I remember last Memorial Day, we reroofed the south extension of the house and it was excrutiatingly hot. That's when we had found my missing plants my our neighbor's backyard.

This Memorial Day Weekend, Joel and I had multiple projects to finish in preparation for the next concrete pour. Fortunately, Joel was taking the mornings pretty easy, but working hard throughout the day.

Saturday rolled around and Joel realized that he needed to rent a jackhammer to break up the concrete floor. Unfortunately, it was 7pm and Home Depot closed at 8pm. When we had called our local Home Depot, the manager was not skilled enough to rent out the jack hammer. I'm sorry, you're the manager - you should be able to do EVERYTHING in the store, otherwise, what's the purpose of giving you the authority to "manage" other people? We can go on and on about how inefficient, unhelpful and completely disorganized our local Home Depot is, but we won't get into that in this blog.

So, without a jackhammer, we wrapped up our work and closed up for the night. Katy Quinn and Kathren Coleman were headed to our house on Sunday to help dig out the basement.

When Home Depot opened up the next morning, Joel was one of the first in line to pick up the jackhammer. Since this was a one person job, I spent the morning preparing lunch for us.

Mmmm, turkey burgers!! I found this great recipe in Real Simple earlier in the week. Meatlovers - rest assured that it's tasty and moist. I got Joel to eat it three times in 5 days. I made them for dinner earlier in the week for a very skeptical Joel and he loved them. Since Joel doesn't eat squash, I omitted the zucchini and added chopped onions. Also makes really cute mini-burgers if you can find mini-buns to go with them.

So, while Joel returned the jackhammer, Katy went to work on the mini excavator. She learned quickly how touchy the controls were and was very careful to not knock out any of the pipes still exposed. Here's a picture of her at work in the basement.

Katy found that pulling the concrete out was pretty tough. The ceiling definitely was restrictive and there was little room for mistakes. But she operated it like a pro.

You wonder where Joel was at? Yes, he waited over an hour in line to return the jackhammer. Seriously, to just give them back their own tool - how difficult is it to just check that it still works and pay? What's ironic? They wanted Joel to pay for an extra hour even though he arrived at the front of the line 10 minutes after the deadline. Can you believe that?? Oh, it's amazing what you can get away with when you have a captive audience.

After pulling out the concrete layer, we started loading up the bobcat and taking the concrete and dirt out of the basement. Kathren spent some time working the bobcat too. With some quick instructions, Kathren was off and away operating the machine. My only two warnings for her were: 1) commit when you're backing up the ramp and 2) don't jump out when you feel the machine tipping foward.

It was nice to have someone else who knew how to operate the machine. Your body doesn't get tired, but your brain gets tired thinking about the dirt and ramping up and moving through the tunnel, dumping and doing it all over again. It's exhausting mentally. Plus, my hands were numb from all the vibrating inside the machine. You can't hear anything because the engine is right behind your head!

You will appreciate this picture - can you tell that Kathren is only on two wheels here? Cool as a cucumber.

We got lucky around 5pm when our next door neighbor Tony came over to help dig. He just showed up in scruffy clothes, grabbed a shovel and started digging. What a nice guy! He's been absolutely wonderful throughout this whole process as we've pretty much taken over and destroyed the yard that separates our two homes. You can see Tony's house in the picture with Kathren - it's the one on her right. Tony dug out his basement last year and has worked really hard to make the basement liveable. It provides us, or at least me, a lot of drive when I know that we're almost there!

By this time, Kathren was busy operating the bobcat, Joel was on the mini excavator, Katy, Tony and I were digging out the footing that goes around the basement floor. It was getting dark and we still had about 1/3 of the basement still left to excavate. With the sky getting dark, it was going to be tough to work. Plus, there was really no other work we could have the girls do while we were operating the machines. So we shut down for the night and ate dinner at almost 9pm!

The next day, Joel had the help of two guys who finished the rest of the excavating. But when we were just about to finish up on the digging around the footing, the rain started. We luckily finished digging out the french drain when the rain really started draining into the basement opening. YIKES!

We got the guys to grab about 1/4 of the gravel when it just broke into an uncomfortable rain. It was clear that if I didn't want to work in the rain, neither did these guys. So we sent them on their way and Joel let me clock out. So nice of him!

Poor Baker had been locked up pretty much all weekend, so we let him out and play in the rain. He loved running through the mud and had some close calls running around the yard. For the first time in a while, he really liked going out in the rain.

Joel worked hard until 10pm, when I came back from grocery shopping and purchasing take out. Boy we worked hard and deserved the pad thai, pad se eww and stir fry we ate that night!!