Whew

Well, what a whirlwind month that was!

We were busy trying to make our house livable for my family while they were here for my mom's surgery, and she was with us for a few weeks after that, so that's what we've been up to.

Now that my school's over, we're settled into our jobs, and everything looks to settle down until the streams of family come visit in July and August, we're trying to get stuff done on the ol' rat hole once more.

We ended up catching the possum in a large live trap, and took care of it for several days. Turns out it really liked to eat grapes, apples, and, of course, cat food (both dry and wet). I thought it was adorable, but my brother was of the opinion that it was horrible. *shrug* Anyway, we sprayed antibacterial stuff on its wound while we had it, gave it lots of food and water, and it seemed to be doing pretty well. There's a place here called PAWS (Progressive Animal Welfare Society or something like that - paws.org) that accepts wildlife, rehabilitates them, and releases them back into the wild. We took the possum there, and we hope they were able to help it get better and now it's happily building leaf nests somewhere.

Shortly after the possum was trapped, my trusty spouse went under the house to see what the damage was. That's when he found the leaf nest the possum had made in our plumbing, and he fixed the hole where it had entered. Our crawl space should now be secure. Anyway, while he was under there, he noticed that one corner of the house (the northwestern corner, the one under the laundry room-cum-entryway that has the car jack holding up the floor joist) had rotten wood and mold growing.

Now, I had been smelling something moldy in the laundry room for a while, especially once it got warm, but my spouse assured me it was just crappy, torn-apart old house smell. I didn't really investigate further. Once he went under the house, though, it was pretty obvious that the copious amounts of rot and mold were what was causing the smell. So, we moved the washer and dryer, opened up the wall, and ta-daaa! There was plumbing. Cracked, leaking plumbing. Turns out the laundry plumbing wasn't where we thought it was, and at some point in time (probably this winter) it had frozen and cracked. There was no insulation in the wall, which contributed. So we need to tear apart the laundry room this summer instead of the kitchen. I was so looking forward to having a kitchen...but oh well. We'll be able to reconfigure that room to make it more of an actual entry to our house, which will be nice. We'll also be able to widen what's now the front door, which will be VERY nice.

Once we figured out the plumbing was cracked, we immediately shut off the water and ran some new pex line. Since we're redoing the laundry room now anyway, we simply drilled holes in the ceiling and ran the plumbing down. We'll redo it nicely later on. Anyway, we had to use compression fittings to get the pex and the old galvanized to fit together. I was happy because I could do my laundry in hot water for the first time in a long time. I did several loads, and then, right before bed, we hear this odd sound.

The sound was water pouring down out of our ceiling. Turns out the compression fitting had let loose in the hot water (after time, apparently). So my spouse hurried into the attic as I ran to shut off the water, and we spent a good amount of time shoveling wet insulation/rat poison/nasty other bits into trash bags. The smell was AWFUL, and bags of wet insulation are very hard to carry. Plus Spouse found a mouse skeleton (intact, dessicated from poison), which was gross. We got everything cleaned up, and we haven't used hot water since. No lasting damage was done, as far as we can tell, and we'll find out for sure when we rip the whole thing out.

Other than that, we've been busy building the little strip for our hedge. We have the wall built and plan on finishing up this weekend with the dirt. We'll plant next week.

Stay tuned until then for pictures! Now that summer's here, we plan to have a lot more posts and get a lot more done.

To finish up, we got our official property value notice in the mail for our taxes due in 2008. The value of our property actually went up. I'm sure it's based on some other factors, like comparable sales, market conditions, etc., because it's pretty dark obvious that they haven't seen the place!