David and I arrived at Poor Valley Creek Friday evening, May 13th, at dusk. We were exhausted and haggard from our 10-hour drive but the valley was heavenly!

As the sun dipped behind the mountains, we opened a bottle of wine, filled our red solo cups, and toasted to the start of our working weekend. Before calling it a night, we sat on our old porch swing and watched the moonrise (it was almost full) while listening to a soothing katydid chorus and rhythmic calls from a lonesome whippoorwill.

The view from the front porch of the existing house at dusk!

Saturday morning we were ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work!
First things first…the “shed”, which is really a small barn and EXTREMELY heavy, had to be moved because it sat where David needed to dig the foundation for our addition to the existing house.

Thank the good Lord for our wonderful neighbors, EJ and Jeffrey! We had a limited amount of time to complete our “to do” list over the course of three days and it would not have been possible to conquer this initial task without their helping hands and additional equipment!

Between the four of us, we managed to spin/slide the small barn far enough out of the way so David could begin digging the foundation for our new addition.

This small barn is over 100 years old! We’ll eventually deconstruct and repurpose the wood & tin into a chicken coop which will sit on the backside of our property, next too our BIG barn.

Next up, David got busy digging! He had to have the foundation squared away before pouring the footers, and the cement truck was scheduled to arrive on Monday morning.

While David worked on the foundation, I cleaned up all of the scrap that was left from when he gutted the house back in February.

Another wonderful neighbor, Gary, came over in his tractor with a bag full of cold water bottles to wet our whistles. His tractor bucket sure came in handy for lifting the super heavy scrap. I filled a 30-yard dumpster in two days.

So thankful for hot showers in a local hotel because I was (actually David and I both were) a NASTY, sweat-soaked mess from head to toe!

Monday arrived along with some of the materials we’ll be using for the rehab & new build which will be started in June! We placed everything strategically and covered it up with heavy duty plastic to ensure it stays shielded from the weather until our next visit.

This was David, waiting not-so-patiently for the cement truck to arrive, ha-ha!
Once it did, he went straight to work pouring, spreading and leveling out the cement/footers.
He was in BEAST MODE!

We spread some fresh gravel and graded the driveway…

…and we even made time to put a couple coats of paint on the old porch swing (I scraped the old paint off and sanded it down beforehand)!

Below is a sample of on-going progress inside the existing house. This will be a major challenge to rehab as it was originally built in 1920 and NOTHING is “true” (square or level) at this point in time.

Stay tuned for more progress in June…can’t believe it is only a week away!