Working for the Weekend

This week has been pretty quiet, home-wise. We've been enjoying roma tomatoes and our wonderful strawberries. Our basil's quite good, too. So that's been fun.

We took back the little pendant lights we bought at Home Depot, because while we were in Portland this past weekend playing with a friend, we saw lights we like better. So we're looking into prices and styles in an attempt to decide what we like, since we'll hopefully be wiring for them in the next couple of weeks. We also picked up our window at Home Depot, since we'll be tearing out one of the old nook windows (the one on the east side). That way we can re-side that entire side of the house. One wall will look nice, at least!

We also cut some nails and did a little more demolition in preparation for this weekend. We have to tear up some of the floor to move the door to the kitchen, and then this weekend we will frame our brains out. I'm glad it's a long weekend; hopefully we'll get a lot done.

One fun thing we did this week was bought a dining table. We got it off Craigslist, and it's a nice, sturdy teak table that has two leaves. It'll seat eight comfortably, ten uncomfortably, when the leaves are out. I really like it, and I like that we didn't pay very much for it. Now that we have a dining table, we can place where we want the pendant lights to be. It's exciting. Now that we have a table, and we're talking about lights, it almost feels like we might actually be able to live in our house like real people someday. Imagine that!

Fruits of Our Labor

Actual fruit. I'll get to that in a minute, saving the best for last.

So with all the house crap going on, and autumn/winter fast approaching, we've been feeling a little ragged about the house. We got a notice in the mail from the City of Kenmore that our permit expires at the end of next month, so we either need to finish off our inspections or renew our permit. The renewal won't be as expensive as the first go-around, but it's still a couple hundred dollars. Oh well.

We're also going to Portland to see a friend, and while we're down there we're going to search for a dining room table. We need a table to know where to wire the lights, you see. I really love shopping for the house. I can't wait to shop for bamboo floors.

Anyway, what's the most exciting, I think, is the fact that we have more roma tomatoes than you can shake a stick at. Okay, you could shake a stick at it, but we have so many tomatoes that your stick would get covered with tomato schmutz. We have probably 18-20 roma tomatoes, and the cherry tomatoes are starting to grow and ripen. Our little bell pepper plant has baby bells on it, but I doubt they'll grow and ripen before the first frost. The mutant Home Depot strawberries are ripening, though. Home Depot was the only place we could find strawberries that bore edible fruit when we were ready to plant stuff, and so we got them. But they seem sort of misshapen and strange, like they've been inbred or too chemically altered or something. I'm sure they'll taste fine. The tomatoes came from Home Depot, too, and they're growing fabulously and perfectly, which is also probably the result of genetic tampering. Oh well, who cares - I'm going to enjoy some fresh, ripe tomato from my garden. Without further ado, here are the photos of our bounty.

The plants in our hedge planting bed are all doing VERY well. We only lost one oregano out of all the plants we put in the ground. The mints are CRAZY, pretty much taking over everything, and the basil, rosemary, and oregano are huge. So I'd say the planting bed was a success. Next year I think we'll plant some heirloom varieties. Yum!

Kings of the Trash Heap

This weekend went much better than last. Sunday was still wet, but the water was coming from the sky and stayed out of our house.

Saturday, however, was beautiful, and that was the critical day. We'd rented a 20-yard dumpster to get rid of our construction debris. We originally rented it because we were planning on re-roofing our house from scratch, but we had since since the folly of our plan and are now just going to re-roof right over it. Saves us some hassle and panic.

Anyway, the dumpster wasn't delivered until 7pm Friday night, so we didn't get started as early as we would have liked, but that was okay. Saturday morning a couple of loyal friends came over and we attacked the piles. Some of that debris had been sitting outside since we first tore out the living/dining room (a year and a half ago), so it was nice to finally get it cleaned up. We were worried that we weren't going to be able to fit it all in the dumpster, since it was looking pretty full after just the pile at the side of the house, and we still had the entire carport to do. But we made it! And our neighbors are liking it. I'm sure anything we do to make the rat hole less of an eyesore is a good thing in everyone's opinions. Little do they know that it will probably worse before it gets better, mwa ha.

Here are some pics.

The side of the house, before and after.

The carport, before and after.

The front of the house, before and after. We got rid of the weird, assorted pieces of rusted metal gear thingeys out front.

Me loading the dumpster.

When we were finished, we knew Sunday was supposed to be rainy, and since the garbage fee is determined by weight, we decided we didn't want to pay unnecessarily just because our garbage was loaded with water. Luckily, our lot came with an abundance of nasty old blue tarps. We spread a few out, and then got one from the deepest depths of our yard, which has been sitting undisturbed for who knows how long (we've never touched it). We think this is where the slugs for our entire neighborhood come from, judging by what we saw when we lifted the tarp. Anyway, this final tarp was actually big enough to cover the entire dumpster, which makes us think it was used to keep water off the roof at one point in time or another. Lucky us!

