Happy Anniverary

A few weeks ago, 6 April, was the 1 year anniversary for when we broke ground on this project. Interesting that two years in a row we had significant snow storms in April.

Helping Others

Our builder Rick Hendel and his kids went down to Rockport Texas to help the Reach Global team with recovery efforts from Hurricane Harvey. It had nothing to do with nicer weather there. Very very cool thing for them to do!

Solid House

We’ve had a lot of strong wind and gusts the past few weeks. It’s been good to see how well built our house structure is with no creaks or groans like many houses would have had at this point. Thanks Terry, Justin and the rest of the crew who framed it so well.

Hopefully we’ve finally seen the end of snow for this season. Something I learned quickly after moving here is to slope the snow along the south sides of walkways so that the sun can clear things as much as possible. Without sloping our front walk would be solid ice. 

These piles were about 10-12’ tall when I took this. That was after many days of melting temps.

I’m looking forward to being able to sit out on this patio for my morning cappuccino.

The crew from Krause Electric and Krause Media Solutions having lunch in our family room. Great team of folks!

An inline blower and silencer (muffler) for a bath exhaust. These provide much better and quieter exhaust than typical ceiling bath fans.

There are lists like this all over our house.

Backing plate for a Control 4 control panel. We’d originally planned to go with Crestron or Elan for our home automation system but they are very closed systems that require a dealer to do everything. Control 4 is doing a much better job of end user configuration and control and hopefully will continue to get better on this front. Just think if every time you wanted to install some new app on your laptop or phone you had to have a dealer do it? That’s Crestron, Elan and many others. And to some extent still Control 4 but they’re getting better.

Shawn from Krause Media Solutions installing wire to an AV box.

Every year we get interesting formations in the ice on our back patio.

The ice has melted from the 20 or so feet closest to shore where it’s really shallow. Ducks were still walking across the ice just before I took this photo.

The ice has fissures all through it indicating that it won’t be long before it breaks up.

Thanks Texas! A storm that went over Mexico and Texas picked up a bunch of reddish dirt and carried it up Interstate 35 to Minnesota where it tinged the snow brownish red. We got about an inch of this stuff. There’s a popular saying that you should never eat yellow snow. Never been told anything about red snow.

Tulips are starting to poke up through the snow!