Day 48

Today we took down the top kitchen cabinets in the tower room's kitchen (on 2nd floor). Then Jonathan took out the screws that were holding the bottom set of cabinets in. But we were unable to move that out. It was heavy, the tile and the wall were keeping it in, and what were we going to do with it once we got it away from the wall. So we decided to move on to tearing that wall down. Then maybe the cabinet would just slide out into the room.

Here is a picture of the little kitchen in the 2nd floor tower room. There is a closet behind the kitchen (to the right). We were planning on putting the laundry room in here and just using the kitchen cabinets. But have now changed our minds. We think we would rather open up this room and make it more usable space. When we first move into the house, the girls are going to share this bedroom and could use the extra space. After we get the 3rd floor finished and move the kids up to their bedrooms this is the room we are going to use as our TV/family room. The wall on the very left of the picture used to be a fireplace. We were thinking about opening this back up at that time. But that will wait until we get the girls moved up to their bedrooms on 3rd floor.

Here we have the top set of cabinets down and are starting to work on the bottom. The sink has been removed.


Jonathan has started to cut the sheetrock off of the wall.

The wall has been partly removed. The room already feels a lot more open and we still have quite a bit more wall to take down. :) It is going to be so nice and big in here.

Day 47

Saturday again... We started out the day with a trip into Lincoln. We were hunting for a water heater. I was really looking forward to having hot water. :) It would make it much nicer to clean things (even my hands). And of course this is something that we will have to have before we can move in. We actually planned to buy one, but after going to all of the likely stores, we decided to go home do some research and order one from Sears in Beatrice. So that is something we will be looking into this evening.

Then we went on over to Beatrice. We made quick work of the little bit of floor and nails that I had left in the tower room.

Here is the tower bedroom on 2nd floor with all of the yucky tile taken off. :D

Then we started on the Green Room. With both of us working together, we were able to finish removing the tile and floor in the Green Room. There are still a few nails in the floor and about one load of rubble to haul down. But this is great news for us. I was thinking the I would be working on each of those rooms for 3 days, a total of 6 days. So it would take me a week to finish, and instead we are finished with both of them in only 3 days. YAY! One step closer to moving in.

Here is the Green room with all of the tile taken off. Boy is it good to see all of that wood floor.

We are thinking that we want to knock down the closet wall in the tower room and open it back up to where the fireplace used to be. This would give the girls more room when we move in. And when they move upstairs, we would either be using that room from Jonathan's and my bedroom, or it would be a TV/family room and the Green Room would be our bedroom. We are still thinking about which would be better.

Well, as a more clear update, we now have the yucky tile off of all the floor on 2nd floor, except the two bathrooms and the hallway. There are two walls on 2nd floor that we want to knock down. The hallway wall will probably wait until we have all of the plaster off of third floor, as we think having the wall will help in keeping the 2nd floor clean while we remove the plaster. There is only one room on 3rd floor that we still have the yucky tile to remove. It is hard to believe that we have almost all of the floor back down to bare wood. :D What a happy day.

Day 46

The kids and I went over to the house this morning. I wanted to finish removing the floor in the tower bedroom on 2nd floor. The kids helped me by carrying buckets of tile down to the dumpster. We were able to get the floor off and after lunch we went over to the swimming pool. :D That was pretty fun. The water was a little bit cooler than I like, but the kids thought it was great.

Day 45

The kids and I filled the van with boxes and bags of stuff to take over to the house this morning. They helped me carry everything inside. Then I started working on taking up the floor in one of the bedrooms on 2nd floor. This floor was a bit easier than the last room I worked on. I like it when this happens. I almost got half of the room taken up. Ella helped me to carry some of it out to the dumpster. Hopefully I will be able to finish this room tomorrow.

This evening we went into Lincoln to buy a book on plumbing and to get some wheels to put on Jonathan's heavy tools. I will like having wheels on them. We are going to start moving them over to Beatrice soon. We will be very thankful for the wheels when we do that.

Day 44

Today we went over to the house to unload Ella's wicker furniture. We also looked around to see if it had leaked in the house, as it had been raining the last two days. And the most important thing that had to be done today was Jonathan's battle the bees.


Here is Jonathan with all parts of his body covered and ready to go out and spray the bees.

