We Meet Again

Ugh...cannot believe that it's been more than a month since I last updated this bad boy.  My intentions were so good going in, but blah blah blah kids/work/life madness.  Where do I begin?

We are done with the electrical roughing in.  What a blessing in disguise needing to do that has turned out to be- seriously folks!  Not only is everything now safe and to code, but I got to dictate where to put outlets, light fixtures, and security lights.  I have never lived in a house designed in this century before and am the queen of sketchy multi extension cord wiring jobs to make old electric work for modern living. No more! I have outlets coming out the whazoo, people- places to plug in blow dryers and coffee pots and nary a concern about blowing fuses when I dare turn on 2 or more things at once.

ALSO! We made a MAJOR (at least to us) design decision.  It turns out that we will be able to do the conversion to gas heat after all, and that means our aforementioned janky chimney is no longer strictly necessary for venting purposes.  If you remember, we were looking at 2500 minimum to rebuild said chimney, and to spend that on something largely useless (we won't be burning coal in that fireplace any time soon) felt all kinds of wrong what with our shoe-string thread budget.  So how about knocking the whole damn thing down and making the kitchen/dining room an open concept sort of thing? DUH DUH DAHHHH!!! "But wait!", you say "What about your beautiful fireplace and all the charm contained therein??" Well, I tells ya what.  We could save the firebox and mantle and move the whole kit and caboodle to another wall, effectively making a new fireplace and still getting open concept ju ju! A lovely vista of being able to cook a meal without wondering if the kids were murdering each other or the dogs dances before my eyes! HUZZAH!

Enter the menfolk and a day of dirty, crazy hard work (is there any other kind in the Elephant?) chipping the chimney down from the roof through the attic, 2nd floor, and 1st floor, and carting the old brick out to be used in our landscaping future.  I was home kiddo wrangling, and lordy, my heart ached not being there to help them.  But Gavin took video and I was totally impressed with what they accomplished in no time at all.  Seriously, you can't tell at all from the roof that there was ever a hole, and the room downstairs is already so airy and full of light.

Next we have to put up some support beams to make up for soon-to-be-gone wall framing,  and figure out what to do with the awkward place in the hardwood that will missing.  Of course the dang floor was laid perpendicular to the wall making patching it a royal be-otch.  I'm thinking of just owning the imperfection and using Morroccan tile or parquet inlay or something cool rather than trying to disguise it...we'll see.  Also, we will be trying to reclaim some giant funky piece of furniture or other to make an island to separate the rooms.

We also (did I not tell you this??) decided that the teeny tiny bedroom upstairs would be better suited to being a walk-in closet/office for the master bedroom since the OG closet in there wouldn't fit more than a pair of pants.  Seriously, it was the smallest closet I've ever seen.  Allow me to revel in pure feminine glee for a moment at all that closet space.....GAH!!! Plus gutting the place let's me put in super useful features like a hatch in the closet wall so dirty clothes can just drop right into the laundry room below. Now if only we can find a spot for a secret passageway...

In other news (and in other rooms) blessed Uncle A continues to fight the good fight in the upstairs bathroom.  It took a couple of tries to make the new plumbing synch up with the old drainage, but we now have complete rough-ins, a new waste pipe and GLORY BE! A BATHTUB! Things are starting to look like things again.  Tile should be going down shortly and then....a dream come true: a toilet the handle of which I shall not need to jiggle.  It will be the flush heard round the world.   Got a great quote on insulation for the whole dang house, so once the ducts are re-attached that will be the next step and then....WALLS! WAAAAALLLSSS!!!  I am well and truly sick of seeing every room all at once.

This whole process has crawled on since we are all working around our various making-ends-meet-living-life schedule rather than just throwing money at some pricey builder types (Har de har har! Like that's an option!), but there is so much love being put into this place by so many amazing, generous souls that the house just feels happy, dust, and all, every time I walk in there.  Every bit of progress is a gift in every sense of the word, and the delays only make those baby steps sweeter.


Not much in the way of pictures but I'll see if I can't get some chimney-killing video up here soon:

And lo! It t'were a bath tub!

What's up, waste pipe?

I got the POWER!

Progress! Thank GOD! Pause to picture Gav doing a jaunty victory strut, maybe dressed like Uncle Sam? I don't know why, just do it.  Ok, done? Good. Anyway.

