JULY 4 UPDATE: Happy Fourth!

I'm about half-way to being able to see the second floor!

Dave's parents arrived just after nine this morning, and Don joined Dave, already hard at work on the stairs (what holiday? there's a house to be built!). Dave's using the last of the boards that made up the bin walls for the decking on the stairs, which gives the stairs a lot of granary charm but means a whole lot more work than putting decking on would normally be. We're lucky his labor is cheap, he tells me.

Here's how the stairs looked about mid-afternoon:

I really like the color of them. Somehow that worn wood just looks really nice to me. Dave tells me it's fir -- maybe that's what gives it its nice warm color.

The tedious work of installing all this decking is just the first step, though. We're going to figure out some way of putting trim along the edges, which will also give a way to attach the railing. That trim will extend a bit over the edge, which should give the stairs a more finished look. Then the whole works needs to be sanded a bit more, then covered with some sort of heavy-duty varnish.

That will all be nice, but I'm just pretty darn excited that pretty soon I'll have a reasonably safe way to get to the second story and look out those skylights!

Picking out decent boards for the stair decking is getting more challenging -- there aren't too many boards left that aren't split or filled with too many nail holes. We should have just enough to finish the stairs.

There are some interesting finds in those old bin boards -- looks like someone jotted framing instructions on this one. I can't recognize the writing -- too neat to be my dad's, and it doesn't look like my uncle Arnold's. It could be my uncle Leo's, or they did have a friend of theirs helping with the building at one point. Unfortunately, the writing is on what would be the back side, if we decide to use that board.

The board with "1959" and a line drawn on it to show the grain level is also still around, though the board is in rough shape, and any sanding we did to it would remove the writing. Not sure how we'd use that board. We also found a board with a canning jar lid neatly nailed over a knothole, likely in an attempt to keep varmints out. We're going to try to find a neat place to work that in somewhere -- perhaps somewhere where you can see it from the kitchen.

Dad was on sanding duty in the afternoon -- he replaced Mary, who had to move over to swinging duty:

Sofia always has a great time when Nama and Grandpa come to visit. I also enjoy the break from being Sofia's primary playmate (and swing pusher).

Dave and Don had gotten just a bit further than this on installing the decking when they quit for the night.

Don and Dad (a lot of "D" names around here) also finished installing the floor joists for the first floor this morning. There had been some talk of finishing the floor over the weekend, but they decided against it. The east wall does not have the insulation or house wrap on it (because the addition will go on that side, and we can't start the addition until the excavator shows up and puts in the water line and septic tank), so if it did rain, water might get into the insulation below the floor. That wouldn't be good. So they quit on that project after the floor joists were in.

(And at this point, we're praying for rain -- the corn is starting to look stressed. Not much possibility for rain in the forecast, though. July and August can be awfully dry months in the Dakotas.)

... Frederick did not have a fireworks display tonight, a subject of some contention in the community. Fireworks were part of the festivities for Finn Fest instead. I've heard a couple people grumble that Frederick, which has a reputation for putting on a good fireworks show, discriminated against non-Finnish people this year! I have to admit I didn't realize that having fireworks for Finn Fest meant that we wouldn't have fireworks for the Fourth of July. I might have argued against that -- it wasn't very likely that family from out of town would travel to Frederick for Finn Fest, but it's quite possible there were a number of families in town for the Fourth. They were probably expecting our traditional show, and now they had to travel out of town to see fireworks this evening.

Oh, well -- it's another thing we can do better next year.

... We had our own little fireworks show tonight. And I do mean little -- Sofia like the snaps the best, I think, and there's no "fire" in those little fireworks. We bought a few things that emit sparks, but Sofia was all tuckered out from her hard day of playing with Nama by the time it was dark enough to light them. We'll try again tomorrow.