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!

Lazy Sunday, Rainy Monday

Sunday and Monday were demo days 9 and 10, but really, not much happened in the way of destruction. It's been unusually warm in Ohio for December, and Sunday it was overcast and in the low 60's. We spent a lot of time outside, making a fire, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows, climbing trees, and exploring the woods.

The girls put their fire building skills from girl scouts to the test.

 Lexi was trying to pull herself up the tree.

Lexi got to push Lilly up the tree.

And then Lilly's shoe got stuck in between the tree trunks!

They also enjoyed making chalk art all over the concrete. There's a nice patio area, sidewalks, and a concrete front porch to decorate.

Time for S'mores!!

We found a few spots full of these beetles. I did some quick internet looking, and we believe they are pink spotted ladybird beetles. They are good at eating aphids and lots of other insect eggs, so they are definitely beneficial to the neighboring fields and our future garden. 

My brother and dad decided to haul up the lawn mower, just to see how it would handle the long, thick grass that has been left to grow wild for at least 4 years. It clogged easily, so it was slow going, but amazingly enough it did cut it down.

We now have a path to the West field where the R/C planes fly.

We also have a decent pathway from the house to the shop.

 

Of course the planes had to make an appearance since we spent most of the day outside.

We did manage to work on the flooring in the spare room for a tiny bit, and pull off the door and base trim in the laundry room. A few doors made their way to the garage from upstairs as well. The doors all need a good scrubbing, and they'll just be in the way when we actually get to the point of sanding floors, so we might as well just take them off now.

Today isn't much of a workday either. We went up to the house over lunch today and pulled a few staples out of the floor, and quickly took off the doors to the kitchen cabinets.

 While we were there the trash guys came by with another dumpster since we filled the first one over the weekend.

The girls threw a few piece of paneling in the new dumpster before we left.

 

Progress is going to really slow down this week. Luke has tons of work to do for both his day job and photography, so he can't keep taking half days to work at the house. Hopefully the electrician gets finished up this week enough to get the power turned on, then we'll be able to go up in the evenings. 

Demo Days 3 & 4

Monday and Tuesday were both half day demo days. Luke worked until after lunch and then we headed over to the house for 3ish hours in the afternoon and worked until the sun went down. Tuesday I went over in the morning to chip at the floor in the living room for almost 2 hours, and then we brought the girls with us that afternoon.

The electrician has been there the past few days working on the new 200 amp service box. Of course I've been over there both days and failed to take a picture... The garage door company was also out measuring for a new garage door on the shop. We've been busy chipping away at the floor in the living room. I don't know why anyone would ever put that many nails into hardwood flooring to put down fiberboard and carpet.

This is the end of day 3, and then the end of day 4 in the living room. We now successfully have half of the living room floor uncovered. The floor looks pretty decent, but we did find a boarded over register vent, so we will have to reroute a furnace vent to that spot.

We spent most of day 3 pulling out the paneling in the kitchen. It had two different types of wallpaper on it, so it had to go! In doing so, we've decided that for right now, we will not rebuild the wall area above the cabinets. One day we will actually buy new cabinets, and in the event that they are taller, we would just have to rip it all back out to place cabinets higher. The only place where this becomes an issue is where the cabinets turn out into the middle of the kitchen, so we will just build a small wall to help hold those in place.

We found this calendar behind a cabinet. Apparently the kitchen was redone in June of 1974!

We also uncovered the chimney in the kitchen. We've decided that we will leave 2 sides of it exposed, so Luke started chipping away at the plaster that covers it.

On day 4, Luke kicked through the wall in the eat-in area of the kitchen that faces the laundry room. The plan is to cover over the current laundry room door, and have access to the laundry room through the kitchen. I'll have Luke build a barn door eventually that we can hang as a divider between the kitchen and laundry area. Eventually on down the line I can imagine the back part of the house being redesigned a bit so there is maybe a sliding patio door instead of 2 separate back doors, but for now, having a mud room/laundry room that opens into the kitchen right next to the backdoor (with the small porch) that will be used the most makes sense to us.

On the other side of the eat-in area of the kitchen, we knocked out the upper cabinets that were there. I'm not sure when we'll start knocking out the wall for a pass through. We need to figure out how big we are making it, and get the lumber to frame it out before we start punching through that wall.

The dumpster also arrived, so everyone can feel free to stop by and transfer our huge pile of construction debris!

The rest of the week we will continue to pull up as much fiberboard as we possibly can, and start moving stuff from storage and dad's yard hopefully. We also still have all of the carpet upstairs that still need to be pulled up. So I'll leave you with a sunset :)