We not only have birds living in the wall or gutters of our house. There are honey bees...lots of honey bees. We have seen them flying into a small hole in the wall outside of the 2nd floor bathroom. Occasionally there are bees in the Mars room. One of the windows must be a little loose and they can find there way inside. We have been spraying them, just a little. But have found that this only seems to make them come out and swarm around, and also find their way inside the house. When we are working on the roof it is not a good thing to have lots of angry bees around. We are also concerned about starting to work on the box gutters as this may be where the bees are living. The box gutters are the thing we will need to be working on once the roof is finished. I have also wondered about taking the plaster and lathe off of the bathroom and the Mars room only to find thousands of bees. So as it was a cool day, Jonathan decided it would be a good day for battle.

We had bought several bottles of bug spray, and Jonathan put on extra clothing. I had the kids go down and wait in the car. (The other day there were so many bees swarming around I didn't want them to be outside.) And Jonathan climbed out the window onto the roof. He used up two of our cans of spray.


Here is Jonathan up on the roof spraying the bees. It was a good day to attempt this, because it was so cool (it was less then 60 degrees) there were not that many bees flying around, even after Jonathan started to spray them. I don't know how many he killed or how many more times we will have to do this, but today was a good start on the battle of the bees.

Day 43

Well, I guess it is furniture buying week. We got Zeb a new dresser yesterday and then today on Craigslist we found just want Ella wanted to put in her room at the new house. She had seen these pictures of wicker furniture in one of our Victorian house books and that is what she had decided that she wanted. So after supper we went to take a look at this furniture. And then we bought it. Minivans are amazing vehicles. We were able to fit the headboard, dresser, night stand, armoire, and chair all into the van. Ella was hoping to unload it here in Hickman and use it until we moved to the new house. But Jonathan and I decided that it is already in the van, and we would like to move it only once. So we will just be taking it over to Beatrice tomorrow. Ella is very excited about her new furniture. :D

Day 42

Today we went on a journey to find Zebbie a dresser. We passed his loft bed onto Jake. So now he is missing his bed, dresser and desk. We took bed frame from the new house and brought it over here so he could use this until we moved into the new house. Jonathan is planning on building his a Captain bed for the new house. But as we aren't going to have him move right into his room he was going to need something temporary. And we are short on dressers already. The girls' dresser broke about six months ago, and they have been using plastic craft drawers. Now that we have this old Victorian house, we are wanting to find old furniture to go with it. We have been looking on craigslist and antique shops. But we just haven't felt ready to buy. Probably because we still aren't quite ready to move in. :) Why find more things that we will just have to move twice. But now with all three children without dressers we decided it was time. So off on our journey this morning.



This is the dresser that we bought for Zeb. Now all he has to do is get his clothes inside of it.

Day 41

On the way home last night Jonathan and I were talking about what we should do next.. We think that we are going to start knocking down all of the plaster and lathe on third floor and in the second floor bathroom. If we can get all of this done before my family comes up again to help we will be able to finish off these rooms. Then we would have help getting the clawfoot tub carried up the stairs and the other tub carried down to the dumpster. Then the second floor kitchen and the second floor bathroom would be mostly clean and new for us to move in. That would be very nice.

It is time to go back to the house to work again. Dad went straight up to the roof. Mom and I started knocking the plaster down in one of the bedrooms on third floor. That is a really dusty job. Jonathan measured some of the rooms up on third floor. Once we get all of the plaster and lathe down we can start wiring and putting in our intercom and network lines. So we need to know where all of these things are going to be.

We started out the day with an odd surprise. The kids were in the Mars room (the room that we have cleaned out and the TV set up for them). Melinda comes out all excited and scared. There is a hole in the floor where the old radiator pipes come up. Melinda had been playing over in that corner when she saw that there was a baby bird stuck in that hole. She says that when she saw it she thought that it was missing it's body and it was dead. But then it blinked and she was scared. So Jonathan tried to remove the floor board to get the bird out. He ended up getting the radiator pipe out and the bird fell down into the floor. When Ella looked in the hole with a flash light she saw what looked like a nest. A couple of weeks ago, I had noticed a mother bird flying into a hole to take care of her babies and I heard the babies. Jonathan decided to let the bird find its own way out and put a bird over the hole so that it wouldn't come back into the room. (I have a picture on my camera of the bird in the hole. But I have to get a cable to get the picture onto my computer. I will get it added later.)

