House Progress, or lack there of
Working on Monday is a bummer. We had a 4/10 summer schedule for 6 weeks the summer, followed by Labor Day (after which I totally worked a 40 hour week--silly me), but now we are back to the regular grind. I need to remind myself to cut the days short, which I did for the first time today. What a nice long evening!
I feel like we've been moving for a year. I probably feel that way because it's almost true. But we're getting there. We've now unpacked 3 of the 4 bedrooms and the entire down stairs. The one room that still needs to be unpacked is the nursery, and the fact that we've left it for last probably says something. I've also found time in there to go through my closet and dresser and get rid of stuff.
It feels good. The inside of the house finally is to the point I somehow expected it to reach during the first month we lived here. Haha. The outside of the house has been worse. Okay, most of it is a year more over grown than it was when we moved in, but the front is pretty decent, and we are slowly pushing back the battle lines in the back yard. We now have chickens, and the garden is producing. I harvested the first of the quinoa over the weekend, and I will harvest the rest before we go on vacation next week. Next year I'm gonna plant more quinoa.
It's starting to feel like we can press on to actual progress. Though again and again, we find ourselves too scared to start projects. I'm afraid of becoming one of those people who rips out a wall, and then 5 years later still has all their studs exposed. But we're working on it.
Over the weekend, we removed the toilet from the guest bathroom. That toilet was busted in a number of different ways. And now it's in the bathtub.
Next up was exploring the soft floor beneath the toilet. The plywood was no more, but the 2x4s seem okay. What is unclear is whether the tub is supposed to be sitting on top of plywood that has completely disintegrated, or whether the tub isn't actually supposed to be on plywood at all. Somehow, I'm afraid it's the former. We're really hoping to avoid needing to redo the tile surround and the tub, we'll see what happens. This isn't even the bathroom we want to remodel. We just want to stick with a new toilet and new floor. If possible. I think we're going to hire out the install, once we figure out what we want to have done.
Next up, tonight we installed the first of the can light housings upstairs. This house has no overhead lighting in the upstairs, which doesn't really matter so much in the summer, but as the days are getting shorter, we're remembering how useless the upstairs of this house is in the dark. It took a while, that whole measure 200 times, cut 3 dozen times thing. Plus climbing around in the attic doing more measuring and moving insulation around. But we got one can installed, and I think the next 13 cans will go faster. Then wiring. Then the blow-in insulation guys. I've been so intimidated by this lighting project, it feels so good to have it started.
I also finally finished repairing the cider chest that Chris knocked the legs off of during our move. It looks good as new. Or at least it looks far better than it did when Josh bought it for me.
And I'm hemming my curtains for the front room. Those of you who have been over here probably thought they were done, but they weren't. They were hanging there fraying. They were fraying especially badly when roomba would try to eat them. So I've been doing a bunch of hand hemming over old episodes of Alias. Half way there...