Our Concrete Home

 The long awaited Diesel donor for the COE is here! Picking up the donor in Fontana California.  As a wise man once said "I love it when a plan comes together!" It's taken years but I am finally a real (Utah) man with a diesel truck.  And a dually no less...

  Bagged the COE I've been tracking this elusive COE for 7 years now, bagged in in the wilds of Wyoming with my trusty scent hound Kipper. I dropped him with one shot to the right eye from 500 yards with a .22LR round, no scope! Sure he's an endangered species but he will enjoy a second life as a rollback with an updated Duramax engine. Stay tuned.

The pandemic gave a little extra time to work on a giant project: The Pizza Oven!! Brent researched online and followed lots of YouTube tutorials to build this big beast. Years ago he built this concrete base and started to lay out the brick oven floor in the basement of the garage. We also decided to add the grass to the north side of the backyard using teeny tiny drought resistant plugs. So, in the following pictures, watch the progress of the plugs--it's like a mini time lapse!  Brent had a bit of engineering to figure out with the shape of each level of bricks. He cut and cut and cut!  Little side note: the 2019 steel retaining walls are looking nice! So fun to plant pretty zinas!  Each layer, a different size of brick.  When Brent finished the bricks, we wrapped the entire oven in 3 layers of thermal ceramic blankets. Next, the entire oven was covered in a mixture of crushed styrofoam and cement. It's kindof the texture of stucco.  The maiden voyage was on ...

ARTIFACT #1 Then... and now! ARTICIFACT #2 Then... and now!!! ARTIFACT #3 Then... and now! ARTIFACT #4 Then... and now! THEN (from close to the beginning) and NOW (Sept 2019). Sometimes it's just important to see how far we have come. It's been a decade long family project and more work to go! 

We have been in Our Concrete Home for almost seven years and we are still working on our vision. Jean-Jacques Rousseau sums up how I have felt: “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” We have waited years to figure out and finish our final retaining wall and stairs between our house and garage. It is one of the largest projects Brent has tackled at the house. But the result is OH SO SWEET!!! I can’t wait to see the walls and stairs rust up, soil perfectly amended, and beds filled with beautiful plants. It will be gorgeous! The following pictures span approximately three months:  This gives you a fairly good idea of what was originally there. Before starting the stairs and retaining wall, we had to put up more boards on the house. We still had exposed foam from the ICF blocks.  We need to paint the boards, a project for spring or sooner. Brent built another raised bed along the side of the house. I have been composting directly into that soil and the worms ...