When I went up on the roof to see how Dad was doing, I was surprised to see just how much he had gotten done. WOW! He was getting so much done. But by now, it was really hot up on the roof and on all of that tin. So he needed to come down for awhile and it was time to eat. So we went to the Chinese Buffet. Yummy.


Here is what the roof looks like when it is finished.



Here is that last part of the roof, all tarped and ready for the rain...

After lunch Dad helped us to knock down the plaster. When we had a couple of walls down, Dad started lowering the buckets to the ground and Mom and I went back and forth between taking the buckets to the dumpster and filling buckets for Dad to lower.

Here you can see some of the messy plaster still on the floor. We would do one small area and then haul most of the plaster down to the dumpster.

Jonathan was down in the basement trying to figure out the maze of wiring down there. We want to figure out what goes where so we can safely take everything out and get it all wired and working the way that we want it too.

Then all four of us started taking out some of the lathe and continued to work on knocking down the plaster. The good news is that we got most of that room done and all carried out to the dumpster.
Here is what the room looked like without the plaster on the walls.



This is the wall that we have taken the lathes off of. You can see the chimney in the corner.

Dad went up to finish a bit on the roof and re-tarp the parts that were going to have to wait until next time.

I guess that I used different muscles today because I am just so tired. I am glad to be clean (I just took a shower to wash all of the plaster dust off of me) and just sitting here on my couch.

Now here is the crazy thing, I forgot to take my camera both yesterday and today. So I will be taking pictures of all of the work that we did this weekend the next time we are at the house. I am not sure if we are going to go over to the house tomorrow, or if we will take a day of rest. I guess we will just have to wait and see how we feel in the morning.

Day 40

Off to Beatrice to meet Mom, Dad and Philip to work on the house. The main goal again today was to get some more work done on the roof. They brought down our clawfoot tub. Right now we just have it setting in the parlor. We aren't ready to put it in the bathroom yet.


Here are the kids trying out the new tub. :)

The tub came from Benson Plumbing, Grand Island, NE.

We rented the sheet metal break again. And got all of the pieces bent on two sides. Dad got his smaller break set up on third floor and he and Philip got to work on the roof.


Dad got his little work area set up in the third floor landing room. Here is his metal break and the tin leaning against the wall.


Jonathan was working on the basement. He got all of the brick moved outside and the one room all cleaned up. He wants to get his shop set up in this room, so we can start using the tools as we need them. Mom and I finished breaking up the tile and floor in the first bedroom on third floor. Then we moved to the next bedroom. This was very nice, it is the room with the linoleum. So there was no nails and no wood underlayment. It was so nice to just to peal up the floor and it only took two trips down to the dumpster. Now there is only one bedroom and the little bathroom left on third floor with the yucky tile.

Day 38 & Day 39

We stayed home... well, not at home we just didn't work on the house. Friday night we went out to eat with Abuelita. We were just resting up for the weekend.. We knew that it was going to be busy again.

Day 37

It is Pre-school graduation tonight, so I will have to work and we won't be going over to the house. I decided that we should go over to Beatrice and explore. We found the library, the kids had fun exploring a new library. Then we drove over to the swimming pool. And guess what, there was already water in the pool. They must be opening this weekend. Our next stop was the park. It took a bit of driving around, but we found one. The kids had a good time playing in the park, we packed a picnic lunch and ate at the park.

Here are the kids on the UFO in the park.

Then we went over to the house for a little while. I wanted to finish getting the floor out of the room I had been working on. I got all of it except along the edge, where we decided that they put the wall over the tile floor. I am not sure what we are going to do about that. We are planning on taking the wall out, but I don't know if we are going to do that right now or not.



Here is what the floor looks like now. :D

Day 36

Jonathan started out the evening by removing the old sink and cabinet in the second floor bathroom. Then he cleaned up the area a little and brought our new sink upstairs. And like usual, it seems that we need a slightly different connector piece to make it work. I have started to think of plumbing as putting a puzzle together. So Jonathan moved on to the kitchen. He put the last piece of laminate flooring in the pantry. Then he put all of the doors back on.

