Ready or not!

Bry took a personal/sick day on Friday so that he could make it to a doctor's appt. for his wrist and knee and get some extra work done on the house.  So we had a long weekend, including a nice relaxing Sabbath being iced in.

Here's what we (well, Bryan, really) accomplished last week and this weekend :

He ripped out the shower downstairs (it froze last week when the temp got down to a shivery 0 degrees)  that space will now become more studio storage.  Yay!   Then he spent several hours replacing insulation that was moved out of the way during wiring and pluming projects and spraying several cans of Great Stuff in holes, cracks and gaps.  This raised the overall temperature in the South Studio by 10 or 15 degrees and made the upstairs and living room noticeably warmer.  Hooray!

He finished the insulation in the Living Room and got most of the wallboard up and the outlets for the Living Room wired.  So now we can put in a Christmas tree and hang lights and stuff.   The tree will go in the corner near the big window.  The ugly TV will go upstairs for the season.

He also got the space for our gas fireplace framed up with backer board in place and ready for tile.  Our oil company is coming on Tuesday to install a new gas line and hook it up.  It will be a wonderful addition to the house, making the living room very cozy when we want to cuddle and read or watch a movie there and it will be a big help when we need to let the big woodstove go out so that we can empty the coals - usually once every week & a half or two weeks.  Eventually Bry will build a nice mantle around and above the fireplace which will include a place to hang stockings, shelves for books, movies and/or trinkets and (someday when we can afford it) a flat screen TV hidden behind a mirror.

He got a good start on the installation for the upstairs shower.  (We're currently on sponge baths or charity showers at Mom & Dad's or Jonathan & Nichelle's!)   Hopefully later this week we will have either the shower or the bathtub ready to use in the upstairs bathroom.  Oh - one other little piece of wonderful news - the Upstairs Bathroom is the most comfortable room in the house in terms of warmth.  You can get warm fast in front of the Fisher Stove down here in the studio but it is a rotisserie style of warmth - you need to keep turning to get warm everywhere!  But the bathroom has a nice, cozy and even ambient temperature.

Molly has been making these wonderful 20 point Moravian Stars (see top photo) all weekend out of some gorgeous card stock I bought a while back.  You can find instructions on how to make these stars in several places - we found ours on Jenny Harada's blog.  She advises using old Christmas cards but Molly wanted to make lots and have them be look like they belonged together so a packet of color & pattern coordinated card stock is perfect.  I buy that stuff to use as background for me bead and jewelry photos so I only need one of each nice sheet, the packets usually have 3-4 of each pattern so everyone wins!
And yesterday we took a wander out back and cut our tree.  That was fun - there was lots of slush under the snow under the layer of ice.

Check in later this week for more decorations.  It's still rough in here but I'm sure the kids will make it festive!




. . . .

On this corner.

I swear.  This is as good as it is going to get.  I'm priming tomorrow and painting this weekend.  If anyone wants to kneel down next to my toilet and complain that I didn't do a good enough job on this corner, I'll flush their head for them.











Maxx has been perfecting his pirate fashion for weeks months now.  He can hardly wait for Friday when he gets to be a PIRATE at SCHOOL!

He had a blast helping design his spooky little pumpkin last night, too.  He generally likes creepy things.

We (almost) finished our bedroom last week. 












This was probably one of the easiest rooms we will redo in this house.  When we started it was a very weird retro green color with heavy dribble stains along all of the walls.  We worried at first that this was an indication of some strange leak in the roof but it soon became clear that the problem was the result of very high humidity in the room at some point in the past.  I cannot imagine why any of the former occupants would have needed such a humid room . . .

There was no indication of mold or mildew in the room - just  dribbles.  We washed and primed the walls but Kilz did not do the job that we expected it to.   The walls were a strange matte texture and the primer just soaked right in no matter how thickly we rolled it on and the dribble marks showed through clearly in several areas.  We had to switch to Bin to get the job done there.  That's very stinky stuff but it covered up very nicely.

We chose the paint colors based on Lowe's Olympic Audubon Glorious color theme.   I have some art with prominently golden and tawny colors that will be beautiful in there as soon as I get around to hanging it.  And I love the slanted ceiling above the bed.  I grew up in a log cabin with slanted ceiling/walls in my bedroom and I love to be in a room that is un-boxlike.  It is a great room for sleeping!

Since taking this photo, I spray painted my little night stand a darker purple to compliment the walls. 

And this ugly chimney?  We could rip it out right now but that would involve roof work and messes in two bedrooms and the living room that we don't want to take the time to deal with just yet.  We are going to box it in to cover it and create some small shelves for shoes between the chimney and wall. 

Yes.  I am also learning how to tape up seams in drywall.  It's actually sort of fun and satisfying.   I must admit that I would be having MORE fun if the drywall mud were purple or turquoise  or even lime green instead of off grey.  