We started the week out on a rotten note- we were on our 4th dumpster, still battling an endless miasma of dust, and to top it all off we got a notice from our home owner's insurance that they were dropping us because our house was under renovation and not yet being lived in.  Wait, what? So people don't renovate their houses? Whatever. Jerks.

Turns out it was a blessing in disguise though.  We used the motivator of needing to have another insurance walk-through with whatever new company we go with to get serious and call in some reinforcements.  We were all set to blow whatever we had to on a Yellowpages electrician when a small miracle happened.  The Taper got an electrician who happens to be a good family friend to agree to make room in his uber-busy schedule and get cracking on getting us wired and back in business.  And better yet, the day after we called him it was supposed to rain so his job that day had been cancelled.  In less than 24 hours we had a licensed master electrician rigging up all sorts of fabulous new sparky magics to our house.  And in a couple more visits (scheduled this weekend!) we should be ready to move forward with insulation, plumbing, and-dare I say it?- closing up the walls! BOO YAH!

In other news, we pried all the stick-on tile up from the kitchen, mudroom, and bedrooms.  Let's take a moment, shall we, to focus on the fact that at some point in recent history people thought it was a cute idea to glue mustard-colored tile over their hardwood floors.  When you wrap your mind around that concept, you kind of understand how there is war and strife in our world.  Anywho, turns out whatever money was not spent on maintaining and repairing this house (I'm talking plumbing fixed with duct tape, y'all) was apparently spent on floor adhesive procured from NASA for use on space shuttles.  Like, that tile was on FOR KEEPS.  Now that it's gone there's this horrid gluey scum on the floors that shows no sign of coming up easily. It's like a giant Scratch-n-sniff sticker of evil, the scent being "Musty Old House".  Bring on the gloves and caustic chemicals, yo.  I will get that glue off if it's the last thing I do, if only to show them they haven't broken me.  And by them I mean the those guys at This Old House, the smug bastards.

I spent a long day with the the Taper getting that fourth dumpster packed to the gills, and literally just as we were talking about when to go to the scrap yard with our pile o' metal and junk appliances, some guys came by with a panel van and offered to buy it off us.  So I made $120 off a pile of garbage, recycled like a good green girl, AND I didn't have to lug it anywhere.  <For the win.

So yeah, this weekend should be way productive.  And that's the best thing ever, because I don't mind hard work- I just hate sitting on my hands.  Once the wiring is done, everyone else can go about doing what they do best.  And when everyone involved with this project does their best...well....it's pretty badass.

ahem.

Fourth dumpster.  FOURTH F@#*%N DUMPSTER.

The Weight

Blog title reflects both content of said blog and a sad farewell to Mr. Levon Helm of The Band who passed away this week. Rest in peace, talented man. And now your local news:

A somewhat uneventful week.  Gavin went back to work so there can no longer be great long stretches of house work- we've got to get as much possible done on our days off.  In a way it's a relief- as much as I want/need/am obsessed with working on the Elephant, families with babies thrive on routine our routine has gone to hell in a hand-basket of late.  It's nice to have naps and meals and even the odd toddler meltdown back on a loose schedule rather than coming out of left field- that kind of existence makes you feel like you are losing your damn mind one day at a time.

The (third!) dumpster went on Thursday, bringing our grand total for the approximate weight of all the crap we removed to 12 tons.  I kid you not, 22,000+ lbs. of plaster, lathe, junk and mishegas out of the house and out of our lives.  I can only imagine our houses frame just sighing after all that weight was lifted.  I spent a rip-roaring day with my sister and Uncle A just carting plaster and nail-studded wood out for like a hundred million hours.  I managed to cut my arms like I'd gone to prom with Edward Scissorhands in the process, but it felt really good to get my hands dirty for the day instead of speculating from afar what was going on without my help (or without my micromanaging :).

Uncle A got some lights working in the basement so I don't need to fear I will stumble upon a sleeping vagrant or hibernating bear when I fumble around down there with nought but the light of my cell phone to guide me.  And Gav's friend Dan spent a thankless day doing miscellany and removing hundreds of nails from our wall-less walls so we can one day aspire to put sheet rock up (live the dream!).

Next step- the wiring and duct work, on which we hope to get cracking on this week.  Other than that, I ordered a mailbox so our mail won't just be tossed in a rubber-banded roll on the porch any more (as much as I cherish the idea of identity theft and/or missed bills).  I do so love making small purchases for our home- some sappy domestic-reveling nest-making part of my being does a small jig of glee when my debit card goes swipeddy-swipe for things that don't fall in the boring (drywall/nails/safety-goggles) category.  Anywho, here's our super-cute letter box:

I think I'm going to add a bit of  "patina" to dull down the gold, but aint it adorbs?

