold weather set in.

As a "for now" measure, we used the "banya" building that already existed when we purchased the house and property. Thank the Lord for the friends who sent us special love offerings "out of the blue" which allowed us to buy this stove. We know God works all things out for our good and there are no mistakes with Him!

We did have to break up the concrete floor and dig a ditch out from the banya to the new house like you saw in a previous post.

We also had to cut a hole through the ceiling of the banya and the roof in order to place the smoke stack. Then through a hole in the side of the attic space of the banya we insulated around the smokestack with special heat resistant insulation to prevent the immediate area around the stack  from getting too hot.

Here we are just giving everyone one more reason to pray for us - putting in a smoke stack on a frozen roof in the middle of Siberia! ;)

In this photo, my husband is preparing to tether the smokestack in place.

A smoking smokestack on a cold winter day is a beautiful thing!

Siding - Summer 2012

One of the major house projects we had hoped to complete this summer was to have siding installed on the house. Last Fall, David and I completed two rows of the house wrap ourselves which, if you remember from our posts, was more than a challenge for us due to the height. To finish the job, he asked another missionary to help out with the higher rows which required using scaffolding. We worked to cover the house with house wrap before last year's winter weather arrived to help protect the OSB. 

Fast forward to Spring and the above photo proves that we definitely had some strong winds during the winter months.

With the OSB exposed we knew that we needed to get the house wrap on again and do our best to purchase the siding needed to close it all in.

Praise the Lord, just in time, He provided the funds for us to be able to both purchase the siding and pay to have it installed.

As soon as the weather was warm enough to work comfortably, the men whom we hired came out to begin the process. Due to our extreme cold temperatures here in Siberia, siding is installed a bit differently than in the States. As you can see the siding is divided into three sections on each side of the house. These shorter spans help prevent sagging as a result of our drastic temperatures in summer and winter.

This photo below is not the greatest picture but you can see the trim pieces all on along the roof and the drain pipes, even though we have to finish them on the bottom end, are in place. 

I can't tell you what a blessing it is for us to have an all siding intact, closed in, and completed looking house! 

We plan on finishing the foundation walls, where you can see the yellow insulation below the siding, off with artificial rock at a later date but we are excited to have this "siding" chapter closed in our home building process.

Pouring the front porch and steps

It's been a long time since we have posted on several of our blogs so we are attempting to update them with what you have missed since we have been MIA. Here is a simple post showing how my husband poured the cement for the steps up to the front door of our new house. 

Nothing major but much nicer than walking on a "balance beam" that we used before the steps to get into the house!

After a rainy day.

Another project completed!

Doors

We recently were able to find one store that had several things that we needed for the new house: doors, a few sheets of drywall, linoleum for our bathroom, and a bathtub for the kid's bathroom. We had been waiting for most of these items we wanted to buy to be available in the store so that we only had to pay for one delivery truck. 

If it wasn't so frustrating it would be funny how sometimes trying to buy simple things like door handles can be more than difficult. We tried on four or five attempts to buy the handles, and other components (which are all sold separately now) at one time so they would all match. 

I had found this beautiful handle which I loved in antique bronze.

I had tried and tried to find another variant that I liked but every time we went to buy them, the stores didn't have all of the necessary parts for all the doors we needed to buy handles for. 

Finally, after waiting a bit longer, we were able to order everything we needed. 

And, I was able to have THE door handle I originally wanted! 

Now, my hubby and I have a door AND a bedroom to call our own - almost as good as Christmas!

Still A Work in Progress

So many of you have been anxiously awaiting photos of our new home. This may end up being a little long but, in this post I hope to show you around the inside after we moved in to let you see what has been accomplished so far. 

Let's begin with the view as you enter the front door. You walk into the foyer and straight to the back of the house will be the living room.

Don't worry, this is the worst looking and least finished part of the house! As you turn to the right and walk into what will be the dining room...

you see the one room downstairs that is most complete. We are temporarily using the dining room as a living room and church meeting room.

Walking through this room you come to what will be a guest bathroom. Since it will be one of the last rooms on our list to finish, I have claimed it as a school room for books, school supplies, and at least one student!

On to the next room, the kitchen. We are so excited that our kitchen is going to be spacious enough to hold a large amount of counter space with an island in the middle. David and I both love to cook and we love to entertain guests. Since living in the old house, we were not able to have very many people over at one time. Even then it was difficult with no table to eat at due to space.  In the new house, we also made room for me to have a small table near the window like a breakfast nook for enjoying tea while visiting with friends. 

For now, we hung our good old cabinets that we purchased twelve years ago when we first arrived in Krasnoyarsk and have now moved with us three different times. They suffered some damage while in the other house but they can hang in there until we save up for new ones that will work better in our kitchen.

