I took a bunch of pictures of the kitchen to give everyone an idea of what is going on here.
This is the south wall of the kitchen. The window is boarded up because the glass is broken. Both the window and the door look out onto our back porch. The strange looking black thing in the corner going from the floor to the ceiling is the pex water pipes that lead up to the second floor bathroom. The water pipes were exposed here. And without knocking walls down last year had to do it the same way. Now that we are working in the room we are planning on rerouting the pipe to a more normal way.
The door with the windows leads out to the back porch this other door leads to the stairs to the basement.
The door leads to the stairs that take you up the back stairs to 2nd floor...they go from the 1st floor kitchen to the 2nd floor kitchen. This window looks out to the west and to our back yard.
This is the north wall. The door leads to a tiny hall. In the hall, to the left is the bathroom and to the right the dining room and the rest of the house.
This is the ceiling. There was a bit of a hole here to begin with, but it became much larger when the 2nd floor bathroom caused a flood.
Today Jonathan and I started out by taking down some of the woodwork. This is a slow and difficult process. We have to be very careful not to damage the wood as we plan to redo it and reuse it. After we got the trim off of the north wall, I started to knock down the plaster. The kids helped to carry it all out to the dumpster.
This morning I was telling Ella that we needed to start knocking the plaster down to find Howl, and see what has been hiding. As I was knocking the plaster down on the north wall, I did discover something. There used to be a door here. Hmm... Yesterday I was telling Jonathan that instead of using that window as a door to the bridgelike passageway to the garage it would be nice to open up that wall there and put the door a bit to the north. So I find it very interesting that just where I wanted to put a door, I found one.
When they closed off this door, they covered it with chicken wire, and then put plaster over it. Wow is it hard work to rip this down. I am only half done and it is time for a break. Here is the pile of chicken wire that I got off so far.
The Bees:
Last night the exterminator came to kill the bees. When we got up in the morning we could tell that something was different with them. They sounded kind of strange. When we looked outside, we didn't see any of them, but that was quite normal for the morning. They usually didn't get very active until later in the day when it was warmer. By late morning it was looking promising, as we still didn't see any bees coming and going. The exterminator came by to check. He told us that he would wait at least a day before we tried to open up the wall. (We have to get all of the honey comb out or we will be having all sort of other bugs come to eat all of that delicious honey.) By the afternoon we did start to see some bees coming in and out of the house. So not all of them are dead yet. But the exterminator was going to come back tonight and see if he need to respray. But hopefully soon, we will no longer have honey bees in our wall, our yard and in our bathroom. Though neither Jonathan nor I are really looking forward to getting all of that honey out of our walls. And are quite concerned about how many live bees there might be when we start that fun job.
The Foundation:
This afternoon we had a foundation man come and take a look at the foundation on the north side of our house. The 130 foundation is starting to fall outward, and the mortar between the stones is starting to disappear. This getting repaired is the first step of getting the finish work done as there is a slight tip to the house in that area. He will be getting us an estimate very soon. Not excited that most of our money is going into this one job this year. But we will be glad that we can work freely without worry of how things will be affected by the shifting foundation.
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