A Running Tally of Metaphysical Phenomena

Good news! I don’t have a right hand full of stress fractures. After last week ended and I came back to work more grateful than ever in my life for the opportunity to just sit and not have to haul, install, replace, remove, paint, or pound anything at all for an entire work day (!), I was pretty sure that all the pounding I’d done putting plank floors in had really wreaked havoc on my hands. But here I am, three days later, and I’m ready to get back to work later today.

We have been improving the home with much fervor. Kirsten’s dad (hereafter: The Foreman) took a week off, and so did I, and we went nuts on the place in anticipation of moving in. We were there anywhere from 13 to 17 hours every day, and we got a TON done! We had some help along the way, too, mostly from Kirsten, but also from great friends who were very generous with their time and energy. Still a ways to go, for sure, but it was a might effort for only one week and a small cast. The would-be-inclusive-if-my-memory-was-perfect task list:

• Painting everything downstairs but the kitchen (that includes the ceiling), which we’ll attack when we pull out the cabinets, etc. to replace it all.
• Removing nasty carpet/prickly tack strips as well as heavy padding/endless staples upstairs and putting primer/sealant on all of the subflooring.
• Painting everything upstairs except the hallway and the stairwell (again, including ceilings).
• Putting down about 60 or 70% of the upstairs flooring. (Looks great, was a great deal, but takes a LONG time.)
• Removing an old water heater that wouldn’t even drain out the bottom it was so full of deposits and stuff; we had to tip it over and drain it out the top, which was as tough as you would expect it to be to move a 100ish pound water heater with 40 gallons of water in it.
• Installing the new one.
• Working on cleaning and sealing a slate floor.
• Patching, mudding, and texturing two sheets’ worth of drywall in four places altogether.
• Installing a new sink/faucet and cabinet in our bedroom. The existing sink was re-e-e-eally bad and rusted and gross.
• Fixing up the dryer duct down in the crawl space, which is really more like a walk space and is quite pleasingly clean, well-ventilated, and clear of frightening substances or animal-related detritus of any sort. If my previouse construction plans fall apart, I may consider relocating my bat cave down there.
• Putting overhead lighting in the upstairs rooms where there wasn’t any. And really, not to go on a rant here, but why oh why would anyone build a house where a switch only turns on an outlet? It’s ridiculous, and it needed to be fixed. And so it was, and all was good.

With the floors unfinished, the trim missing pretty much everywhere, and the kitchen not being addressed at all just yet, we’re a little bit limited in what we can unpack and how much we can get settled at the moment. Kirsten expressed it well when she said that it feels like camping. But we have everything we own within the walls, and tonight, we’re going to put in the remaining four heaters (it has baseboard heat, and all of the existing heaters were recalled) and maybe make some progress on the floor upstairs.

I know you’re wondering, and plenty of people have asked: we do have pictures. Not hundreds and hundreds, but a decent amount, and enough to remember a lot of what it all looked like before. I don’t have the pictures with me at the moment, so this is a pictureless, boring post, but I just wanted to put an update on where things are at the moment. We’ll keep on working, and I’ll keep on updating as we do!

Tags: house, projects

This was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 1:45 pm.