Day 274- Hold onto your butts

We bought the house 2 months ago. We haven't had a kitchen since. We have, however, had mice, a snake, crickets, skeeters, stink bugs and two trips to urgent care. The Hubbs and I have been working on the house by ourselves, with a little help from my Dad and lots of support from family. In this time, we've had little obvious progress, yes we knew what work had been done, but if a stranger came by it just looked a mess. This all changed this past weekend. Within three days we went from a big empty room with a wall still open to a enclosed space with upper cabinets installed. Hooooooly crap!

So this week I will be bringing updates for each of the little things we've done over the previous week. I warn you, it's gone from "oh we ripped up MDF for 12 hours" to "we insulated, drywalled, taped, assembled and hung cabinets".


So as I said. Hold onto your butts, it's about to get serious up in here!




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When we bought the house, we knew that there was some water getting into the basement. There were three suspects in the matter:

1) The foundation was leaking
2) The kitchen sink pipe was leaking
3) The gutters were so full that water was running into the basement instead of down the downspout

And the winner is................

The kitchen sink! The Hubbs was in the basement doing something when I was running water in the old sink, and he could hear it running out in the basement. So he ripped open the walls and found this:

That looks nice and solid

Yes, that is a hole in the pipe that rusted out. That's gotta go. But we weren't in a hurry. We have a bathtub to wash dishes!

Now that we are further in the reno, we decided it was time. Time to fix the pipes. Since we forced the seller to give us a home warranty, I just popped online and reported a plumbing problem. Two days later we had a plumber out and got the follow news;

1) The whole pipe is corrugated steel and likely  is rusted shut (think of arteries and cholesterol)

Guess how AWESOME the basement smelled. Just guess!

2) Whoever did the last fix, likely because the pipe is rusted shut, didn't tie the PVC into the air vent, meaning not only do we have a 2 inch pipe closed to .5 inches, we there's no suction to help.

3) The PVC portion of the pipe isn't on a downward slope and is full of water and old food stuff. Um, delicious?

4) All of the steel piping has to come out for a proper fix.

Luckily, our plumber is awesome and got all but $120 covered by the warranty. Thanks John! So on Friday he was out replacing all the pipes and running lines so that our kitchen sink would drain like a dream.

So we went from this:

See the multiple pipes and danglies?

To this:

Down to one pipe

And no danglies!

Oh, and we removed the extra weird pipe that was sticking out of the wall. But that was all Hubbs and his Sawsall. Gotta love a handy man!

Now that water is going to FLY through those pipes. Step one DONE.

Day 254- My house, my Menagarie

Plastic update- We finally went through all the left over water from the hurricane and are starting to move to more grill cooking. This past weekend we went to home depot and managed a plastic free purchase. This can be done by buying cement board and 2x6s. Now that I think of it; building is a bit like cooking. If you cook or build from scratch, it's pretty easy to be plastic free. If you buy all prefab stuff, then you get lots 'o plastic. Words of wisdom right there.


In other exciting news; I found a snake in the basement. Yes, boys and girls, a snake. A black rat snake to be exact, which works well with killing the mice; not so well with me not freaking out.

Image from wiki, thank goodness

When the previous owners got read to sell the house, they had it painted with kilz in creamy white. We've found some old colors, and this was probably a good idea. On the downside, whoever they hired had apartment painter syndrome; which means it was just sprayed everywhere. Walls, windows, light switches, electrical sockets, that hardwood floors and the bathtub. Hubbs and I spent a week scrubbing hardwood floors to remove paint, and I'm just now getting to replacing the painted over electrical sockets. 

Normally, I'll replace one or two a day, just to make sure I'm not screwing up electrical. This requires that I go to the basement, turn off all power to the house and then commence working on sockets. Today when I went down there, I heard this sliding, rustling sound. At first, I thought it was the floor joists creaking because Hubbs was upstairs hanging curtains. But then I realized it was ALIVE and if I poked a ceiling tile, the sound would move. Of course, I ran upstairs and convinced Hubbs urgently calmly to come down and see what we had going on. You see he's tall and can reach the ceiling, whereas I would have to use a step ladder. Yes. That's my story. 

We pull down some ceiling tiles and find this:

See our snake?

Well, that's a four foot snake in our drop ceiling. Between the pipe leak, the mice and THIS we are unfinishing this basement and starting over. I'm convinced there is are voles, mice, rabbits, snakes, small children and perhaps some more cave crickets in the basement and IT FREAKS ME OUT. It's like Home Alone levels of basement anxiety. After some quick googling to make sure that we wouldn't die if the snake bit us (not that we wanted to be bitten), we convinced the snake to leave with a rake and a gentle nudge to the door. 

Snake V Rake

Yep, you should leave

He didn't get far enough away, so he was placed further away from the house

So, there is our first and hopefully last snake. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go investigate all sounds in the whole house. And there are lots of sounds.

Day 215- Let it Begin

In honor of the recent events, I changed up the look of the blog. What do you think?

We have big news. BIG news. Approximately 3400 square feet of news. Can you guess? It rhymes with mouse.... Yes, the Hubbs and I bought a house! There will be updates on this house as time progresses, as it's a fine specimen of 1970s styling, but I will try to focus for the remainder of the year on the ability to be plastic free in both the move and the renovations.

Let's talk about packing first. As my mom likes to say, collecting china is a long a winding road to nowhere; so naturally I picked up that trait. If I had my druthers, I would wrap everything in bubble wrap, box it up, and call it a day. Well, we can't really do that now, so it's paper to the rescue. The Hubbs has been riding the DC metro to and from work recently, and on the metro, individuals are inclined to leave their newspapers. Score! Packing material. Really, we've been using the newspaper to fill the gaps in the boxes and purchasing paper from Home Depot to actually wrap the dishes. This way they are clean and not covered in metro cooties. We've also been buying individual boxes instead of a wrapped pack of boxes. But Carrie, you say, why don't you free cycle boxes from a grocery store? Well,  our last move as done by professional movers and they used standard size boxes, it was so much easier to pack the truck. So we now spend the $100 on boxes instead of $100 on gas tooling around to find the boxes. Thus far this is what the guest bedroom looks like:

Ok, I lied. There is another stack in there too. But you get the idea. Soon we'll be moving into the house, but for right now we've been working on it constantly. Let me just say that this:

Beautiful carpet, yes? 

The Hubbs and his glory work:

And this is what is underneath:

There is a special place in hell for those that carpet over hardwood. I say this as someone who's spent 6 hours this week pulling out carpet staples and tack strips by hand. 

Oh, and I've already bled my own blood and gotten a tetanus booster. Thanks carpeters. Thanks.