Here is the new vanity ready to be put in.

While Jonathan was working I stayed close by (I was in the next room removing the yucky floor). I am actually starting to get this floor figured out. Yes, now that I am almost finished with it, it is starting to come off a bit more easily. I only broke the head off of one nail and that one came out easily with the vise grips. I think I will be finished with this room with one more trip to the house. YAY! Only four and two half rooms of flooring to remove. :D

Day 35

It seems that after a weekend of working in the house we tend to take Monday off. Well we did it again. We did got into Lincoln and buy a few plumbing pieces so that we can start working on the bathroom sink. It get it to work we are going to have to bring the drain pipe over a bit. Well not actually bring the pipe over. But bring the connection over, so that it will be under the sink.

Day 34

Back to the house to finish the new floor in the kitchen. Of course the point where we stopped yesterday, had to be a hard board. It needed several little cuts around the opening to the pantry door. While Jonathan worked on figuring out those measurements, I went back to work on the tile in the next room. I really wanted to get more of that done today. But it was still a painfully annoying room to work on. I did finally manage to get all of the tile pealed off. By the end of the day, I have just about half of the room finished. I did make another discovery. The wall that makes the hallway at the top of the stairs was not always there. It was put over the yucky tile floor. This fact is adding to the difficulty of removing this old flooring. Jonathan and I are now considering removing this wall completely and opening up that room. We had been wondering about it before, but now that we are sure it doesn't belong I am sure that it will have to go. All that is left is to decided when we will be taking it out.

The laminate flooring in the kitchen has been finished. We do still need to put some kind of molding over the edge. Jonathan is thinking of using this as a "practice" for making molding. We are going to have to learn how to make all kinds of moldings and edges.



We called the day a bit short, Melinda had a birthday party this evening. But that is fine, we got the kitchen finished. Our next 'project' is to get the rest of the plumbing working in the bathroom, the vinyl floor down and everything ready for move in time. A fully operational bathroom.... I can't wait! :D

Day 33

Jonathan's Mom came over for a visit, this will be her first time to the house. So we started off the day with a tour.

Today was the day we were going to start putting the new flooring into the 2nd floor kitchen. We bought some laminate wood flooring to lay down in there. We are planning on redoing the floor sometime in the future. But we just need something clean and nice so that we can move in and we thought this would be a good solution. We ended up getting just over half of it done. We wanted this half to dry fully before we moved the frig and stove out of the hallway and back into place. The rest we would save until tomorrow.

As Jonathan and I worked in the kitchen, his Mom started working at removing the tile in the next room. In between while waiting for Jonathan to get the next pieces cut, I was working on removing the yucky tile from the next room. This has been an interesting job. It seems that each room is done just slightly differently, some the ways that worked the best to remove the tile might not work at all in the next room. This room has different wood underlayment and they also used different kinds of nails. These nails are shorter and twisted, kind of like screws. If you can get the nails out in one smooth move, they are easier then the ones in the other rooms...but if the heads break off, they are much harder to remove then the other type of nails. The underlayment in this room is much thinner and the tile and underlayment do not come up together. We had to remove all of the tile before the wood. I cannot seem to get this wood up in very large pieces. So it is slow, hard and frustrating. :P But any forward progress is still movement in the right direction.

Day 32

Friday...
Jonathan and I both had the day off of work today. But not to work on the house. It was for Melinda's kindergarten graduation. Her program wasn't going to be until 2:15 so we decided that we should at least drive over to the new house an unload all of the things that had been gathering in the back of the van. It was a rather cloudy day and they had been forcasting rain. We stopped at Walmart before we got to the house and it started to pour. This is quite a terrible feeling when you know that 2/3's of your roof is only covered in tarps. We got our shopping done and drove over to the house. By now it was just rainy, at least the pouring had stopped. We quickly walked around the house to see where the water WOULD be coming in. At this time it was only dripping in on 3rd floor. We set about some buckets and waited, watched, and listened for more water. Then went back down to second floor where we now discovered some water dripping and went in search of some more buckets. We decided to move our TV and some of the other things into the 2nd floor kitchen (this is a room that as of yet hasn't leaked and is under a new roof so we think it is safe).

Then we unloaded the things from the van. With everything getting wet again, we didn't think there was much that we wanted to work on. So we went on back to Hickman to wait for Melinda's graduation.


