11/5/06
OK so obviously it's not a good idea to make a post like the previous one and then not follow up in a timely fashion.
There has been a lot of concern and questions about Lucy. Let me state for the record that she is fine. Well she seems to be fine anyway. It's been almost two weeks since her little episode and we haven't seen any similar symptoms since. If anything she seems a little perkier than she was before our week up there. She's been going out for runs with Sandy and has actually been running (as opposed to exploring and rolling around on her itchy back). We're hopeful that the whole thing was caused by something she ate or drank and that it won't happen again.
Also if anyone has been avoiding calling us our phone is working again. It turned out that the problem was in the wire that goes from the phone pole to our house.
Here's an update on what we did during our week up on our property:
The goal was to turn the "sauna" into a well insulated small cabin that we can use year 'round but particularly in the winter if we want to ski in and spend a weekend. Here's what it looked like before we started

It looks cute (especially with the little icicles along the edge of the roof) but trust me it was a total dump. I bet there were at least two pounds of mouse crap in there plus you could see right through the walls in a lot of places.
So we made a trip to Menards which Sandy hated (she claims we were there for 3 hours) bought a bunch of supplies and rented a truck and headed north.

The weather was very cooperative most of the week, it did snow a few times but never very much and it did rain one afternoon which was kind of frustrating. Here's what the tent looked like our first morning.

We stripped the sauna down to the framing cleaning out all the poop infested insulation and the junky stuff inside it. One of our main goals was to install a regular exterior door because we wanted it to be airtight and well insulated. The problem was that the thing was only 77 inches floor to ceiling and a standard door is 81.5 inches tall. So to make the door fit we had to raise up the roof. We accomplished this by bracing up all the framing and then lifting the whole thing up by 11.5 inches and then re-attaching the corners. You can see in this picture that it's in the process of being lifted and that the 4x4s on the corners have been cut and are lifted away from the floor.

Once the lift was done we removed all the studs (except the corners) and replaced them with full length studs. Originally it was my plan to take the full length studs out of the house, but after looking I decided there wasn't anything in that place that could be removed without causing the whole thing to collapse. So I made a trip to town and got some new studs and other supplies.
We had bought a door at Menards and saved the windows when we remodeled the kitchen. Here's some of the new framing in place and more in progress. Sandy was beginning to work on the foam insulation

We were really getting tight for time at this point so everything was a big rush and kind of stressful. But with a good boost of help from my Mom and Dan we managed to get the fiberglass insulation up on the inside and the tyvek on and the windows in place. Then on Sunday morning we got the door installed and the Sandy got the tyvek finished and taped on the seams. So this is what it looks like right now

I'm hoping to go back up the week of Thanksgiving to finish up some things like installing the woodstove and the paneling inside.