Unfortunately, some of our garbage poked up too far above the rim, so this morning we had to take the tarps off to reconfigure some of the stuff inside the dumpster. And then it poured all day. Oh well. At least it only got ONE day of rain instead of TWO. We'll see how much we end up paying.

Waterworks

So this last weekend we went to my high school reunion.

We swore we were going to turn off the water before we left, but we forgot.

We got up early in the morning on Sunday to return home, made a pit stop to see some family, and battled traffic all the way back to the rat hole. Loaded with stuff, we went to the door, opened it, and were immediately confronted by a waterfall. Pictures don't really do it justice-it was pouring out of the light fixtures and gaps in the ceiling.

Probably the smartest thing we ever did was install the water shutoff valve close to the house, and that's where my spouse ran as I dashed into the house to survey the damage. There was a couple of inches of water on the floor of the laundry room. The bowed floor worked to our advantage.

The carpet in the den had soaked up some of the water, but not enough to damage anything in the den. We had moved most of the stuff in the laundry/entry room when we were investigating the burst pipe rot that there wasn't much in there. Except our shoes. Pretty much all our shoes.

Most of the water was in the laundry room, with just a little bit in the kitchen, and we knew immediately what had happened. After all, this had sort of happened once before. The compression fittings we had put up in the attic space to temporarily repair the lines to the washing machine had let go. We don't really know why. He rushed up into the attic space and began to drill holes in the ceiling to drain the water that was sitting up there.

I caught the water below in buckets, sponging it up as best I could with a mop.

You can see in the photo that I'm wet, but I was actually pretty soaked. My hair was all wet, my clothes were mostly wet. The washing machine was full of water from the ceiling, and the pails filled up really quickly once the ceiling drain holes were drilled. This water wasn't just any water, either. The water that was raining down upon everything was tea made from old blown-in insulation from who knows when, mouse carcasses and droppings, and D-Con. Lovely thing to be drenched in.

Several hours later we'd gotten the sodden insulation out and mopped up most of the water. It was really late, but luckily our managers were really understanding, and I worked a half day the next day. We took the time partially to rest and partially to clean up. I had to tear up a lot of the linoleum and some of the den carpet while he converted the compression fittings to threaded fittings.

The linoleum was really old, and because it was so wet, the glue stuff was really sticky and nasty. It horrible, and the floor was all wavy. In fact, our dryer seems to have sunk a little bit. Not a good sign.

We're probably going to have to tear out all the wood in that room, floor joists, footings, and all. It's just a mess. But it could have been worse - it could have been the rest of the house as well. As it is, the damage is isolated pretty much to that room.

And we're thinking about running the plumbing under the house when we redo it.

I meant to post this sooner, but being tired from the weekend combined with working late to make up the lost time and going to classes for work hindered me.

This weekend we've rented a dumpster (that was supposed to have shown up 5 hours ago, so we're not hopeful it will shoe up at all) for all our construction garbage. We'll finally be able to rid our lot of some of the crap that's lying around, which would be really good. It's even better because we suspect that rats have moved into a pile of lumber just off the side of our house. We saw a big, brown rat on Monday morning as we were standing on the porch.

I seriously doubt it lives in the house with us. Rats are smarter than to live in such a run-down place.

Den of Destruction

So after another weekend away, we made some progress on the house. We managed to demolish another wall in our scheme to make the entryway to the den bigger, and we did the demolition necessary to move the kitchen door. Now all that's left is reframing. Hooray! We also got the materials needed to start doing the ceiling joists, and hopefully we'll be getting the supplies to do our truss in the next couple of days. It will be so nice to take down all the random supports we have nailed in.

Here's the wall of the den, ready to be taken out. This is the original exterior of the house, which was pretty cool to see once we got all the crappy, white-painted wood paneling off.

Here's what it looked like once we got it out.

And here it is all the way out, from the view standing in the living/dining room.

The first permanent ceiling support went in, much stronger and better than the original, in our opinion. You also get an idea, hopefully, of how much taking out the walls expanded the space. Pretty much the entire den is open now, and the house feels less claustrophobic. What a difference!

And, finally, here's the final demo of the kitchen doorway.

We'll be moving the door all the way over to the right to give ourselves more counter space. We'll see how it goes. I should have taken some "before" pics, but I'm a bad blogger and am going to make you go fishing through the archives.

All in all, a pretty productive weekend.