Oh! And our tree out front and azalea bush have both bloomed be-yoo-tifully! I must say, I LOVE finding out about all the flora and fauna we've got in our yard, like little bonuses every week.  On Saturday my sister and I saw two baby squirrels poke their wee heads out of their nest in a knot in the black walnut tree and I've seen heaps of cardinals in the trees out back.  I found a rose bush and a couple of hydrangea (I live for hydrangea!) and big rangy bursts of forsythia just about everywhere. I don't think I'll get to do more in the yard this year besides make it presentable, but OH the fun I'm gonna have next spring....

Azalea realness

Crab apple? 

More Guts, More Glory?

Ugh...where to begin? It's been a helluva two weeks, friends.  First, we had a wonderful and all-too-brief visit with Gav's folks, who were able to see what we see in the Elephant and so were, as always, supportive and optimistic and all-in-all perfect.  Gav got to log some manly-man hours with his Dad knocking around the house and doing all sorts of fun jobs and the kids got to love on "Gammy and Pawpaw" for Easter so it was a perfect visit.  And then mid-week, the fun REALLY began.

I'll cut to the chase- turns out the knob-and-tube wiring we were told was inactive in fact powers about 1/2 of our house.  Glory be.  When it's in decent shape it's not necessary hazardous (though pretty inadequate to power our modern appliances, etc as it was largely used prior to the 1930s) but when it's janky and sort of all over the place mixed in with modern(ish) wiring, like ours is, it has the potential to cause fires and blow fuses and all sorts of fun and games.  So it needs to go.  Thankfully we have some great family connections to electricians and after they poked around a bit it was determined that to do the work we needed to....wait for it....gut the rest of the house.  We called Israel to see what he'd charge to do the remaining walls (the upstairs hallway, the horrid blue room, the kitchen ceiling, and....gulp...my beloved foyer) but because he'd gone so over weight on the past dumpster he needed more this time around- money we just don't have to spare.  Enter Gavin (with help from myself and a rotating cast of good and benevolent friends and family) doing the demo his damnself.

Today I got to join him for a lovely demo date (Mom was able to take off work and wrangle the kiddos for the day). In some ways, it was satisfying- swinging a giant pry bar at the walls that have caused me so much anxiety and consternation- but mostly it was dirty, tedious, and immensely strenous labor. We set up a make-shift shoot out the window and into our new (third) dumpster using a ladder wrapped in tarp and dropped bucket after bucket of crunchy plastery goodness down and out of our lives.  Gavin's been at it for a few days and honestly, after putting in just one good day myself, I don't know how he's held up so well-  I feel like I've gone over the Niagra Falls in a friggin barrel. Suffice it to say I am crazy-proud of my hubs.

I have had some reservations about this final gut- it becomes increasingly difficult to save those traits of the house that add that infamous "character" since working around old moulding and plaster medallions can be really hard when you are trying to smash through walls.  There have been a few casualties along the way -one example- the aforementioned plaster medallion crashed to the floor without warning today and broke into a million peices so it will have to be replaced with a salvaged one or a reproduction- but I think we have managed to keep enough original details to add back in once the walls are up that the house will still be itself, but better.  Like the Six Million Dollar Man. Or something.  Plus the more we open the more we discover potential problems (I'm looking at you, furry grey/black mold monster under the kitchen ceiling) before they have a chance to really become catastrophic.  We will truly know what's what with this house, and that does feel good.

Anywho, once all this is done the electric can be roughed in and we can FINALLY get moving on insulating and PUTTING UP SOME WALLS.  I really, really cannot wait.  But for now, enjoy our new "open concept" Victorian...

It is I, Demo Goddess

His and Hers Matching Aspirators! How cute!

Gav's Dad sanding all our cabinet doors

The crazy "Baker's Rack" set up so we could get to the plaster on the stair wall

Uncle A planning our upstairs bathroom.  

Goodtimes

The infamous Joe Da' Taper

Beauty in Destruction

The view from upstairs into my poor, poor foyer

No Guts, No Glory

Oh what a week it's been! On Saturday we had the Taper walk through the house with us to talk about what in the world we could do with our beyond-cracked ceilings and walls.  We were pretty certain that the upstairs was beyond help (the ceiling in our bedroom resembled the state lines in a map of of the USA) but we were uncertain about what to do with the now acoustic-tileless ceilings downstairs. Plus where the old roof had ostensibly been leaking its freaking face off there was more of that adorable mold on the plaster on the north side of the house under each window.  Oh! And the giant holes in the two smaller bedrooms.  And the crumbly plaster over the fireplace...So yeah, we had a few questions.  As predicted, the Taper's advice was simple: gut it.

