The big dig

Our house has five bedrooms but the two in the basement don't have egress windows or escape windows (which is what I like to call them). So our weekend project was to dig the holes so we could put the windows in. We started on Saturday. Here are some before pictures:

Ashley's old window

Sara's old window

After I took the pictures we began to dig outside of Sara's window. Well, actually Joe began to dig. I had to go to the store and get myself a shovel that would work. I got a short handled "camp" shovel which Joe made fun of--"girly" shovel is what he called it which I thought fitting since I am a girl. Anyway, after I got myself a shovel I also began to dig. And the kids got their plastic yellow shovels out and began to dig as well. And we dug and dug and dug and dug and dug. This is what it looked like at lunch:

It was soon after lunch that Joe began changing the digging depth on me. First it was four feet for a certain point. Then it was four feet from a lower point. Then suddenly it became five feet. Then after we got to five feet he informed me that we had to dig out the sides of the hole as well so they could actually fastened the window well into the cement block. My thought at the time "Won't the dirt just hold it in????!!!!" So we dug out the sides and just when I thought I couldn't ever lift my arms again, we were done with one window. Not sure when the next one is going to get dug out. I need to be able to lift my arms again.... Here's the "after" pictures of the hole outside Sara's room. We are going to have someone come and help put the window in. Which makes me wonder why we didn't have someone come and help us dig the hole....

I had some other, better pictures of the hole but somehow they got erased off my camera. This is just a picture of one of the sides that we had to dig out. But the hole is still there so tomorrow I'll take some more pictures of the hole and share them with you. I'm sure you can't wait, but you have to understand that I am pretty proud of this hole.