Libler and Son, or is that Libler and Mom? Part I

Happy Friday everybody, for me the happiest part about this Friday is that Valentine's Day is over, Hallelujah!  Now, I don't have anything against Valentine's Day, I am as romantic as the next girl, but I work in my sister's flower shop for this occasion and believe me I mean WORK!  For all the lovely ladies (and gentlemen) that receive flowers, I hope you appreciate them, because it takes a lot of work to get them to your table.  I was so tired last night that I just sat on the couch all evening.  I don''t even want to think about how tired my sister is, she was pumping out arrangements for 3 days, I just help with the easy stuff.  Good job Lesley, we sent some gorgeous arrangements out the door.

Anyway, there are more ways to show love than sending flowers, thank goodness, or I wouldn't feel very loved.  This project I am going to show you just a snippet of, is one way my family, has shown their love to me.  You see, I was walking past a realtor's  board one day and saw the name "Hudson" on one of their listings.  Hudson is where I grew up, just 20 minutes from where I live now.  Naturally it caught my attention, it was cheap, but of course there was a reason for that,  it was a tiny house, with a precariously slanting floor in the living room and no bathroom, yes, that's right I said no bathroom!

Now, besides the attraction of being cheap, it has this view!  Does it get any better than this?

It is also a couple of houses down from my Mom's house, where I grew up and 3 houses down the street from my Aunt and Uncle.  Anyway, my husband said if I bought this little house, I was on my own, he would have nothing to do with it.  My oldest son lives in BC so he wasn't in the picture, so I asked my son Budd if he would be my carpenter (I think he was 20 or 21 at the time (you can see that I have big faith in my kids ability).  He looked it over with me and said he would help renovate.

Well after a long time, and a lot of red tape, we bought the road allowance beside us in order to put a septic field in (no community sewer here) and we were ready to roll.  This all took 2 years, all through that 2 years as I gutted the house completely, right down to the studs and all insulation out of the walls and attic, my son and my husband were trying to talk me into knocking it down and starting fresh.  My son had spent 6 months building houses and was more comfortable with starting new than  with adding an addition and working under this place to make a new foundation.  I finally relented and after stripping it down to bare bones, we called in the big guns and had it knocked down.

Now I will tell you the story of my footings.  We had the gravel contractor clean off the area, the bedrock was pretty close to the surface.  In order to put footings down we had to
build step footings, this was all new to us.  My son wanted nothing to do with it and my husband said to hire a contractor because we know nothing about this.  I told him we couldn't afford to hire a carpenter and if a carpenter can figure this out so can I.  Believe me, this was hard for me, I had no idea what I was doing.  It took a while and of course it was Fall, so we were racing against the weather but I persevered, and prayed a lot, and cried a little,  and guess what, I did it.  Now that I have done it once, I wouldn't hesitate to do it again, but I would make sure I had an extra set of hands.

 After the framework was complete, my son and husband (as many times as my husband told me he would not help me with this, he kept coming back) spent quite  bit of time tying the rebar in and I rented a huge hammer drill and drilled holes into the bedrock to put pegs of rebar into so this baby will never move!  Once it passed inspection , we got a crew of volunteers together and poured the cement.  After being told over and over again by my husband that I couldn't do it, this is one of the most beautiful sites I have ever seen.  When it was all done my Mom asked him what he thought of me now, he told her I was a stubborn old goat, because he never would have done it.  Believe me, that is a huge compliment.

Days after this, the snow came, and stayed until Spring.

To be continued...