Here is Melinda at her graduation. :)

Day 31

Thursday was another trip into Lincoln. Me and craigslist.... I found something that I thought Jonathan might want or need.. and sure enough he did too. So we headed into Lincoln to pick it up. And then of course make a few more stops.

Day 30

Wow it is hard to believe that we have already owned the house for 30 days. When we got out of the van and started walking towards the door, we noticed that some of the black tar paper we had put on the roof was laying in the grass. :( But it did seem like the tarps were still on the roof. The first thing on the to do list today, was to walk around and see if there was water anywhere. It had rained the night before. But we didn't see any signs of leaking. So we went on up the the roof. One part of the tarp was loose and the black tar paper had ripped off in a couple of places. So now we had to find some more boards and try to get the tarps secured again. We found a couple more boards laying around and carried them up to the roof. Once we got everything nailed down again, it looked as if it might stay in place and hopefully keep any rain out until we can finish the roof.

Then we did a bit of exploring. There are signs all over the house that there have been some changes. We are still trying to see what things might have actually looked like before. We also went around measuring some of the doors. My brother has some old doors from his house that we might use to replace some of the "new" doors in our house. But we have to check out what the sizes are.

Well, by this time it was already time to head back to Hickman and get the kids into bed. These evening work days go by so fast, it hardly seems like we get anything finished.

Day 29

A day of rest...well at least from working at the house. I cut the kids' hair, sorted some more clothes, helped with homework, did dishes and researched some questions we have about what to do with our house.

We will get back to Beatrice tomorrow after work.

Day 28

We went to the house right after Jonathan got off of work. But we were only there to take the Metal Break back. We had missed returning it the day before by 15 minutes. :( But while in Beatrice we tried out a new restaurant. Then we got a call about something I found on Craigslist... so off to pick up my newest treasure. Actually it is a present for the kids. We bought them Rock Band for the Wii. They had played it over at Uncle Gary's house at Christmas. And they had a lot of fun with it. I had been hoping to get it for them for Christmas this year. But this will work out nicely. It will give them something fun and new to do while we are busy working at the house. They are all very excited about trying it out. But that will have to wait until tomorrow. It is way past their bedtime. :D

Day 27

Happy Mother's Day!

Back to work. It started out the day by getting a flat tire. At least we hadn't even gotten out of Hickman before it happened. So back to our house to take the tire off and move everyone over to Jonathan's car. Then we were back on the way to Beatrice.

We got to the new house and started bending some of the tin in the metal break. We all worked to get it up to the roof. (Dad and Philip had put together two vise grips and a metal bar attached to a rope. We used this to pull the tin pieces up to the roof instead of carrying them up the three flights of stairs. I was very happy about this.) Once we had all of the tin on the roof. Dad started working. Jonathan was working on the basement, cleaning more stuff out and putting it in the dumpster.

Jonathan got most all of the junk out of this room and some of the stuff out of the next room. Wow it is starting to look pretty nice down here.

Mom and I started pulling up more tile on the 3rd floor. We now had one room finished and were making good progress on the first bedroom.

Things were going slowly for Dad. I went up on the roof with him for a bit. All of the little triangles were hard to work with. And they had to have so many bends on them. Then we went to the ground to make some of the bends. Dad went back up to put on his triangles. Jonathan and I started cutting some of the tin into 5 foot pieces.

Mom had started up the wood burner in the parlor. She was hoping to dry out the house a bit and at the same time burn up all of the branches in the yard. She was making good progress on the branches and it was nice to see the smoke coming out of the chimney.

When Jonathan and I had ten 5 foot pieces cut, Dad came down and we started to get them all bent on the metal break.

It was already starting to get late in the afternoon and it had been drizzling off and on. There was nothing left to do but start tarping the roof. Jonathan and I worked on that while Mom looked for wood that we could use to nail the tarps down and Dad tried to get the last few pieces of tin finished.

We all wish we could have gotten more of the roof finished, but at least we have a good start on it. Now we have to wait until Dad and Philip can come down to help us again (for the roof anyway).

Poor Jonathan still isn't feeling very good. So it has been a really long weekend for him. I hope that he will be feeling better soon.