They could come up with something like that.  Right?  Kind of like purple fade to white elmer's glue-in-a-stick?  
I also must constantly fight the instinct to just run to get the duct tape and spray paint, but the process of smearing goo into a crack in the wall and smoothing it down is a lot like painting.  Or pottery.  It's messy.  It accomplishes something.  Your work is immediately visible.  I like that.







I do not like this.
















Or This.

What crazy person put this toilet and sink in here before finishing the drywall?  I mean, really.  Who can reach in there?

I can't even fit the blade in this corner.  Oh - wait - yes I can - If I crawl Underneath the sink and carefully wedge the corner knife up between the sink and the wall, I can sort of smear it downwards . . .





Oh - and installing this light fixture before mudding was a brilliant plan.

You would think this guy was under some pressure from his wife to get a functional potty room into the house NOW or something.

I'll tell you something else brilliant.  It turns out that the water supply fixtures for this sink have some sort of "emergency flow restriction device" or something.  Which means that if you turn the water on full blast too quickly, the sink seizes up and shuts off the water on you.  For HOURS.  Or until a plumber comes and takes the Whole Bloody Apparatus Apart  and resets it.  It's supposed to protect homeowners from water damage if their faucet breaks and starts spraying all over the place.

Well, do you know how many times I've had my faucet break off and start spraying water all over the place on me in almost 41 years? 

None.  Never.  Not at all.

Do you know how many times I've had something go horribly, hideously wrong in the kitchen or the studio and need several gallons of water at 40 tons of pressure NOW! in order to contain the damage or rinse out dye or spilled paint or caustic chemicals or just to pressure wash the burned rice off the bottom of the pan?

Daily.

There had better not be little flow inhibitors on my studio and kitchen sinks.  Let me tell you.


This photo makes it look like I've been put in time out, but I'm actually putting mud in the corner behind the toilet.  (I wonder if there's a difference?)  While Moly runs around taking pictures of herself with the cat. . . .   BTW - that cat has been through about 5 names already.  The latest being something Irish which I can neither spell nor pronounce but which means "she who inspires terror." 

We are still holding the line on it remaining a barn kitty.  Molly may have to go live in the barn, too.  I am appalled at the amount of garbage this kid has.  There's no way I want it all to come into the Beorningsetead.  She has more laundry than most third world villages.  But she thinks up awesome names for cats.

The roof, which was tight and secure all through the storms of summer and record rainy season of fall, has decided to leak.   Everywhere.  Thousands of little rivulets, puddles and pools.  Dribbling down into my studio and warping the ceiling in that room.  This is maddening. 

On the one hand - it is only the back roof, relatively small, over the part of the house we intend to put the main bathroom and, eventually our bedroom.  Because of Bry being so sick post surgery, we did not have time to install the insulation and wall board as planned over the winter.  No building supplies were ruined.  No labor was wasted.  That is a good thing.

The ceiling in my studio was ugly anyway.  We've talked about putting in a skylight in the bathroom because there is no window there but since we didn't plan on doing anything to the roof, decided not to.  Now maybe  we'll put in a small sky light over the bathtub.  (How much costs a little skylight?)

On the other hand, we wanted to move in over Spring Break.  We were all set to install the pump, finish running the plumbing, install and prep the sub-floor, install the shower, potty and vanity, insulate and put up wallboard and prepare the spot for the tub over the next three weeks.  Now those three weeks, and probably more, will be spent pricing, procuring and installing roofing materials.  That will delay our move-in which will delay our ability to really push the Ft. Jackson house (Which is really at it's most lovely at lilac & poppy time) on the market.

We're not sure yet what the extent of the repair/replacement will be.  The back roof is OLD.  The reason it is leaking is because the original tin roof was installed with nails that have no gaskets or other kind of weather proofing.   For decades, those nails have been doing their job, keeping the roof on, without leaking.  We don't know if it was because the house spent the winter without heat (doubtful - that part of the house wasn't heated anyway) or if this spring was just THE END for that particular aspect of the house's construction.  That's likely.  It's been there for at least 30 years.

A good roofing screw will have a bit of rubber thing-gummy under the head so that when you screw it down tight, it creates a water tight seal against the tin.  When we fix this roof, we should be able to expect it to last for the next 30 years or so.  Happily, the rafters are still good and solid so this will only be a repair, not a re-build.  We are a little concerned because most of our available escrow money is tied up in - guess what - insulation, wall board, sub-floor, plumbing and fixtures for the bathroom that is supposed to go under that roof.  We can't get more $ out of escrow until those are installed and the bank inspector comes to check out our progress.  We can't install these beautiful things until the roof that will protect them is repaired.  We can't repair the roof until we have more money to buy materials. 

What fun!  We can probably get some more escrow money freed up when we finish the downstairs wiring, install light fixtures in the front of the house and put wall board in the kitchen and living room again.  That roof seems to be sound - it is newer and better constructed.  We may also need to come up with some creative ways to boost our income in the next little while to provide more cash for this process.

Anybody want to buy a scarf?