I happen to quite like plaster- I think it has character that drywall can't imitate,  plus it's great for sound insulation.  When we bought the house my strong inclination was to try to save as much plaster as feasibly possible to keep the integrity of the house's aesthetic.  But a funny thing happens when you sign on the dotted line and take ownership of a place- you start thinking about the stuff you can't see. You think about it A LOT. You think about termites and rusty pipes and asbestos and creeping crawling lurking issues that are just waiting until you and your babies are all snuggly moved into the place and you've spent your last 2k on a fancy fridge to rear their ugly heads.  Long story short, after the overwhelming impression we've reached that this house has been neglected for at least 30 years, we needed to know what was going on in there.  And since they don't make an MRI machine big enough, that meant getting the old walls off so's we could see what we could see.  Plus once the walls were open we could re-wire the seriously scary outlets and insulate and all that good stuff.

So we made a compromise- instead of gutting the whole thing stem to stern as the Taper suggested, we kept the foyer intact -the plaster in there is in the best shape and I truly feel like it's the part of the house with the most innate character. Oh, and then there's the fact that it's one less place for us to spend money. Yeah- that might have something to do with it too.  We also left the upstairs hallway, and, if you can believe it, the back room of hideous blue and brown flowers and stripes.  Wait- I haven't showed you the famous blue room? How could I have left it off??! Here you go:

To quote my brother, "Dang.  That is so ugly it's almost back in style."

That room has, if you can believe it, the most current reno on it- it's got modern wiring and the walls are very much intact.  Also, it's current life will be as my work-from-home office, so it frankly doesn't warrant the money to love it up.

But everything else is out, baby.  The next step was figuring out just how to make said gut-job happen. Gavin was more than willing to do most of the filthy job himself, but he only has 2 weeks off coming from work, and he is only one man.  I have next to no time what with the kids and work, and even if the two of us worked 12 hours a day I don't think we could even begin to make a dent in two measly weeks.  So we decided to call for some quotes to see if we couldn't get a crew of guys in to knock the whole job out and cart away the resulting garbage while they were at it.  

We called a few guys and got demoralizingly expensive estimates- literally all of our budget's worth of money just to destroy the house we were trying to fix.  We were just resolving ourselves to doing the work as best we could with whatever friends and family we could bamboozle into helping us when the sky parted, a perfect shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds, and standing in that light was a wee man named Israel.

He was recommended to us from friends of my Mom who swore by him; we had little faith at this point that we could afford anyone but figured it couldn't hurt to have one more guy take a look. He's a small, soft-spoken man of very few words.  He listened patiently while I told him how I wanted to save as much of the molding as I could, and unlike the men who came before him, he didn't tell me it wasn't worth saving and I should just "buy some new molding at Home Depot". He agreed that the foyer was fine to save and just needed a little polish coat to fix some minor cracks. He walked around the place with me for about 15 minutes, took notes in a little spiral notebook, and then proceeded to quote us a quarter of the price of all the other contractors. He told me he knew we were on a budget, and he could also see we had plenty of projects for him in the future, so essentially, he was giving us a break(!).  I almost couldn't shake his hand fast enough, and by THE NEXT DAY,  he had a crew of guys and a dumpster in our driveway, and the great gut began (forgot my camera so excuse crappy cell-phone pics):

Our scary-full dumpster.  Almost 6 TONS of plaster and lathe.

Dining Room- they pulled the mantle off and saved it! :)

Notice the window INSIDE the living room wall from when it was part of the porch.  

Dining Room Some More- that's all molding they saved.
Some will be re-usable, some won't, but we'll find a purpose for all of it...

Pocket Door.  Still in Pocket. :)

Wesley's (?) Room

The Bathroom.  It actually looks better this way...

Really, if you have never experienced demo-ing plaster and lathe, it is one of the most backbreaking, dirty jobs imaginable- dust, heavy lifting (plaster weighs 85lbs a cubic foot, btw), lead paint- you name it.  Israel's crew worked like freaking machines and in just a couple of days accomplished more than we could have in a month.  Amazing.  Suffice it to say, if you need a good reccommendation for work on your house, drop me a line- I have a guy.

