Something I'm proud of...

God has provided us with a great house to live in here in Vancouver WA. One of its charms is the unfinished basement. We have been scheming for three years as to how we will go about adding bedrooms and bathrooms. One of the big barriers has been the tiny windows, seen here:















So, the first step to having a room for people to stay in when family comes to visit was to put in new windows. I found a store in Hood River, OR, that sells used and recycled building materials. I picked up four double-paned vinyl windows for a fraction of their normal cost.

Then, my friend Shawn and I dug a window well, six feet across, five feet deep, and four feet out from the wall. I bought a diamond blade for my Skil saw, and using a spray bottle full of water to keep the blade cool, cut the cinder block from both the inside and the outside. I knocked out the wall with a sledgehammer, framed in the new window, and behold:















People sometimes ask me how I learned to do things like this. Well, my dad has always been fairly mechanically inclined, and clever, but I was a lazy kid who didn't work around the house. I think the answer is what I call "Adult Onset Y-Chromosome Assertion." Let's face it: sawing, smashing, hammering...all things men love from boyhood.