Extended Break

It's been a while since I've posted here. I'd like to say I have a valid reason, but I don't. I just haven't had much to say. Even though lots of things have been going on at our house.

We got this wild idea to paint our living room for a quick update that wouldn't be drastically expensive. Seriously, nothing is worse than 68 year old, TEXTURED, plaster walls painted baby blue. They haven't been painted in who knows how long and have a nice coat of cigarette smoke from previous inhabitants. Did I mention that all the trim throughout the house is painted with cream colored oil based paint?

We started with the trim because we knew it would take a while as it need to be sanded. So we sanded. And stripped (the paint, although it certainly would've made things interesting). And sanded. And stripped. All 18,973,392 coats of paint. It. Sucked. No, C didn't do all of it, I just took more breaks than he did.

C repeatedly dropped hints over that weekend that insulation was on sale at Lowe's, blah blah blah. Although I realized he was making a valid point, (our house has no insulation in any of the exterior walls) I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to do about it. So I did what any wife with white hair from sanding and an extra day because it was a holiday weekend would do. I took the hammer to the wall and created a hole in the plaster large enough that it couldn't be easily patched.

Soon that became this.

There are a lot of safety issues I should point out here. We should've worried about lead this and asbestos that. We did atleast wear those mask thingys. Bottom line, if you decided to take on a project like this, you may want to have those things professionally checked out first.

See, no insulation. Excuse our temporary window coverings.

Right here, C is installing more receptacles and replacing all the old wiring so later he can tie them into a new breaker box and my worries of dying in a house fire will be severely reduced.

Our dog Jake should've been named Sup, short for Supervisor. He's convinced that no matter what you are doing, he needs to be right there to watch. This includes using the restroom, taking a shower, cooking, anything.

Since C does electrical stuff all day, he convinced me we need to install can lights. Now that we have them, I believe just changing the lights would've made a huge difference but it's too late for that now. See Sup Slacking...

Hopefully this coming weekend C will be done with his first real experience mudding and we'll be able to prime, paint and put all the trim back on. Next on our list... those really outdated windows... okay maybe our son's room. I just can't decide.

Weekend Work

If you've spent any time here in the past, you know I put a fair amount of photos in my posts. So I'll warn you before you go any further that the photos in this post are absolutely nasty (and embarrassing but whatever).

Apparently the house has had plumbing issues for some time but we were never made aware of them by the previous tenants. Sick and tired of taking a shower while standing in 4 inches of water that had accumulated just since turning the shower on... we decided to do something about it this past weekend.

We debated on whether to get a snake and try to unclog the pipes or just replace the almost 70 year old cast iron pipes with PVC. We chose the latter and off C went into our crawlspace which is actually quite roomy.

This is what he found.

That nastiness is a mixture of hair, rust, gunk and I don't really want to think about what else. The white pipe at the top of that photo would be someone's attempt at updating things. If only they had carried that idea all the way down. It was simply inserted into the larger cast iron pipe below it and not sealed in any sort of way. Therefore once the drain pipe was clogged everything that went in after it was overflowing into the crawlspace (hey, I warned you).

But we got that all fixed up and I got the tub nice and sparkling again (ever tried to clean a tube that doesn't drain?) and it was on to the bathroom sink.

In order to get to the pipe we had to remove some of the tile. Some genius decided to install the tile using liquid nails so we had to shatter them to get them off. A perfect excuse to remove the rest of the tile that goes halfway up the walls, all the way around the bathroom. Added to the project list... check.

We also discovered that at some point, this bathroom was painted pink... I know, almost as bad as the pipes.

What we found in the sink pipe wasn't much better.

(This is after he cut it so about 6 inches below the sink.)

We ended up having to replace that pipe almost all the way to the point where it joins the other drain pipes and goes towards the sewer.

Once we got the sink and cabinet out of there, I couldn't put it back. We had so much room without it. And the storage space isn't an issue because the linen closet is way oversized. We found a suitable pedestal replacement at Lowe's for just $44.

Maybe this weekend we'll get to the kitchen sink... which hopefully is just a broken disposal (but we aren't counting on that).

Changes...

We've made a few changes since we moved to the OLD ADDRESS.

We ripped out the bushes in the front, removed the wheelchair ramp, and pressure washed a few things. We aren't done by any stretch of the imagination but it feels better already. Check out these before and I'll say current photos since we aren't done. Next on the list... probably painting the exterior and re-painting the porches.

Whomever built the ramp didn't leave space between the boards so that what's under it could dry out. We found a puddle of mud and full of all sorts of critters.

Like huge earthworms (too bad we don't fish)...

Slugs...




Spiders and babies...










Don't have a clue what this is. C called it a hammer-head worm...









We aren't sure if we want to keep those azalea bushes on the right.



The back porch used to have a huge (it's still there, just quite a bit smaller) gardenia bush growing beside it. I assume the sap from that is what was all over the back porch. But I kept my shoes on just in case.