In other news (cause, like, taking the guts out of the entire house isn't enough for one week) the guys came back to do the aforementioned tar-job on the chimney.  They climbed up there and then called to Gavin who was standing on the ground below.  One guy took his pinky finger and with it pushed over one whole corner of bricks on our chimney.  Basically, the whole bloody thing is shot.  New chimney must be built.  For a fireplace that, as it turns out, was coal-burning and so will not be able to be used for wood any damn way(maybe gas one day?). There goes another 2.5k out the window.  Awesomesauce.

But! On a happier note! We actually completed something! You may recall that our prior cellar door was an experiment in rust and debris covered over by a tarp and bug larvae? Yes? Well, with the help of my wonderful Uncle Andrew, Gavin replaced it with a strong, clean new door.  One thing can be officially checked off the master list.  We'll take small satisfactions where we can get them:

Old Crap Doors!

New Wonder-Doors!

Uncle Emerging Like Handy Bear From Cave!

Yeah, so it's been a pricey, exhausting week.  But we have a certain sense of peace now, knowing everything there is to know about what our house's inside's look like.  Some of it aint pretty (is that asbestos I see wrapped around our ductwork???) but now we know what we are dealing with.  We are not naive enough to think this means there will be no more surprises (I'm looking at you, plumbing) but at least we can make our list of priorities based on reality and not assumptions.  Or something.  Anywho, next week- Gavin is off! His folks come to see our crazy house! We may put up a wall or two! Huzzah!

Into the Breach

There is knowing that your house is going to need "a lot of work" and then there is living it.  This house, friends and neighbors, needs A. Lot. Of. Work. If there was a movie made about this house, it would be called "A Lot of Work: The Blue Elephant Story." Or just "Fright Night".  It is not like one of those shows on HGTV where the couple debates buying a house and they say "There is just too much work!" because the paint is an ugly color or the bathroom fixtures are outdated.  This is like an HGTV show where the couple walks in and then runs out screaming, because zombies are coming up from the basement and mutant Termite Monsters are swinging from the chandeliers, and that same couple end up rocking on the floor sucking their thumbs and humming, just trying to forget...

Let's recap.  This week I kicked off the festivities by coming to the house at night the day after we closed and began tearing out the carpets and curtains upstairs.  We knew for sure that the worst of the visible damage was upstairs (with the exception of Hell Bathroom downstairs- but that's another story for another day) but had no idea just how awful things were with the condition of the walls.  In one bedroom there is an entire wall being held up by the tenacity of the dingy floral wallpaper.  In the bedroom next door, I pulled back the colorless rug (I think in another life it was sea-foam green?) to find that the padding beneath was so old it had literally disintegrated into orange dust- I was able to fill a shop vac sucking up a room's worth of foam-dust.  I filled 5 contractor bags with stick-em tiles from under the rugs and tossed curtains that were so old and dirty they could stand straight up off the rods.  But! The good news! Under the horror of the rugs were unfinished pine floors- so no wall-to-wall carpet will be needed! Hoorah for unspent money!!

Vacuuming up The Orange Carpet "Padding" Note the artfully placed hole in the plaster.

Next Mom, my grandmother and I went on a quick tour of the house (Grammy hadn't seen it) and couldn't help but tear down some wallpaper while we were there (yes, my 87 year old grandmother was put to work. We do not age-discriminate at the Elephant).  We found a weird/cool Chinese-style mural under one wall's worth of paper in the living room (see pic left) and a lifetime's worth of MOLD under another in the kitchen. NOOOOO!!! It seems like it was part of some bathroomtastrophe from the past- there was clear warping from water damage in the stick-em tiles outside the bathroom door and in an entire house of plaster the only new sheetrock is in the kitchen ceiling below said bathroom (which by the way has a lovely painted plywood panel in place of tile in the tub, ostensibly for quick access to whatever pipe-demon had caused the flood I deduce caused all this damage).  I guess that was where repairs stopped because some seriously scary beardy-black mold was practically flipping me off once we got rid of a big swatch of (mustard and green plaid- my hand to God) wallpaper. Ok house.  You win.  For NOW.

So let's see- that was day 3.  On day four Gavin began by spraying some bleach water on the mold (we will tear out the wall later). He also tore out the big sheets of brown faux-wood panelling in the kitchen.  Yes, the same kitchen with the green and mustard wallpaper.  I'll give you a moment to process how pretty it was.  Oh, and sea-foam green painted cabinets. Yeah....now you're there.

