Our homemade dump rake wheel chandeliers are done! There are six of them above the great room between the log roof trusses. A seventh with go in the loft above the lookout staircase. This is the lodge at night.

This is the north walk out patio, an exclusive perk of staying in the suite. The north patio will be a beautiful spot to enjoy a lazy afternoon or maybe even an evening fire for roasting marshmallows and talking about your fun lodge adventures!

We know why Doug Spieker is smiling. Do you? He's happy about what he's working on. And you are going to love it when you see it. But what is it? Hint: He's wearing a welding helmet.

Carson and Carter Hinrichs from Lidgerwood installed our homemade great room flooring. Great job guys! We hired Alan and Dorreen Olstad from Rutland to make the flooring from rough sawn ponderosa pine. It is beautifully imperfect and wonderfully rustic.

What a treat it is to escape from the lodge at night and enjoy the view of the glowing great room from the slope of the pasture hill. It will be really fun to do this when the lodge is filled with people for an event.

We can't say enough about the spectacular work Dave Meyer and his son Jarod do. Their finish work, which is immaculate, and our choice of knotty alder for our interior doors, trim and cabinets puts a refined rustic polish on the lodge.

And there was LIGHT! Take notice of your southern view at night when you are driving North Dakota Route 11 between Lidgerwood and Forman. You should easily be able to spot the lodge.

The large open layout of the kitchen with familiar appliances and surfaces such as this granite counter, we hope, will make for a comfortable but fun culinary experience for our chef minded visitors.

Unloading on the go, its the latest craze. All the farmers are doing it. In this case, Austin Stenvold with passenger Maria Breker are unloading into the grain cart driven by Olivia Stenvold. Olivia is the lodge manager. You'll have to ask her if you can get a ride in the grain cart. She's a pro.

Maria Breker and Austin Stenvold harvest corn on the Breker Farm. You gotta watch out for those candid cameras in the corn rows. Or maybe its the other way around!

Austin Stenvold guides his wife Olivia as she backs up a conveyor auger to a grain bin on the Breker farm. The corn was nice and dry this year.

The lodge is quite rural. Being rural as we are, we have no sewer. So here is the solution. An enormous septic system buried on the hillside below the lodge. Our plumbers are Calvin Jacobson and his crew.

Our homemade dump rake wheel chandeliers are pretty cool. Thanks to Doug Spieker and Eugene Breker for designing and building them. You will see throughout the lodge, as with these lights, we have tried to incorporate a slice of local history.

Painter Patty Breker has become somewhat of a color expert at the lodge. She has selected and painted over 20 different colors for the various walls of the lodge. You will especially see the variety if you tour our bedrooms, which will also be themed.

Even the Breker kiddos (Gideon, Emma, Noah and Benaiah) were put to work painting on Grandma Patty's crew. Its probably one of the prettiest mechanical rooms you will never see.

Joe Breker enjoyed showing visitors his manure on the farm as he faithfully turned it throughout the summer with a compost mixer to make the perfect fertilizer. The manure was spread over some fields of fall cover crop where the peas and radishes are now the excited ones.

We are really excited about our chandeliers. There will be seven matching wheel chandeliers in the lodge. This one, above the great room, is being installed by Eugene Breker, Chris Jones and Cliff Kiefer.

Originally commissioned for the Sargent County Courthouse. This solid brass chandelier is over 100 years old. The Rockswold family from Forman has allowed us to display this beautiful chandelier in the entryway of the lodge. We did some work to refurbish it and shine it up again, as well as rewired it and installed new lights.

You can't be scared of heights to clean the windows at Coteau des Prairies Lodge, right Cher Spieker? So, Cher, are you now our official window washer??

By now, you probably think all we ever do is work. Not true. We party too, but only after we are done with work. This group is enjoying a nice visit on the new east deck after a lodge style feast.

Patty Breker tiled a shower surround in the lower level suite as well as the floor in the entryway. She also has a tiling project for the wall in the main kitchen. She does a nice job, of course we may be biased.

Nate Rude and Jerry Sapa race their screws. Jerry won this match. Nate said Jerry had a better battery, but we all know Jerry is the man!

Coteau des Prairies Lodge as seen (hopefully) for the last time without siding and porch roofs. You were probably beginning to wonder if we just settled on Tyvek for siding. Nope. The lodge is overdue for a serious facelift. How do you like the new deck? It's almost done!

Our flooring guy, Donovan, trowels glue on the floor of the lower level kitchen. Later he installed vinyl tiles squares and boy do they look nice!

Nate Rude made the funky looking log into a newel post at the top of the stairway leading to the loft. The branches at the top appear to grow into the roof! Sweet huh?

You can't get too much slab. Ponderosa slab, that is. It's beautiful and it's rustic and we love it. These massive hunks of rough sawn, wild edge pine will be the window sills in the four loft floor dormers.

The second floor rooms were feeling left out because they didn't have the opportunity to sport the awesome log walls found below on the main floor. To help make up for it, we made them with log roof trusses exposed in the ceiling.

Blue stain. It occurs naturally in ponderosa pine. Some logs get it, others don't. It is random, wild looking, and we think...beautiful. These are homemade trim boards for the stairway leading down to the lower level.

One of our finish carpenters, Jared, is trimming out a window in the main kitchen. He does beautiful work. Sadly though, this is the last we will ever see of our log walls in the kitchen. We all knew this day would come.

Joe Breker is at it again with his faithful old green scraper. He used it last summer to break ground as well as shape the driveway and parking lot. Now he is working on the final landscaping around the lodge.

Nate Rude presents Wilder Benites with a parting gift at Wilder's going away party. Nate tried to make it secretly before the going away party started, but you can imagine how easy it is to do anything secretly with a chainsaw. Wilder is a special friend of ours from Peru, he spent about a month this fall and last fall working at the lodge.