Day 26

Well, Saturday is here...and it is time to put on the new roof. We have a mostly empty dumpster, the metal break is reserved for us. Now all we have to do it get it finished. Jonathan, the kids and I headed over to the house right away in the morning. My parents were going to be there pretty early, and Philip and Andrea were going to be a little later, they were dropping the kids off at Amber's. So I continued the ripping off the floor in the Mars room. Jonathan worked on the plumbing in the second floor kitchen. Before everyone got there, Jonathan had the sink working and I had most of the floor off. So then Mom, Andrea and I swept in the Mars room and moved the kids in there. We now have a TV set up and the chairs and table are in there.

Then Jonathan, Dad and Philip went up to the roof and started taking off the rest of the old roof and tossing it down. Andrea worked on cleaning up the kitchen and getting us set up there. (We don't want her on the roof, we need to keep her and that newest Glause baby safe.) Mom and I went back and forth between tearing up the floor in the first room on 3rd floor and hauling the roofing material that the guys tossed off the roof to the dumpster.

Here you can see that all of the old roof is off. Jonathan is taking some of the tin off of the edge of the house.

They soon had all of the roof down to bare wood. Boy does it look nice. It is really hard to believe how nice the wood was underneath. Then it was time to pick up the metal break and start putting the tin on the roof. While Jonathan and Philip were picking up the break and buying roofing felt, I helped Dad to swept off all of the pieces and stuff off of the roof.

Here Dad and Philip are getting one of the pieces of tin attached to the roof.

When Jonathan and Philip got back we started working with the tin. We had a bit of trouble with the machine. It wasn't as strong as the one Dad has at home. It took us awhile and a bit more effort to get it to work for us.

Dad and Philip started putting on the roof. But it was later then we would have liked and we hadn't gotten as much done as Dad had wanted. But at least it didn't look like it was going to rain over night. We stayed there working until about 8:30 p.m. It was quite a long day. But it felt like we had gotten a lot done.

Philip, Andrea and Savannah headed home. Jonathan, the kids, Mom, Dad and I headed off to our house in Hickman.


This is a picture of the roof of the tower. It has at least three different layers of shingles on it. I like the wooden shingles on the bottom layer. Jonathan and I had been thinking about putting something like this on the tower roof. We were also considering putting some on the Mansard part of the roof. It will be awhile before we get to that. But it was fun to find these shingles hiding under all of the other layers.

Day 25

I guess this will be our day of rest... Jonathan isn't feeling that well and I have to work tonight. So there will be no working at the house today. But this will be a busy weekend. Mom, Dad, Philip and Andrea are coming down to help us. If the weather cooperates we will be putting on the new roof. YAY! We really need to get that done before another big rain.

Day 24

We went into town and picked up a few things. We bought some temporary flooring (possibly for five years or more) for the 2nd floor bathroom and kitchen. We just want something clean and easy for these two rooms so we can move in and start redoing parts off the house the way we really want them to be. So for the bathroom a cheap piece of vinyl flooring. :) Now all we have to do is clean up the bathroom a bit and put it down. For the kitchen we went with a laminate wood flooring. We have put this into our other house before. So that helps, as far as us knowing what we are doing. We also got a small, cheap vanity for the bathroom.

When we went over to the house this evening, I continued to remove the old tile. (I think we will be doing this for quite awhile. We have only removed the tile in 2 1/2 rooms. There are 7 1/2 rooms to go.) And Jonathan was working on the drain pipes in the kitchen. He was having some difficulty with this. Of course it doesn't help that he isn't feeling well today. He has a cold.

We did get a new dumpster delivered. That is actually kind of sad, it takes so much effort to full those things and now here I go with another empty one. But I guess I will feel better after this weekend as the thing should be nearly full again. And by then there won't be much yuck in the house at all. :)

Day 23

Jonathan had the day off again today. We still really want to get the kitchen and bathroom to be fully operational by this weekend. So once again Jonathan and I headed off to Beatrice as soon as we had the kids on the bus to school. We started out the day thinking that we would move the frig and stove into the back hallway and the cabinets and counter out into the next room so that we could work on the floor. With all of the stuff out of the way the plan was to put down some inexpensive vinyl flooring. Something just to make it feel nice and clean but that we wouldn't mind just throwing out when we finished the other kitchen and got back to work on this one. But right away we had a problem. That cabinet/countertop is just HUGE and HEAVY. And of course it didn't help that there is that one step up to the next room. So now what. I am sure that there is no way the two of us can move this into the next room. By now it is almost time for me to go. And Jonathan had really wanted to work on the plumbing today. So okay, we can't move that cabinet out.


