I’ve been participating in the A-Z Challenge over at my other blog.  That will keep you entertained all month.  I am working on this month’s Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour post, which will go live on the 19th.

As noted earlier, we began work on the west wall of the living room.  Scraping is coming along well.  Hubby is also tightening up the boards in the wall.  Here’s where we were on April 9th:

And here’s where we were as of this morning, April 12th:

To give you an idea about how much the wall is tightening up, here’s a closeup where you can view the metal spacer hubby has inserted in the gap that is appearing as he works:

If it’s not obvious, look approximately one-third of the way down from the top of the photo.  Behind those boards is also a sizable gap in blown in insulation.  We picked up a bale last night to use as filler as we work.  Hubby is removing each board and re-nailing it in a tighter configuration.  He’s replaced, I think three or four boards already.  We were able to use three boards we removed from the bottom of the front wall (when the previous owners installed the plumbing in the walls, they appear to have cut those boards and re-installed them — hubby made a single length series of boards to replace those for a better aesthetic effect).  We hope to get the front two-thirds of this wall painted without having to make any new boards.  When we get to the back one-third, every single one of them will be replaced, because when the previous owners enclosed that porch to make a bathroom, they used really crumby boards, which are disintegrating.  We have the process for making these boards down pretty well, so we’ll spend about a week making boards before we start that section.

In other news, I’m doing both revisions and working on new material, and that’s going fairly awkwardly.  I haven’t done any revision work on Polar Bear on the Loose for the last two weeks, but I have done extensive outlining for the book I plan to work on while we’re on the Grand Tour next month.  I want to use part of our train trip as a writing retreat, so I needed a fresh book to work on for that.  I’m using four tools to accomplish this — Scrivener, Aeon Timeline, Index Card for iPad, and Evernote.  The book has a working title of May Days. At the moment, it features three different natural disasters and how it has served to impact the lives of three generations of the Ziegler family.

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