Thursday, February 18, 2016

Roadtrip to West Virginia

We took a quick vacation down to West Virginia. Everything with the house was going slower than planned, and Nana and Papaw's house got like 17 inches of snow, while we got zero up here in Ohio, so we packed up, drove 4 hours, and hung out in almost no internet or cell phone hills for a week. Seriously, we have to climb a mountain or walk over a mile up the road to get a cell phone signal, and just a few years ago, it was a 40 minute drive before our cell phones picked up a tower!

Nana and Papaw's. Apparently my camera decided not to save the whole picture...

The horses up the road. There were never horses when I was little, but the girls love to walk up and feed them carrots.

The sun never really reached the house. It didn't get high enough in the sky to clear the hill until it was setting at the beginning of the road.

Building a fort!

Mr. Snowman

Our dumb dumbs... Apollo and Athena

Sled riding.

The snowpants were just as fast as the sleds

The snow lasted awhile since the sun barely hit this side of the valley.

Sunset

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Finally Some Progress

It absolutely stinks to own a house that you can't live in! At this point in time, it'll probably be the end of February or the beginning of March before we actually move in, meaning that we will have owned the house for 3 months before actually spending the night there.

But we have progress... the gas company finally came out and installed the propane tank, and today they are filling it, which means that tonight or tomorrow, we should be able to stay warm in the house! This is what the contractor has been waiting for. He has a lot of drywall mud work to do, and mud doesn't stick to well to the wall when it's frozen.

Yay for heat!

We also gave our mailbox an update. I never really cared about the mailbox on the porch when we lived in town. You could barely see it from the road, and people rarely came to the front door. In the country though, mailboxes at the road define that there's a house somewhere around there, and I wanted something fun. The problem is that all 4 girls wanted to paint something on the mailbox (and I wanted to as well), so we decided to just do handprints, simple yet colorful.
Other things going on the past couple weeks include drywall getting put up in the kitchen, getting a wood burning stove for the shop and running the pipe for it, and moving our Taurus and 1 Fiero from dad's back yard to the shop. We still have 2 Fieros sitting at dad's place, along with a bunch of stuff that we kept outside when we lived in town. It's mostly outside toys, so it's not a big deal if they don't get moved until spring.

Our hope for this week is to have the furnace running, and start putting up drywall mud in the 4 bedrooms upstairs as well as the bathroom. We are so glad things are starting to move forward!

Saturday, January 2, 2016

Knocking Out Stairs...

It's some dirty work. With a 3 day weekend, why not tear something up? The furnace guys are supposed to come sometime next week, and the contractor is going to start running water lines on Tuesday, so we decided this weekend would be the time to knock down the attic stairs. We finished most of the demo work yesterday, and today we are buying the pull down stairs, and we'll try to get it put in. We also pulled up a lot of the masonite in the hallway, which means we only have the front loft bedroom left to do upstairs, and then we will begin to patch walls in the 4 bedrooms.

This is what the upstairs hallway area looked like before. The attic stairs are above the staircase, where the smoke alarm is hanging.
 This is what the attic stairs look like. No thanks, those things bend every time someone steps on them. Super creepy, and they look to be original to the house.
Here's the hallway area after knocking it all out. We still have a stud hanging out, and there's a wire running there as well. We need to figure out what that wire actually runs and get it moved!
Of course no attic is complete without finding some curse in the stair walls. We found a Christmas ornament or two also, but yeah, napkin curses and a snake drawn on leather/suede. Fun times!
Hopefully we can get the pull down stairs done this weekend, and rip out more flooring. I'd love to have the upstairs finished except for lighting fixtures and sanding/staining floors in about 2 weeks. Let's see if we can get it done!