How about I do a run down of hiccups. This will be the fun post John and I get to reread a few years down the road and pinch ourselves for making it through the unforeseen road blocks. Before I start though, I figure I ought to let all you well-wishers know, we lost the upstairs laundry. Womp, womp. The bid came back crazy high and something about paying several k's to launder my clothes seemed nuts. Whether upstairs or in the basement, I don't enjoy the laundry. I'd rather splurge on countertops. You feel me? Oh, and we lost the laundry chute, too. Maybe I already mentioned that. It became the new air supply so that we could open up the entry to the kitchen. Paying to have that wall in Annie's bedroom patched became hiccup number 1. Plus it meant doing away with the old air supply on the right. Plus it meant cutting up the chair rail. Glory.
Hiccup number 2 from the past couple weeks was dealing with moving the gas line to our new range only to discover a long ago hidden air supply to the kitchen. Basically the old owner has been paying to pump cold air through a duct that was blocked by hardwoods and a stove. Lovely way to spend your money. And to spend ours in fixing it...Because - you guessed it - by fixing it, we had to rip up and replace more floors.
Hiccup number 3 (which turned out to foreshadow many more problems) involved this pretty little number below.
I came over to see the progress on the hardwood floors only to find that they discovered some loose floorboards in our family room. This was NOT the sort of progress I was hoping to see! They cut a chunk of hardwood out and found this crumbling subfloor with a huge hole. Water damage. Mercy me! Nightmare, people. We had to install new subfloor AND new hardwoods. Plus the problem isn't exactly fixed. Because fixing it would entail dishing out beaucoup bucks to replace these gracefully aged (ha!) windows and the siding surrounding it.
After a little bit of wavering the floor installer decided we ought to just roll with new subfloor and caulk the gaps on the outside where the water has been coming through whilst the money to replace all the windows doesn't exist.
Here's to hoping for very little rain throughout the years...
So while that guy was installing new floor, I gave installing a new vanity in the first floor bath a go. So, it turns out measuring with tape is mighty important. I most definitely drilled new (permanent) holes in our tile to secure the pedestal sink only to find I was about a 1/8 inch off. Porcelain ain't exactly one known for its capacity to forgive. A 12 inch spread is a 12 inch spread, people, and there ain't nothing gonna change that. I had to readjust everything and drill new holes. Too fun!
And after all that fun I had to patch the floor tile from the old vanity's footprint.
Two white 4x4 tile options later, I decided neither looked good and went for the less offensive of the two. Below you can see the 4 tiles I went ahead and installed and below to the right, my other option. Luckily the new vanity covers most of it anyway so I doubt anyone will be the wiser. Final pictures of the cleaned up bathroom to come in a couple weeks. But long story short, I chipped away what was left of the broken tiles and used a premixed adhesive/grout to both act as thinset and later grout.
And all the while that we've been poking around doing odd jobs here and there in the house, we've continued to come back to this beautiful room. Imagine your newborn baby's head resting softly against his mattress pushed up against this doll of a wall. I know - it makes you cringe. So we've invested an insane amount of time into cleaning this room up. The wallpaper was unimaginably difficult to remove. And then we had to scrape the walls, pay to have them skim-coated TWICE, sand them and now we're on to priming them.
There you go. An edited list of the many things that have gone not as planned in getting this house ready to live in. There's more. Much more. Like ripping up the carpet in the den only to find more damaged subfloor (similar story to what the hardwood floor installer found). We took a hose and sprayed it on the windows outside to see if the water damage was from 20 years ago or 2 weeks ago and cried as the water cascaded to the interior through every crack and crevice of every window...My dad said we may have to rebuild the whole wall from the outside in - roof to foundation. So my carpet order for the den has been put on hold :(
And there's the thing about not having air conditioning over this past 97 degree weekend.
But perhaps my least favorite hiccup of the week was watching Google Fiber get installed for all our neighbors and wondering why they weren't knocking on our door. So I called Google and spoke with one of their representatives. To my shock and his, there was a glitch after our sign-up. And even his supervisor couldn't figure it out. But sometime in the last few weeks our account and physical address got separated and we were deactivated. I'll make this long story short and sum it up by saying that with a receipt and confirmation in my hand that Google fiber sent me two months ago I was not about to let them tell me that they were sorry but we'd missed our chance to now receive the service. So after a tense talk with another supervisor they "tricked" the system into thinking our address was in a still-open Fiberhood and re-signed us up. Sadly though we still missed our neighborhood's installation timeline. And Google being the fine folks they are have no clue when we'll ever get ours installed. Sometime in the next couple months, they said. Major womp, womp. So now we continue on without internet for another indefinite period of time. Blog posts will be thanks to mooching off someone else's internet for yet another season.
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