As you can see we only hung enough drywall to hang up the cabinets. Technically, that is a cabinet in the middle of the room with the snowman tablecloth draped over it. It goes in the corner of the kitchen up above the sink but I am enjoying using it as an island and canned food storage area while it is down on the floor where I can reach into it better.

As we walk back towards the front door you can see the front door and more of the foyer.

Now, let's take a look upstairs. Our stairwell is incomplete and the stairs themselves are also temporary. We have to be careful walking up and down them as they are a bit steep and open  underneath which makes for really sore shins if your foot falls through! We know from experience. 

At the right as you come up the stairs is what will be Beka's room.

Beka's room

We ran out of drywall for the rest of Beka's room so, until we order several large items again to be delivered to our house on one truck (drywall, linoleum, etc.) we will not be able to finish it. We also have to wait in order to transport certain supplies due to the extreme temperatures of this time of year. 

The next room upstairs is the boy's bedroom.

No one has a bed in the new house because much of our furniture was damaged by mold and moisture. Timothy, our youngest son, had a very difficult time living in the old house due to the amount of mold that was on the furniture, walls, and other items. We have done our best to clean everything we have moved over to the new house. Timothy was very dependent on an inhaler and other asthma meds but he has greatly improved since we moved into the new house. Therefore we did not move any furniture or items over that we could not properly disinfect. Even clothes smell of mold so we have been disinfecting them as well.

Next to the boy's room and straight across from the stairwell is the kid's bathroom/laundry room. We had to make the best of this small space so we built two walls in the long bathroom to divide up the areas between the vanity, tub, and toilet area. The laundry room is a small room attached to the bathroom which will have a door to allow it to be closed off from the bathroom.

The above picture shows where the tub will go.  It looks small because we are installing a smaller tub in this bathroom so that we could allow more space for the toilet and vanity area.

The master bedroom and bath comprise the back half of the second floor of the house.

As you walk from the main bedroom area to the bathroom, to the right is a walk-in closet/storage area and David's study/office is to the left.

Closet/Storage area

David's study/office

These small rooms are also waiting to be completed. We use them to store tools and boxes in for now. 

Our bathroom holds a tub, corner shower stall, and a separate toilet room which will have a door on it.

We have not purchased the linoleum for the bathroom yet but we have found the design we want to purchase. We found a small remnant of the linoleum we like and brought it home to see how it looked in the bathroom before deciding for sure on it. I really like it!

Well, that is the tour of the house as is it so far.  Our outside temps have been -30 degrees Celsius and colder this week so even before they were this low, we stopped all work on the house. We are actually glad that we did not get more work accomplished before we moved in as we have had some problems with condensation. These problems are to be expected with our extreme weather. We still have to finish the ventilation system in the bathrooms which will also help. We moved in and have learned some things to do differently and to change, which we will be able to take care of in the Spring.

Also, we were not able to install a coal burning stove before moving in so our heat is powered only by the electric "stove" we  showed you pictures of in posts about our heating system. This "stove" does well at heating the house until about -20 degrees then it needs the added boost or support, if you will, of a coal burning stove to keep the house comfortable. So, needless to say, with these recent temps we have been dressing a bit warmer. We are definitely looking forward to warmer weather so that we can continue the work needed to be done and install the stove to be ready for next winter. 

Don't worry, there will still be more for us to write about!

WE MOVED IN!

The kids packed up their stuff on their own. They were so excited to move out of our old house!

We are happy to announce to any of you who might not yet know that we have moved into our new home! We finished moving the basics necessary to sleep in the house  in the wee hours of Christmas morning. I am still trying to find places for boxes so that I can take pictures of what parts of the house we are using and what parts we still have lots of work to do in, but I will do my best to post some pics real soon! We thank all of you who prayed for this event and helped us financially so that we could move out before the coldest part of winter arrived. 

Tearing the bathroom out of the old house

 When we moved into the old house there was no running water inside. In order to make life easier for his family, my husband built a very small bathroom in the main room which would be our living room/bedroom. We, thinking we would live in this house for a short six months while we built our new house, were fine with it being so tiny. It was like an RV bathroom, but we had the most important room of the house INSIDE and not outside. We appreciated this greatly during the rainy times and winter time. Not real convenient when we had guests, so we tried not to have too many since there wasn't room for them anyway, but it worked! 

However, that six months of building turned into SIX years before we were even able to move into the new house. 

During that long period of living "temporarily" in that house, we constantly fought the battle of mold and mildew. Our youngest son suffered from allergies and didn't do well living in those conditions. 

Once we moved into the new house in November of 2011, we moved our Sunday school ministry into the old house and the adults then switched to meeting in the new house. In order to have the old house professionally treated for mold after all most everything had been moved out, we started removing the bathroom walls to open up that corner and facilitate the treatment process. We had no doubts of what we would find when we began tearing the bathroom apart. 

Here is how it all looked.

Pictures are worth a thousand words, right? Now you know of one of the many reasons we are thankful to have finally moved out of this old house!