Thursday, July 05, 2007

My arms are sore

Saturday night we went bowling with some friends from church. We had a great time even with some minor inconveniences along the way. We were hoping to get to the house some this weekend, but it just didn't happen. Sunday was a church picnic (BBQ...yum!) and Sunday afternoon we went and saw Ratatouille. Very cute movie with some laugh-out-loud scenes, and a great message about being true to yourself.

We did make it to the house on Monday night since we don't have band this week. We spent Monday night demolishing the bathroom. That was a lot of fun. We took off the sliding shower doors, took off all of the mirrors except the medicine cabinet (it's set into the wall), took off various other attachments (toilet paper holder, towel racks, etc.) and I started in on the linoleum. I stopped because I wanted to get some pictures before I pulled all of it out. There are four layers of linoleum in the second floor bathroom, and the bottom layer is my favorite. I'm guessing it was put down in the 1920's or so (could have been earlier--I'm not sure how to date linoleum) and it is SOOO beautiful. I have pictures but they haven't made it off of the camera onto the computer yet. I'd love to keep it but it's not in very good condition. I'll have to settle with saving scraps of it for a true "scrapbook" to tell the story of our house.

On Tuesday we went to a fireworks show down at the Arch which was a lot of fun, and really beautiful. I didn't take the camera but took some pictures with my cell phone (I'm getting pretty savvy with this technology stuff) and a couple of them turned out pretty well. We walked most of the way downtown which was great exercise, and prevented us from having to deal with the traffic jam after the fireworks show.

Pretty much all day yesterday was spent at the house. We (read: Mark) tore out some more baseboards and finished taking down the dropped ceiling in the middle bedroom. We also found out that a couple of our walls have been drywalled over the plaster. That's usually a bad sign, since it means there was a problem that led to needing the drywall (usually to hold up the plaster). We (I actually did help on this one) pulled all of the drywall off of one wall and the wall doesn't look to be in terrible shape (i.e., it didn't fall down when we removed the plaster). The opposite wall, on the other hand, is not going to have the drywall removed until we are ready for the whole wall to come down. Mark started to pull off the drywall and the plaster was falling in huge chunks, so we're going to wait on that one. In the meantime, I took down the dropped ceiling in the bathroom. We also removed most of another closet, including the HVAC ductwork that wasn't hooked up (which ran to all three of the bedrooms), and the green and brown shag carpet that was in the bottom of the closet. We've been finding lots of little "treasures" along the way that I am keeping as well. One of them is an advertisement card for blinds that may well be as old as the house!

Last night we climbed up on the roof of our little house and watched the fireworks display downtown. It really was a great view although much more impressive up close. Happy independence day, USA!

1 comment:

Tonya said...

MAN! You guys are having FUN! with your new house! I can't wait to see the pics. I am feeling like a part of the demolition saga just reading this:):):)

We went bowling in UA twice and I tell you, I was so sore that I was whining about the steps we had to climb to get to our flat. I could hardly squat down to pick Lyra up! That tells you what kind of shape I'm in. It wasn't my arms that hurt, it was my right hip.