Sunday, January 11, 2009

Working outside keeps us warm, right?

Yesterday, cold as it was, we spent a few hours at the new house. The important thing to understand with this is that we have no heat--and we won't have heat until the plumbing is replaced. All of the heating in the house is with radiators, and without plumbing we can't turn the water on...thus, no heat.

Still, we had a great time taking down the back fence and deck. The fence was falling down anyway, but it needed to come out so that the roofer can get a dumpster in the backyard. After the roof is finished Mark will rebuild the back fence. I worked on taking the deck out, and I got a good portion of it out before Mark had to come in with a bit more muscle. ;) The boys helped here and there, carrying tools around and collecting nails, screws, and bolts for Mark. The rest of the time they spent playing with the HUGE tree in the backyard.

We worked inside for a little while as well, replacing door locks, putting some new smoke detectors in, and replacing outlet and switch covers. There's a lot to be done, but almost all of it needs to wait until we have heat--i.e., we can't paint or repair cracks until the house is warmer than freezing. ;) I'm impatient and I want to get started on that now, but I know anything we do with it this cold would just need to be redone later. I have no desire to do the work twice, so I'm (im)patiently waiting.

We also bought a washer today. This has been quite the search for us. We were given a very nice, very expensive dryer by a church friend over a year ago. Since it is a very nice dryer, we wanted to get the matching washer, but it was so expensive it just wasn't practical. We've scoured craigslist and every time we go to Lowe's we check their clearance washers, but they've never had the right one. Until yesterday. It was about $300 cheaper than buying it new, and it is the exact washer we've been looking for. It was a customer return due to it not working in the area they had planned, so it's supposed to work perfectly. We'll be moving it later today after we borrow a friend's truck.

4 comments:

Tami said...

Yea for the new washer! Keep up the hard work on the house...you'll be in there with your new kiddos before you know it! :)

Erin said...

Congrats on the new house! How long until the plumming gets done?

Courtney said...

Erin--it will only take a couple of days to do. The problem is he needs electricity. And the electric company won't turn the electric on until the city comes out and does an inspection, which I went and paid for today. Hopefully the city inspector will be out tomorrow and the power will be on by Thursday (best case scenario) or at the latest Monday. Then Mark will need a few days with power to finish demolishing the bathrooms in preparation for the plumber.

Christy said...

Congratulations on the new house. It looks beautiful. Hopefully this cold front moves through quickly so as not to give the electric company a reason to drag their feet.