Here are the frig and stove shoved in the back hallway.


On the left you see a pile of the old tile ready to be taken out to the dumpster. The cabinet is back against the wall.

The other side of the cabinet, against the wall. And no more yucky tile, just old wood floor. :D

While I am at work, Jonathan pulls up the old tile that had been under the cabinets and most of the rest of the kitchen. Then he works wonders and gets the PEX strung through the wall and ceiling and up to the sink. He moves the cabinet back against the wall.

When the kids and I get to the house, I help to finish taking the tile off and we get it all out to the dumpster.

On a side note we have Jonathan's new Planer in the back of the van. I have not been looking forward to moving this into the house. Wow, tools can be so heavy. This thing weighs 200 pounds. I hate tools that weigh more than I do. :P We did manage to get the thing into the house. I think that tomorrow I will have the bruises to show for it. I am just not strong enough to be as helpful as I wish I could be.

Day 22

Jonathan took the day off today and tomorrow so we could work on that plumbing. I went over in the morning to help him. Jonathan pulled down a piece of the sheetrock in the 1st floor kitchen so that we could see if they had used that place to work on the plumbing upstairs. Good news we think it might have been. Then we tried to move the Frig into the next room. But it didn't fit through the doorway. So we ended up just moving it off to the side. Now it was time to start working on the cabinets and counter. We were going to have to move these out of the room to get the old tile off of the floor and see just where the pipes were coming from. By now it was already time for me to leave for work.

...While I was at work, Jonathan got the cabinets unscrewed and loose. He moved the frig again and started taking up the old tile. He got all of the way down the back hall and part of the kitchen up. YAY! He was really busy. And he was tired when the kids and I got there. We had supper and I helped a bit with the floor before we had to go and get supplies, plumbing supplies.


Here are some of the pictures of the kitchen. Jonathan has been pulling up all of the old tile.

Day 21

We went over to the house to take some measurements and to poke around a bit. We are planning on getting the plumbing working in the 2nd floor kitchen and the big bathroom on 2nd floor. We are not sure where all of the pipes are and might have to look under the floor or above the 1st floor ceiling.

Melinda was sad tonight after we put her to bed. I think this is the first time she realized what moving would really be. She was sad about missing her best friend Sophia. We talked about how we could still see Sophia. But it is not the same as living in the same town. :( HUGS for Melinda.

Wallpaper

While wondering around the house today, I saw something I hadn't seen before. There is a strip of wallpaper in the parlor along the side of the fireplace. Jonathan and I like making all of these hidden discoveries. It gives us some clues about how the house looked many years ago.



After finding this wallpaper, I decided to go around and take pictures of all the old wallpapers that I had seen.



This wallpaper is in the living or front room.



This is from the library.


This is the last piece of wallpaper that we have seen so far. It is in the closet in the green bedroom on 2nd floor.

If we find more wallpaper along the way I will add them to the collection here. :)

Day 20

Back to the house... I wanted to get the Mars room finished. I am planning on moving the base of operations to the Mars room. (Which means, I want to set this room up for the kids. I want to get all of the yucky floor off and clean it up. Then I will put the cardtable in there so they can color and do art things there and I want to put the Game Cube in there.) Well, I was pretty happy with my progress on the floor. I got another 4 foot wide strip taken off and down to the dumpster. I now have one more strip left, this one is a little over 4 feet. But once again there was a problem. The closet was put in on top of the floor that I am taking out. So I will need to take out the closet walls to finish the job. As we weren't planning on using this room as a bedroom and unsure about keeping any of the closets as they were clearly additions taking this out is not a really big deal. It is just another of those unplanned things that tend to take up our time.

