November 6, 2009

Eddie and I are sitting outside by the fire at noon on a Friday. We’re sipping pumpkin lattes and marveling at the smells, sounds and feel of fall in our new neighborhood. A neighbor is mowing a lawn, the wind is rustling the fallen yellow and brown leaves, and the clouds are keeping a steady clip as they cross overhead. We just finished crunching a bunch of numbers, the outcome of which allowed us some space to breathe. Our till isn’t full enough to finish the kitchen before Thanksgiving. A bit of a bummer, but mostly relief because now we’re able to take our pace down a notch. Our new *by-thanksgiving* plan is to refinish the kitchen floor, put up insulation and drywall and finish the half-wall we’ve started building to separate the kitchen from the living room. Fir-cabinets will have to wait, as will the purchase of a new enviro-friendly refrigerator and dishwasher. The beat goes on.

Since our last post we’ve been mighty busy, even for us. Eddie, Geoffrey, Steven and Joel-the-Rigger erected a high-quality-craftsmanship fence. Planting fence posts took an entire day. Eddie and gang were working from 8am to nearly 9pm. All the while I primed doors and windows in the study, our bedroom door and upstairs bathroom door. Over the course of the next week, Eddie put up every fence board and voila, we have a beautimous fence.

The next weekend, with the help of Itzo EZ, we tore down the wall separating the kitchen from the dining room. We took turns screaming obscenities, well. . .I guess Eddie didn’t, but EZ and enjoyed the aggression outlet. Ironically enough, we weren’t rocking out to metal or buttrock, but the Boogie Nights Soundtrack. Who knew? Rich also helped with the final touches of the kitchen demolition, ripping up the linoleum floor while Eddie ripped out the ceiling. All the while this demolition was happening we had two electricians that Eddie knows from work installing a new panel and masthead. We now have a 200 amp service—let there be (lots of) light!

The next weekend Eddie began the uber-intense job of wiring our new kitchen, while I scraped every inch of glue off of the kitchen floor. Eddie let me know, post scrapping, that I kept grunting and yowling, as well as belting out lyrics to Wolfmother. I had little recollection, I was in the flow I guess. We also leveled out the side yard. Sounds easy? It wasn’t. We picked and hoed and raked and then did all three all over again. We also picked up countless buckets of rock. I’ll get a good pic of the rock pile for our next entry.

Eddie then took a week off from work to finish the electrical in the kitchen and begin the construction of the new half-wall/partition. Working tirelessly from sun-up to sundown (and beyond), Eddie crammed himself into corners, perched himself in small spaces in the roof structure above the kitchen, strung himself out over a ladder to push and pull electrical wire through far-reaching crevices and, just generally worked really hard and got really dirty. He also started wearing a ball cap with a pencil hanging down in front of one ear. Adorable. So, here we sit getting ready to start this weekend’s renovation. Today I’ll scrape the chimney in the kitchen. Scrape what you ask? You guessed it, wallpaper.



We decided that sanding and finishing the floors was the best way to get the most bang for our buck before we had guests for Thanksgiving. As I'm writing this it's hard to even remember the nasty linoleum residue that used to cover our kitchen floor. Thanks to Stephen for recommending sanding the real bad stuff at a 45 degree angle for the first pass. We'd probably still be sanding without that bit of knowledge.






Poor Jeff got suckered into hanging insulation and drywall on the ceiling in exchange for a haircut. Oddly enough, we haven't heard from Jeff in a while.







To be continued. . .