4/5/2026: First Recordable Injury.. Doh! Rain, & ICF Round 2

Summary:

Monday
- Almost finished subfloor
- First recordable injury.. NOOOO!!! (Viewer Discretion on Some Pics)
Tuesday – Wednesday
- Tarps snow and rain
- Little to no progress 😦
Thursday
- Stair stringer construction
- Steel hole drilling
- Miracle neighbor randomly stops to help mount stair stringer assembly
Friday
- Clean up ice, snow, and water
- Things dry out
- Stairs complete!! WOOHOO
- Floor framing for washer and dryer
- Subfloor SOOO close, all pieces cut
Saturday
- ICF slinging and staging!
- Subfloor DONE. Like All the way 🙂
- ICF’s begin!
- Taber and Rebecca come to help
- 4 of 6 courses stacked!

Hi all.

HE IS RISEN! Happy Easter. I can’t start today’s letter without expressing gratitude for my Savior and all he has done for me. I am so grateful that I have a chance to overcome both death and sin because of his sacrifice and resurrection. He is my why for all that I strive to do in life 🙂

This was a bit of a rough week. It had a VERY poor start. Especially starting with Monday. I had my first real incident. I cut my thumb with my skill saw! My right thumb is a little skinnier now.

All things considered it is a very minor incident for which I am VERY grateful. More than anything it really hurt my pride.. I might have been yelling a bit.. things like ” NO NO NO NO NO” and “I’M SMARTER THAN THAT!” and “WHY WHY WHY” .. you know . very emotional type stuff. Anyhow .. It was a good reminder to be much more careful with my tools. I had my hand a bit too close and the skill saw grabbed my glove and pulled the saw over and yeah. The rest is history. Sad stuff. It’s been a little hard to work around. Everytime I bump it on accident it makes me want to curse (but I don’t ). And even now it kind of carries a small dull ache. But again all things considered, I feel very grateful that it wasn’t any worse!

If that wasn’t a bad enough start, Tuesday through Thursday brought on a lot of rain and snow. Again, I am very grateful for the moisture. We are all praying for it as we have not had nearly enough this winter. But with an open to the elements construction project, it sure is annoying :). We preemptively bought some really big plastic sheets (thinking ahead about ripping our entire roof off at some point). So we got to deploy those. And it worked… mostly. We didn’t have a good way for the water to run off and since the subfloor wasn’t totally finished we ended up with a big pool or two sagging down through the joists. Gratefully though, only a tiny bit made it all the way into the house 🙂

Thursday the weather was still awful but I was able to start working on the stairs! This is an exciting development! In the garage under the upstairs floor, it was still mostly dry so I got to work. I’ve decided cutting stair stringers (especially 4 of them) is not my favorite! It was a million cuts with the skill saw for cutting out all of the triangles. And with my recent trauma, I didn’t exactly enjoy that. I suppose if I had some training on how to lay the stringers out it might not have been so bad, but since I don’t do this very often.. (like 3 times in my life) it is just not my favorite. But we got it done!

After the stringers I had to drill some holes in my steel beam where the stairs would land. This was also awful and a major battle but with sheer determination, I overcame the steel 🙂 And then we had a small miracle. With the stringers mounted to the header we had to slide the header into place. It was pretty dang heavy, and Karianne and I were struggling. When all of a sudden a random neighbor comes running up.. hey it looks like you all need some help! And yes we did. We have only met Casey one other time close to a year ago while out riding 4-wheelers. It was such a blessing at such a critical time, definitely feeling watched over! Anyhow, with Casey’s help we got it up and mounted!

On Friday we got to push all the snow and ice of the plastic and roll it up and put them away. The sun came out and it was beautiful! I then cut all the stair treads and installed them. I was able to rip down a bunch of the extra pieces of subfloor using a table saw I inherited that has been sitting out in the elements for well over 6 years. I can’t believe it still turned on and worked. After the stairs were done I framed in a spot over the stairs with 2×6’s for where the laundry will eventually go. And then cut up all the remaining pieces of subfloor and got most of them glued and nailed.

And finally on Saturday, I FINISHED the second subfloor officially (only a week late ). Saturday was a fun day, we slung all of the ICF bundles up onto the floor with the excavator. That machine has saved us so much work! I am so grateful for it! And then we got after it stacking ICFs. Taber and Rebecca came over again and Taber was a lot of help. He ran most of the rebar and really kept things going. We did have to improvise a bit with the rebar since we don’t have any of John’s fancy tools to help. The rebar bender is my favorite. We used a huge chunk of heavy steel, the arm for my excavator thumb, to bend all the rebar. It actually worked well enough! Which is all we needed 🙂 We ended up stacking 4 of the 6 courses of ICF’s and it went very quickly which was awesome!

When the week started it really felt like nothing was going to happen. It was a slow awful start, but now that I look back at the week, we were still able to make some awesome progress. I can’t believe how fast it has all been happening. I am also very grateful for the angels that are watching over and protecting us. The fact that I didn’t lose my whole thumb and that Casey randomly showed up, makes me think and feel that some people on the other side are a bit more invested in this project and our well being than I may have realized 🙂