He came and he went.....

But he did leave his mark.  Another long summer with my little brother.  Casey went home on Saturday.

When he arrived he had a car full of tools. When he left he had the car and a trailer full of stuff.  A thousand dollar costco run did not help but then he had to buy supplies for Laurens wedding and Joni needed pants to go with her wine and paper goods.  And then there was the Saturday garage sales.  Too many good deals to pass up.  A ladder here, a wheelbarrow there, and the fireplace set.  So sad he left the extra hardwood flooring he planned to use for Joni's house.   And let's not forget the trailer itself.  Obviously the boy has latent hoarder characteristics.  

It was painfully obvious that his mind was on getting out of town.  Had been since before we went to Sonoma.  The giggle with everyone, except Casey, was his insistence that he only had "a day and a half of work to do".  That morphed into "not including the remodel" which he always knew was part of the job.  His day and a half became almost 3 weeks which was far more realistic for the work that had to be completed but not what he wanted.  Our friend Scott would come over and Casey would say "I am leaving tomorrow" and he would look at me and smile.  Even Oma knew he just wanted outta here!  Not sure why, we are very pleasant people and he had his own room with a TV and bath.  May have had something to do with Lauren's wedding and Joni!

As it was, Casey did not do well with Marketing 101.  One should always turn over any project clean bright and shiny.  Let's just say we spent all day Sunday cleaning up the debris field.   The good news is that I got a new finish hammer, a pair of nice pliers, and a few other items which were buried.  

All that said, let's focus on what is important.  We started with this....

And ended with this....  

Five and one half months of construction and we are left with an extremely well built cottage for Oma.  It was altered on the fly to meet everything that Oma wanted.  Had Casey not been here it would never have been built or if it had we would have had significant cost overruns and way too many fights with contractors, designers, and engineers.  Casey did a great job of finding the problems before they were built and developing solutions with the various trades.  

All that is left is for Oma to finish unpacking and Annette and Oma to get the garden under control.