Jonathan has been trying to figure out the tangle mess of the plumbling in the house. We go back and forth between which bathroom and kitchen we need to be fully operational. I think we are back to the second floor kitchen and the big bathroom on second floor. We would like to just completely redo the kitchen and bathroom on 1st floor, so that they are new and nice. But until they are finished we are going to be needing a kitchen and bathroom that works completely. Which is why he is trying to figure out where the pipes bring water into the second floor kitchen. He took off a piece of the floor in the bathroom, thinking that they had run the plumbing over from there. But no luck... So now he is thinking that he will take a couple of days off of work this week to just get this figured out and working.

We had to quit work early today, as Zeb's best friend was having a birthday party. But this is probably not bad. We do tend to get pretty tired and sore after a weekend of working. Zeb had a great time at the party. Jonathan, the girls and I had ice cream and went to the "wood store" while Zeb was at the party.

Day 19

Today was a busy day. My first job of the day was hauling the carpet out to the dumpster from the 'Mars' room. Then I started to go up to 3rd floor, but on my way up I decided to rip the carpet off of the stairs and take that out to the dumpster as well. After seeing all of the yuck and dirt that was under that carpet on the stairs I question why anyone would ever want carpet in their house. Wow that was filthy. :P After I got the carpet out, I needed to pull the nails out of the floor on the stairs before anyone got hurt. So I swept up the yuck and pulled out the nails. Then I finally made it up to get the crowbars and hammer off of 3rd floor.

Here are the 3rd floor stairs before I took off the carpet. As you can see it was loose and falling off in several places. It was not very safe. I was worried about someone tripping on it.

Here are the 3rd floor stairs free of carpet.


Jonathan had been busy hauling the rubble out of the basement. It had all fallen to the floor in the basement when he was ripping out the rotten floor in the 1st floor bathroom. He got a lot of yuck taken out to the dumpster. It is just about full again. :)

The basement with only our tools and stuff. (At least in this corner.)

I moved on to working in the 'Mars' room (one of the bedrooms on 2nd floor). I wanted to pry up the old tile and the chipboard underneath. After watching Dad do this on 3rd floor last weekend, I thought it would be something I could do between times. I wanted to start in one of the rooms that wasn't leaking. I knew before I started that my Dad was much stronger then me, but until I started using Thor's hammer to pry the crowbar between the layers of floor, I didn't imagine how weak I really was. I started out needing to use Thor's hammer as a two-handed weapon. It was hard to work in the doorway and I am clearly right-handed where Dad can use either hand.

Lisa making slow progress on the floor.

I have now decided that the leaking roof actually made the whole process easier as the tile and chipboard have been wet and are kind of warped. They seemed to not be as stuck to the floor as it was in this room. But once I got started it was okay. I was breaking it into much smaller pieces then Dad had been. But it was at least coming up.

Then I went to check on how Jonathan was doing in the basement. We starting working together to try and fill the dumpster and empty out part (at least) of the basement. We hauled a lot of the junk out of the basement. We took the old washing machine and the water heater out to the dumpster. And cleared out many of the boxes in the second room. We took all of the ductwork pieces up to the craigslist room and put them in a couple of boxes. Now we just need to get some of the junky furniture out and sweep and clean up a bit more and it will be nearly cleared out and ready for Jonathan to set up his workshop and all of his tools. YAY! That will be a happy day.


In one of the boxes in the basement I found TREASURE. There were five Nintendo games hiding in the box. The kids, especially Zeb, were excited about my treasure.


Here is a picture of Jonathan emptying his can into the nearly full dumpster. (20 more yards of trash.)

Next Jonathan started working on the floor joists. And I went back up to 2nd floor to pull up some more floor.


With Jonathan's help, we got one large strip of floor pulled off, and most of it hauled down to the dumpster. This will be my project again tomorrow. I can't wait. Boy am I going to be strong after I get all of this floor pried up. ;) No more Thor's Hammer... it will be Lisa's Hammer.

Day 18

Another boring day for the new house. Today we had to just do some shopping. We went to Sam's Club to get stocked up on foodstuff. We also took a look at the furniture store. We are needing a different bed for Zeb. His loft bed just isn't something that we are going to move. And even if we didn't mind moving that huge thing, it just won't fit into his future bedroom. So we are thinking about a Captain's bed for him. After looking at what was available, Jonathan thought that maybe he would like to build the bed. Before we bought the house, he was hoping and planning on getting started on some woodworking projects. So we are thinking about designing Zeb's bed.