Kids costumes

This year Zane was scooby doo, Zander was darth vader and emberr was a gypsy.

Would you come in??

Getting candy at our house was not as easy as knocking on the door and saying trick or treat. You had to come in the house and walk down a dark hallway first. We had 82 kids come to the house and only 12 were to scare to come in. Would you come in to get some candy??

Are you hungry??

We had a table full of goodies for our halloween party. the menu consisted of brain, eyeballs and severed fingers, and body parts in jello.

Halloween decorations

The weather made us change our plan of what we wanted to do outside, so it didn't turn out how we wanted but it was still not bad.

This is a life size pinhead off of the movie hellraiser. He moved his head, mouth and eyes and talked when he was turned on. He was sound and motion activated. There were a few kids that had nightmares from him.

We adopted two zombie babies this year, Chewie and angry Alice. They are both motion activated and the move, make noises and their eyes light up. We had a some bad luck with bringing home working zombie babies, we had to change them in several times before we finally got ones that worked properly.

The rest of the pics are of the inside of the house. We had a halloween party on the Saturday before halloween, so we tried to make the rest of the house look spookie too.

cutting down the tree

Outside we filled in the rest of the trench around the house. Some of it we had to do with shovels and pails and the rest Jay was able to use his front end loader. We still have shovel a little a bit to finish it off. Jay had to stop using his front end loader when his tire sunk in the loose dirt and slide towards the house.

Since part of the problem with the basement walls was because of a tree root, we desided to remove the tree. We had professionals come in and cut the tree down and then Jay cut it up and hauled it a way. A couple of days later we had a back hoe come in and remove the stump.

No need

Since we cut a hole in the cement wall to connect the two basements we desided that we had no need for the stairs that were for the old part of the basement. we took out the stairs and turned that area into a storage area in the basement and a little broom closet up stairs.

breaking down walls

While we are doing work in the basement, we desided to connect the two basements. For those of you that don't know we had the new basement which was a finished basement it is the one where the wall were caving in and there was an old basement that was a cement basement that had a spare room and storage. Where i wanted to put the hole to connect the basements we had to move the water heater, the chimney and the central vac. Lorne and Ken came up to help me take out the chimney. I was able to get a small hole in the chimney before they got here. Jay was the one that cut the hole in the cement wall, and he ened up calling Ken up for some extra help. It was a foot thick and it took three different saws and a lot of hard dirty work to get it done but it is worth it

Blue Skin

Once we had all the dirt dug out it was time for the blueskin membrane. Before we could put it on we had to scrape the dirt off the walls with a wire brush. We spent Saturday working on the walls and adding gravel to the dirt in the trench so harden it up. We had it all ready to put the membrane up on Sunday. Jay and I cut it all first and then when Lorne and Ken came up we were ready to put it on. Ken used a roller and painted the primer on the walls and Lorne and Jay put the sheets of membrane on. After the first few sheets and they figured out the best way to put in on it went fairly fast. They finished putting on the membrane and then stopped for lunch. After the break we started to put in the weeping tile and drain rock. we had to use five gallon pails to haul some of the drain rock to where it needed to go. By supper time we had the drain rock put down around the house except for the last 10 feet or so where Jay had to tie the weeping tile into the sump pump. (It was still to muddy to do that). We also filled in the trench along the side of the house, see previous post.