Rouse Family Adventures

As soon as we got to Winthrop we realized we had forgotten our truck, excavator and toolbox keys.  Thus had denied ourselves access to all our tools and most materials.   Brandon conjured up his old hooligan spirt and started the process of breaking into our "secure" construction site. Using some shims and a library card we were able to nose the truck door open a tiny little bit. Next we stuck a piece of leftover solid ground wire into the door and wiggled it around like a blind folded Miley Cyrus twerking around in a dark room.  Finally on one random twerk, we hit the unlock button. Once inside we now had access to our boxes of fasteners, a spare excavator key and...... a lock picking set.   Once upon a time we had learned lock picking. A skill which was cultivated by the national park service- whom took it upon themselves to lock everything they could think of and more. Vowing to never be locked out of a piece of property on public land (again) we learned a te...

I thought I’d give all our friends, family and esteemed followers an update on our first massive erection. Our concrete is poured it’s time to buy some tool belts and learn to frame!   So, we took a week off work and headed over the mountains to start assembling walls on our two story garage with apartment ontop project. Fueled by excitement and the necessity to get to the lumberyard before they closed Brandon drove feverishly around the bends and curves of the mountains passes. Annabelle happily played and chirped around in the back of the van… until she started making some funky bodily noises and frantically pointed at her mouth. Like a seasoned parent I sprung into action and grabbed the first vessel I could find… my coffee mug.. filled with a few inches of coffee in the bottom. I expertly caught a rainbow of vomit spewing from her little mouth.  I caught almost everything, only spilling a little bit on a blanket. The Stanley cup, was nearly full to the brim with victor...

 We’ve had two concrete trucks out on our property and have been foundationing so hard. As a concrete truck virgin I didn’t   know much about concrete other than it takes sidewalk chalk pretty well.   So I   googled some shit about it so I wouldn’t   appear ignorant when the first truck showed up.  Key points, refer to concrete as mud and talk about how it slumps. When the truck gets there let the driver know you want to look at the mud then say , "yeah that mud looks a little dry. I want more slump." That pretty much sums it up. That and you need help. Luckily, we have some pretty reliable friends that have been willing to come help us and have made some new ones. The night before our first concrete truck it was just Brandon, Annabelle and myself. Armed with a bunch of kid snacks and some new barbies we were prepared for a total shit show. At 9 PM we got a text from a fellow owner builder in the same neighborhood we had just met that afternoon saying h...

Life was getting too easy.  Things were getting almost complacent. With Annabelle starting kindergarten soon, we stepped back to think about where we want to be for the next several years.  Not sure how many years, but from at least Kindergarten -through- as long as she makes it before robots take over  the public education system.   Anyways, we decided we want more skiing in our lives and we should move to Winthrop, WA. Houses are expensive, even fixer-uppers, you can pay over 1/2 million dollars for a turd of a house.  With our waning enthusiasm for polishing all the turds in our lives, we decided to just take a stab at building our own house. This could also be one of those weird things people do when they hit 40, but instead of learning how to play the saxophone or buying a fast red car which seem pretty easy things from this perspective we are going to do the build your own house thing. Since Brandon has learned to think in his sleep we will probably b...