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!

Floors and Fire

The past week has been filled with work and Christmas preparations. It just doesn't feel like Christmas this year. We don't have a big tree here in Tiny Barn, our decorations and stockings are in storage, everything we bought is hidden over at dad's house, and we are going to shove the majority of their presents in bags because wrapping would just take up so much time right now!

We had a few very cold days before it warmed up this week, so Luke wanted to play around with the fireplace and see if we could make it work. It has a wood burning insert that was basically rusted shut from sitting so long, so he worked the controls loose, cleaned out the old ash, and we ripped up some newspaper and collected some pine needles to burn. After successfully seeing smoke come out the chimney, he bought a few firebricks to replace a missing one, and built an actual fire (small one) to make sure it was drafting right. So far so good, although we won't make anything too big until we do get the chimney inspected.

 

We focused on the floors upstairs, pulling the fiberboard and plywood off the floors in the back loft, and finishing off Luke's office (the John Deere room). We still have the front loft and hallway to rip up, and then the upstairs will be ready for a thorough wipe down. As soon as the heat works, we can then mud, sand, prime, and paint all the bedrooms upstairs, before tackling the floors.

There was mostly a thin plywood in the back loft instead of fiberboard, but it seems that they decided to use some glue to hold it down, so the floor is pretty messy right now.

The John Deere room (Luke's office) has a nice big plywood section in the flooring from where the chimney came up through, so we'll have to patch that up somehow.

The electrical guys have started working on pulling out the knob and tube wiring, but so far the furnace guys are MIA. We need them there so we can have heat, so the contractor can start his drywall work! We still have light fixtures to order and pick up, trim to tear off the walls, and some downstairs flooring work, as well as the upstairs floors that still need peeled up. We spent Christmas Eve working on hooking up the electrical box in the shop, and driving in ground wires. We had to go look for gifts for the hillbilly gift exchange anyway, and the shop certainly has a lot of junk to sort through. We took the opportunity to burn some cardboard from the shop too, and just enjoy the view since the weather was so warm!

Demo Day 2!

Sunday was our official Day 2 of Demo work. Luke had a photo shoot in the evening, and with a late morning to say good-bye to Nana and Papaw before they left for West Virginia, we only had a few daylight hours to work.

Of course, work couldn't start until flying was finished. Luke had already been out Saturday after the girls' party with his brother, so Sunday was dad's turn. There is talk of building runways with lights and R/C race tracks...

We succeeded in pulling out the stove, since it was something quick to grab and wasn't bolted down like the range hood or dishwasher that still need pulled out.

We also got the drop ceiling frame out of the kitchen. Tearing things apart made us realize that the kitchen used to be two separate rooms, and the library was also split into two rooms before.

This is the guest bedroom floor. Originally we were going to have our contractor replace this flooring, along with the flooring in the living room and library. We've ripped a tiny section out of the living room and found hardwood, and this is the section we ripped in the guest bedroom. The fiber board has been nailed down practically every inch, so ripping this out of at least 3 rooms (it may be upstairs under the carpet too) is a slow going process! As long as they aren't totally shot, we plan on refinishing them!

 Here's part of some treasure we found next to the chimney that runs up the kitchen wall. Someone must have been doing some research on Native Americans down around Bolivar. Pretty interesting, but it would have been cooler had it been something to do with the house.

These are the cabinets by the eat in area in the kitchen. You can see the gap between the cabinets and chimney where the papers were shoved. Our idea for this is to actually knock out a good section of the wall and make it a pass through to the living room. We plan on painting the kitchen cabinets since we don't have the budget to replace them right now, but these upper cabinets are seriously bowed, and more than likely we will break them taking them out.

The electrician and furnace guy are set to come out this week to do their thing. We've got to get propane service set up ASAP. Our general contractor probably won't begin until next week, after heat and electricity have been established, which means we have this week to tear out as much as we can. The more we tear out, the more money we will save, since the contractor won't have to do that work. Our big problem is that Luke works 9-5 everyday, and it's pretty difficult to work up there in the dark. We also need to get a U-Haul fairly soon and get everything out of storage and into the small garage, that way we can eliminate our storage bill.

We have no idea how far we will get this week. Everyone works, vacation is a myth for Luke, he still has editing to get done, and we have the girls. I may end up leaving the girls with Luke while he works and I just go up by myself and start chipping away at the fiber board. It all needs done!