And the Floor goes Down!

Putting the floor down proved to be a real puzzle!

We have gone through at least 8 different air nailers in this build! The Sepik weather just turns the seals inside to goo after a while and they stop working. On a few nailers, we actually had backup seals and when we took them out of the package, they crumbled to dust! Very frustrating!

We also tried had to keep the floor covered in case it rained as you can see in the left side of this picture. We didn't want to spend the money on a sub floor so we had to be extra careful as we worked!

The house was already much nicer than what most people here in PNG could afford so adding a sub floor seemed like going way overboard. 

Although not having a sub-floor made it a lot more work and effort. We also we tried to make it mostly bug proof.

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We had to quickly cover the floor with tin roofing if it started to rain so all our work wouldn't be ruined!

But in the end, I think we did a good job and made a nice floor.

How to Plant Seeds

 For our Science lessons we learned how to plant seeds. Miss Stephanie, who is a much better gardener than me, was happy to teach Jonathan all about it!

We put these greens on top of our salad, it was good!

Happy 35th Birthday to Jacob!

Making Dad's Strawberry Ice Cream Pie! Yum!!

Jacob was very very happy to eat his birthday pie!

Naomi loved it too!

The kids gave badminton to Dad for his birthday so Naomi is very interested!

Fun with the camera!

 Jonathan and Naomi love to be funny with selfies! :)

Rebuilding the House Foundation

It is always a complicated job to get stone dirt in this country. Many times it is loaded by hand with shovels down at the river and then brought to us. This dump truck took a little work, but it did finally get up there and dump its load.

We had been in Australia taking care of some medical needs for Naomi when an old missionary house was taken down and the foundation was planned. So here is a picture of Bill catching me up with all the things I missed while I was away.

The kids started calling this the disappearing house because while we were in Brisbane, It disappeared!

There were some hot days here in Wewak working with metal and concrete!

But eventually the foundation started to take shape!

And before we knew it,  the floor of the disappearing house had mysteriously reappeared!

Here are some more pictures of the foundation work. If you look closely at the top of the poles, you can see where we welded new L-brackets so that everything would be level.

When the house was built, much of the timber was different heights and widths. but we were able to buy timber that was very uniform from the local store, so all the foundation posts could be the same height.

It was a lot of work in the hot sun!

Here we are trying to figure out how to make everything level

And here I am welding up our new consistent heights for the posts, very hot work here in the tropics!

After a lot of work, we were all pleased with how level the bearers turned out.