Moody Blues: October 2005

Flip-Flopping

We keep flip-flopping. This deadline we've set, is really screwing with our heads. As soon as I have the thought "Let's call it off, there's too much to do." I think, "I'd never get so much done with out it and man won't it be nice."

Plaster is gone, so this week we've been running cable and telephone lines to the upstairs rooms. We've also been sinking the electrical outlets. The wall we took out is now...out. Now we need to frame it. Finish the wiring. We've had a few floor estimates. We love the real wood floors but laminatet might be the easiest. Our roof was leaking. Weren't sure how we were going to do that. The money came. (thank you, thank you a million times over) We had a new roof installed Wednesday...while I was at work. (totally weird, it just kind of flew by) Alexis brought home about a hundred new shrubs of the evergreen variety. Those need to go in the ground yesterday. Special ordered 14 x 14 feet of huge pieces of patio slate. Area needs to be cleared and leveled. Drywall, spackel, paint the rooms inside. Call a plumber about the water pressure or we'll be washing the Christmas silver in the tub. Insulate flooring under the addition. Clean out the shed so we can move our tool area out of the house and into the shed. Fix final portions of the fence.

I'm sure I'm forgetting others. Man. There's a lot to do. Let's forget it. We don't need the pressure. We're having a baby...we're having a baby! It's going to be a lot harder to have a circular saw in the living room with a baby around. I need to get this finished. We need to get rolling here. What's next on that list?

Read more!

Storm Windows

It's been seven months since our storm windows had been lifted. With the colder weather approaching it was time to get busy getting new ones back on the house. We had the windows measured, 21 in all. Had to special order them (nothing in this house has a normal measurement) and yesterday was the big day to pick them up. We were so excited. They had taken a month to get here and we were eager to have one more thing on our list completed.

We're standing there waiting for them to bring them out and it's taking forever and finally some one comes out and he's sweating. They had dropped the whole stack of 21 windows as they were taking them out. The ones that didn't shatter looked like they had fallen off the truck. Scraped bruised and bent all to crap. Of course they were apologetic and we're pretty easy going but it's a good thing it's not Jan.

So, the windows have been ordered. Again. I'm beginning to think this house doesn't want storm windows. If we ever do get our hands on these things, I'm going to wrapped them in everything soft I can find and lock them in a vault somewhere until we bolt them to the house.

Read more!

1918 flu pandemic

The Times Dispatch has an article on a renovation find in Richmond.

Read more!

Heavy Stuff

Drywall is heavy, plaster is very heavy but an inch of stucco and wire mesh? Man.

With hammers and buckets, we took to the walls of three rooms downstairs filling a dumpster almost to the top. Neighbors stopped by all day to see what all the noise was about.
Click "read more" for pictures.

For the most part the plaster came off pretty easily. Most of it was coming off the walls anyway which is why we were here and with the help of my parents, Alexis's parents and my brother, it all went pretty quickly. One and a half days to be exact. We would have never got so much finish so fast without them. Thank you guys!

There has been an addition put on the house a long time ago. This was the fish tank room and also the room where they had walled over the windows. We have been getting such great light back there so we decided to take down the wall that separated that small room and the larger room to make one large room with windows. We didn't have time to take the wall down but we did stake a stab at the stucco. This wall used to be an outside wall which it turns out they plastered over top of. This stuff was an inch thick and so heavy we called it a day. We got about half off but after a long weekend of halling plaster it's going to have to wait until next weekend.

We're so excited about how it's going to turn out. We've got a lot of work to do before Christmas but what a day that will be.

Ps. No fish were hurt in this story. The fish were put up in temporary housing while their home was relocated to a room upstairs.