Last weekend was very productive, thanks to a lot of help from our friends. On Saturday Craig helped us take down the wallpaper in the living room and dining room. And on Sunday, we got a lot accomplished downstairs with the help of Kris, J.D. and the Gingeriches.
We got the game room painted, the family room stripped of wallpaper, the media room ready to paint, and all of the fake wood paneling out of two rooms. Additionally, the boys did a little messing around!
At the end of the day we had generated quite a pile of trash - wood paneling and bags of wallpaper debris, plus eight dead mice found in an air vent! Thank you to everyone who helped out!
On the 15th, a crew arrives to remove all of the acoustic ceiling (popcorn or cottage cheese ceiling) and to reface all of the walls that had the fake paneling removed. Mostly after that, it should just be paint, paint, paint, before most of the rooms are livable. Of course, the kitchen and baths will still need a bit of work, but that'll have to hold off a while (till my stress level is down and bank funds are up!).
Back in Portland, we are out a bathroom. The house inspection revealed a leaky shower with rotted floorboards, which we are now in the process of replacing. Sadly, our contractor Mike, thinks we were duped when we bought the house. The floor boards have all been replaced, but the shower tile is original. Mike believes they replaced rotted boards, but didn't fix the shower. He thinks the owners probably didn't use that shower on purpose so that everything would look hunky-dory (and dry) when we got the house inspected, but then we've been using a leaky shower for the last four years. So now the onus is on us to get this problem fixed once and for all. Of course, that doesn't mean we are going to be doing a top of the line remodel, either. Mike is very understanding about our desire to do some "bargain shopping" when it comes to materials.
Our house is set to close on the 24th. Mike wondered if we needed the house to fund before we could pay him.
"Well," Mac explained, "I am 99% certain we can pay you before that."
"Good," Mike countered, "I am 99% certain that I can get the job completed by the 24th." We like Mike a lot.
To make matters more interesting, we had a toaster fire the day the bathroom got demolished. It was a great test for our brand-new up-to-code smoke alarms that Mac had only installed the day before!
This picture only captures the last gasp of the flames after we had taken the toaster outside. At one point we had quite a bit of black smoke and a toaster full of flames. All right, we get the message: We need to clean the toaster more than once every five years!
No comments:
Post a Comment