On Saturday, Scott took out and replaced the bottom row of the big upstairs windows. He had a narrow ledge to work on, and after he carried the windows to the second floor from the inside, he had move them to the outside through the openings and lift them into place before nailing them. It was nerve-wracking to me, but he said he wasn't nervous at all.

On Sunday, he put the top curved window in. This one he lifted on the outside of the building, but he said it was lighter. It was higher up, so I was praying the whole time he wouldn't fall. But they're in, and he's still with us.

To help him manage the windows from the outside, he build this ledge. So at least he was standing on something level, even if it was only 10 inches wide.

When I wasn't helping to stabilize a window, I was tearing out drywall in the living room and office, burning any wood trash I could, and cleaning up. ​

Three days at the river house, and Scott has wired the bathroom, put up drywall, taped it, and cleared out the area where the water heater and pump used to be. He is going to make it into a closet with a built-in cabinet. He also tried to install the vanity I bought but discovered it was the wrong one, so he took it back to the store. 

He likes taking photos of the river and sunsets. Here's one from each of the last two nights he was there.

Original loft photos

Scott started on the upstairs bathroom. He took out a window that would have been inside the bathroom, put up plywood, and framed in the walls.

Scott successfully got the one-piece shower surround inside the house all by himself. Looks like he had to take the door off to do it.

Scott and Frank spent one weekend working on tying the cistern into the pump. They discovered the pump had a failing gasket and wasn't strong enough to work from the second floor. So they'll be moving it to the ground level next and making a new gasket.

The next weekend, Scott spent a day and a half moving dirt again. Everything that he'd dug out for the cistern hole was piled up around it, and the resultant grading would have sent rainwater streaming toward the cistern cap. 

This is a before picture, but it's hard to tell from it how much dirt there was. Think: a day and a half's worth of shoveling.

Two places where some of the dirt went are one, around the firepit, and, two, over the former patio of tiles on the side of the house. Scott moved all the limestone that was under the tiles as well.

The plywood contraption by the window is our shower stall. Scott needs help moving it into the house so it's there until he has someone there.

Somewhere in the last couple of weeks, Scott installed the upstairs potty. 

Here are all the pictures so any can be enlarged.

At the end of the day, I was a little crestfallen looking around to see our accomplishments. It didn't look commensurate with the damage done to both our bodies. I guess it is also the phenomenon of not being able to keep an accurate "before" picture in mind when looking in real time at the "after."

First, Scott removed an enormous slab of concrete with a sledgehammer. The slab used to be under the pump house he took down last weekend. When I say enormous, I mean  insanely enormous: insanely thick and insanely heavy. Normal people don't think of touching such things with their bare hands. I felt bad watching him work on it. It took so much effort. Then, after sledging chunks off, he'd load them into a wheelbarrow, cart them down to the river bank, unload them, and arrange them neatly along the shoreline.

Second, we finished gutting the bathroom and then removed all the wallboard from the walls and ceiling of the eventual kitchen. While Scott was working on the slab, I started taking the wallboard down after removing the trim and switch plates. Then he came in and did the bathroom, which included smashing a tile wall, a concrete shower pan, and a concrete floor four inches thick.

I don't have any good picture of the bathroom from the outside where you could see the 3-foot wall on the right where the tiled part of the shower was, the 2-foot wall on the right that housed the pocket door, or the pocket door. All I have are these which show the two walls but with no good idea of context or scale.

We kept the fire burning all day, and when we were exhausted and ready to go home, Scott loaded the last of the mattresses on the truck to put in the trash.

We made a LOT of progress on Labor Day!

We worked from around 9:30 to 7 with one short break for lunch. Here's a summary of our accomplishments

• Cleaned out every room, removing all furniture, shelving, knick-knacks, mirrors, pictures, pillows, bedding, rugs, curtains, rods, etc. from the house except for the stove (the lot will easily fill one dumpster and then there was plenty more volume that we burnt)
• Gutted the kitchen
• Gutted the bathroom
• Removed the bedroom doors
• Removed the fireplace insert
• Opened the wall into the sunroom, removing the barn door and the wall extension that had been built there
• Opened the wall between the kitchen and living room
• Demolished a hutch 
• Demolished an outdoor structure (we discovered from some writing on construction materials that the building was called the pump house at one time) 
• Burned a bunch of stuff

Every item made out of wood, from kitchen and bathroom cabinets to the outdoor hutch, was very strongly built and difficult to bust up and heavy to carry. Also screws. So many screws in everything.

Bathroom Gutting
Still more to do in here, from removing shower, tiling, wainscoting, and trim.

Before-ish and after Bedroom #1
So...no before pictures in the first bedroom? I am not a very good photojournalist. I do have three of the living room from which you can see a little into the first bedroom. That's the best I've got.

Before and After
More to be done in here including removing fireplace housing, removing trim and wainscoting, removing and replacing floors, windows, and doors.

All my post cleanout pictures.
​Again, terrible photography skills on display. So much furniture up here that had to be taken down and out.

All my living room pictures.

I have no closeup picture of the hutch pre- or postdemo. But in the picture of the house, you can see the shed to the right of the house and the hutch between the house and the shed, against the back wall of the house.

Mattresses cost $60 a piece to take to the dump!!! So we're carting them back to our house.

We were hanging with my BIL Dave and his girlfriend Elle. Elle was saying that her mother and stepfather owned a cottage on the Portage River, and they had gotten to the age where they had decided to sell it. My husband's ears perked up.

We went out to see it within days. Elle's sister Moe and her husband Matt have the house right next door, and they were doing the selling because they wanted to make sure the people who bought the cottage were not developers or AirBnb landlords etc. 

My husband fell in love instantly. The property is right on the river, and the cottage had been updated with a nice loft and sunroom. But many other items needed to be updated. I was uneasy about the musty smell, the evidence of rodents, the mosquitos, the hour drive from our home, the water situation (they had a cistern for toilets and showers but brought their drinking water in with them; if we moved there, we'd need a new cistern and to truck in water), the septic, while brand new, didn't function, and the garage was falling in. 

Plusses for me were the bald eagle's nest at the back of the property, the nature preserve across the river and another one just established on the property surrounding us, the neighbors Mo and Matt, and the fact that I knew Scott could fix anything and make it nice. Mostly, I could tell he wanted it really bad.  

So we bought it.

Exterior

Interior

More interior shots

The river view and the eagle's nest. In June 2024, there was a big storm, and the nest blew over.

There is a trail already, but they are going to make a bigger one eventually. In the time since we bought it, they put in a kayak launch next door and graveled the road leading to it.

We knew that the sunroom and the gabled loft were recent additions to the house. Later Scott learned that the kitchen and bathroom (front end of the house) were an earlier addition.
1. the earlier addition
2. the sunroom
3. the gable from the outside
4. the loft from the inside

Here are two photos. One is the front of the house before the loft addition. The other is the back or river side of the house before the sunroom addition. These photos were hanging on the walls when we took over ownership.

Comparison pics, back and front of house.