House Update

Well, because I still haven’t figured out a good way to process all of my pictures (I need a hell of a lot of hard drive space and a good program for processing RAW files. Anyone have a spare copy of Adobe Lightroom kicking around? Aperture? No? Bueller? Bueller?). So, I don’t have a whole lot to talk about. Why not bore you all with the trivial details that comprise our quest to fix this place up.

The second biggest news is that we hired an electrician to come in and bring our basement up to code. The likelihood of us dying in a horrible, horrible electrical fire has now decreased dramatically. He was a friend of a friend, so we got a pretty good rate. He was a little scared by the mess in our basement. I mean, when an electrician says “woah”  and starts snapping pictures with his camera phone to show his electrician friends…. well, you know that your wiring is “not good.” To put it mildly. We had a lot of knob and tube wiring. That someone had spliced romex into. Without any junction boxes. I’m told that this is bad. Really, really bad.

Yeah, our basement was a giant death trap. We might as well have had a zombie infestation down there. At least then our cats might have taken them out.

Our basement is now up to date. The old outlets that were upstairs have now been ripped out and replaced with modern ones. And we (finally) have a front porch light. We’re living high on the hog up in here with our motion sensing porch light and basement that’s not so likely to kill us. Now we just need to patch up all of the holes in our walls.

The biggest news is that we need to tear out our third floor. As in gut the place. Tear it all out. With shovels. And crowbars. And maybe my bare fists if I get mad enough. Why do we have to tear out our third floor? Because the walls are comprised of crumbling horsehair plaster covered up with something that’s basically glorified cardboard. With lots of holes in it.

Apparently this is a bad thing. Having your walls come tumbling down. Our third floor is a Jericho in the making. 

We could have patched things up and propped things up and maybe used a little duct tape and then crossed our fingers and hoped that the walls stayed up. But, we knew that they were going to have to come down eventually. Why use all that spackle and primer and paint when you know that you’re going to have to rip it out anyways? I love spackle, but it ain’t cheap. Besides, the third floor isn’t insulated at all… which is probably not such a great thing what with the upcoming winter months and rising heating prices and blah blah blah extreme climate change.

It sucks, because it’s going to mean a long ass wait before I actually get to use the space (so much for using my craft room this winter). But, hey, it will be that much nicer in the long run. And I have a nice, long winter of daydreaming about my craft room and mentally decorating it ahead of me. I like mentally decorating. I find it to be a cheap and easy means of (internal) self-expression.

We don’t have the, ummm, resources, to do the whole project at once, so we’ll be spreading it out over the course of the next year or so. We plan to do the demolition in the next couple of weeks. Then, after I’ve worked a few more side jobs, we’ll buy some skylights and put them in (the third floor has exactly two windows. they’re small). Then, we insulate.

After the insulation is done, we seal the space up for the winter and I pretend that we don’t even have a third floor. It’ll be rather hard to do what with the doorway that leads right straight up to it that happens to be located right across from our bedroom. But, I’ll do my best to forget. Eventually, we’ll blue board and plaster but that shit don’t grow on trees. 

If it did grow on trees, you better your sweet ass that we would go hiking a hell of a lot more. 

I already have the colors picked out. And the furniture. And the decorating scheme. And way more details than it’s emotionally healthy to have figured out for a space that we haven’t even started working on.

I may or may not have gotten slightly addicted to HGTV while we had a bunch of time to kill in hotel rooms out west. I think that if Kristian hears the phrases “accent wall” or “updated hardware” one more time, his head just might implode. At least the implosion won’t make a big ol’ mess. I’d hate to ruin the color scheme of my accent walls. 

On a positive note, I put up a bunch of pictures last weekend and our house is really starting to look a lot homier. And we have a few little projects that we can work on while we wait for the resources to make the third floor habitable. I have picked up a few useful tricks after all. Project number one? Patching up all those damn holes in our walls. And putting up some curtains in our bedroom.

I made a list today of all the things that we need to do. It was long list and more than a little overwhelming, but I actually found it comforting to lay it all out there. With the exception of the work on the third floor, most of the work is cosmetic. Cosmetic I can definitely deal with. I’m comforted by the fact that our list included items like “spruce up first floor bathroom” and not things like “jack up foundation” or “replace roof” or “kill the zombies in the basement.” 

If we did have zombies in the basement, I would have to paint them in accent colors.