Work is mostly going on in the interior of the little house in the big woods now. Here are some pictures:

Mary has primed many cabinet doors and hung them outside to dry.

We have the shiplap installed and painted on the big wall. Also, the wood stove has been installed.

The ceremonial first lighting of the woodstove occurred:

We brought the appliances in from under the front porch roof and got them ready to install (washer and dryer are around the corner). Also, we started hanging cabinets that we bought from someone in Utah who was redoing their kitchen. They turned out to be from Barlow’s Wood Classics, which is the same company that made our cabinets when we redid our kitchen in Orem. Excellent quality cabinets made of real wood (maple, I think). We were very happy to see the Barlow’s mark on the cabinets!

In other news, we finally got the 2500 gallon cistern in the hole in the ground that our builder, Matt, dug for us. Here’s Matt lowering the cistern into the hole, watched by a couple of his daughters.

Now we need Garry the plumber to come and connect the cistern to the house.

The hole for the cistern turned out to be too deep by almost 2 feet! So we had to take the cistern back out and bring the depth up by filling in with some of the (formerly) dug out earth. Here the poor thing is, flopped on its belly like a fish out of water. Garry and Rob hauled it out with the aid of a couple of trees, a couple of snatch blocks, and Garry’s truck.

Dumping in dirt using son Keith’s tractor:

After the bottom of the pit was smoothed and leveled, the cistern went back in and had various pipes installed. Below is the (almost) finished cistern. We’re going to be collecting rainwater in addition to hauling water from Bonners Ferry, and I forecast that shortly after the tank is filled with hauled water we’ll have a big rainstorm, so we need to have somewhere for the extra water to go. That’s the 2 inch pipe on the left corner of the tank. The smaller pipe next to it feeds water to the pump in the crawlspace. On the near left corner is a 3 inch pipe for temporarily filling until we have the house downspouts hooked into the system. When that happens, we’ll also add a tee for filling from the haul water tank on the truck. The access riser is in place and the tank is ready for filling. We’ll backfill the hole with dirt after a few days so we can check for leaks first.

Meanwhile, Mary has been very busy masking, priming, and painting cabinets:

And finally, we’re beginning to fill the big cistern. The tank in the back of the pickup holds 450 gallons of water, which we get at the Boundary County Fairgrounds for the price of $0.25 for about 50 gallons, so a full pickup tank costs about $2.25. It’ll take several trips to bring the big cistern up to its 2500 gallon capacity, but then we’ll keep it topped off as needed. Also, in the next few days we’ll be hooking the house rain gutter system into the tank so that we can capture rain water and snow melt. All of the water then will go through a 5 stage filtration system in the house before being used, including a charcoal filter for taste and certain chemicals and a biologic filter for germs.