Next Project - THE OVERHANG SPACE

Mark has been working on our next project. Attached to the back of the house is an overhang roof, see original photo below:

This space is about 20' X12' 

You can see how bad it looked.  It was used to house wood for the wood furnace.  We still have the wood furnace, but we did not have time to cut wood this year to feed it and even if we did we would not use this space for wood storage.  In the future, IF we have & use a wood furnace, it will be an outside wood furnace, we will store the wood near that furnace.

This space has a dirt floor and that dirt gets tracked into the house all day, every day!  The dirt here is a gritty, sandy dirt that sticks to your shoes. So, we decided we would make this a patio space with concrete patio block that looks like brick. 

When we purchased the farm, this space was actually worse than this - it was almost knee deep in junk 

During our moving we used this as a staging spot for boxes and such 

Mark framed the area at the base, added several layers of top soil, and tamped down each layer.  He also took down the plywood wall (behind Mark, notice it in the second photo above) - it had several holes in it

Starting to lay the brick.  He's moved over 2 tons of brick within the last two days.  Each square block weighs 70lbs and he's moved 80 of them - at least once

The patio floor is now finished - it looks soooo good.

The floor is very solid!  Yesterday, we drove to Marquette to purchase the 2x4s, plywood, vinyl, and lights to install the end wall again.  I'm so proud of Mark because he has never done this before.  He has laid tile, but never a patio on dirt and sand (wood is solid and dirt/sand are squishy).

They are predicting our first real snowfall for tonight, so Mark achieved his goal.  We are expecting 1" of the white stuff, but we know it won't stick, it is still way too warm for a real snowfall.