Current color-scheme of our kitchen.  It is the full spectrum of colors found in infant diapers.

At some point he went down to the basement to get a tool or something and BOO-YAH- a giant puddle of water.  I had turned the water on the night before so I guess it served me right.  I should have known better than to just assume basic plumbing is, like, a thing.  Thank God turns out it was a simple fix of tightening a couple of pipe joints but just the Elephant's way of reminding us who's the boss (It's Tony Danza. That's who).

On this same day we got the first quote from a roofing company to flash our chimney.  You see one of the selling points (hah!) of the Elephant was that there is a very well-done brand new roof.  There apparantly was not, however, any attempt made to seal around the chimney (usually done with metal "flashing" which is kind of layered like fish scales at the base to keep water out).  So a van rolls up and all these bizarre little men come pouring out.  My brother Joe wondered out loud if they had been bred for chimney maintenance over the generations- they were all tiny and had weirdly large teeth and beedy eyes and were clearly related.  Any-who, they walked up to our attic to look and point at where the sunlight glints in around the chimney gaps, said something to each other in Chimnese and then quoted us $1850.00.  Har.  De har har.  When I actually laughed out loud in their faces they immediately dropped it to $1400 but at that point I was already dialing another company for another quote.

Which brings us to day 4.  I forgot to mention that our cellar doors (the double sided hatch-type ones like they use for tornado shelters in movies) are literally rusted through with giant decroded holes all over and blue tarp and logs on top to keep the elements out.  Really, this was the solution someone came to. So we had to order a new set, and because God has a sense of humor the only place that carried our size was a Lowes about an hour and a half drive from where we live. The other option was to order a different brand at nearly twice the price so of course we loaded an infant and a toddler into our Santa Fe and away we went.  I had thought to ask over the phone how big the box was and I felt confident it would fit in the car.  What they neglected to mention was that this box weighed about 300 pounds.  Oh, and once Gavin had given himself a near-hernia getting it into the back of the car it rattled the whole way home like a box car full of ball bearings, causing the baby to endlessly howl in annoyed rage.  Goodtimes.

But we got it to the house.  Gavin then began ripping the acoustic tile off the downstairs ceiling (while I wrangled the babies and worked from Mom's local and lead paint dust-free house) to reveal how bad the plaster was under there; the plan is to reveal as much as we can throughout the house so we can make an educated decision this weekend as to what our game plan is re: ripping out walls, etc.  The good news- the bowing we saw above the mantle in the dining room fireplace was not from bricks crumbling in on us as we initially feared but just some manky plaster falling behind a piece of plasterboard that had been slapped up as a quick fix. The bad news- chimney guy number two informed us, after walking our roof, that if he really wanted to he "could kick the whole sonofabitch chimney right over.  It's shot." Awesome.  Well, we weren't under the impression that the fireplace worked, so not the end of the world I guess.  Plus turns out that until we are ready to rebuild the chimney, it would be stupid to do metal flashing (like putting a nice new brass bell on a sinking ship) and he suggested meshing and tarring the whole thing and doing a rain barrier. Long story short- half the price and they guarantee their work not to leak.  Works for me.

Above Our Mantle (Hey, the chimney's not collapsing- just the wall! Yay?)

And finally, as we were packing in day four, a wee winged insect landed on my hand.  Gavin said "That's not a termite, is it?"  "No babe!" says I.  "Termites look like this..." I whip out my trusty iPhone, do a quick search, and proceed to pull up a photo that Mr. Bug-on-my-hand could have posed for. So yeah, turns out termites "swarm in spring" and they are swarming their asses off all over our porch.  There is a termite contract on the house so our bug man will be there next week to well and truly kill the little bastards, but the idea that creatures are actively eating his house has Gavin freaking the freak out. This morning he said to me "I just feel like I'm gonna open a wall and there will be a million termites in there, doing cartwheels and eating and crapping all at the same time..."

Tomorrow we meet with my uncle Joe (who hereafter shall be referred to as "the Taper" since there are no less than three "Joe"s involved in the rehab of this house) for walk through.  He is a professional drywaller (you didn't think we were doing this completely unarmed, did you??) and he will give us his opinion as to what we should do with our walls. I can hear the words "Gut it!" in my very near future.....

So that was the first week.  Wow.  But....Onward and upward!  Into the fray! Fight the good fight! A bunch of other uplifting platitudes! Wheee!