Weekend Update #4

This weekend we actually got work done!  I even had Friday off so I got 3 days of wonder.  And again we are very lucky because we had both sets of parents, a brother, & a nephew helping us work. Without them we would be so very far behind (not to mention paying people buttloads of money to contractors & electricians). Thank you Wonderful Family!

This weekend we:

• mowed our 1+ acre lawn (most of our 5 acres is not grass)
• winterized the outdoor water spigot
• cut up branches into firewood
• cleaned out gutters & put on some leaf-guard netting
• sealed the cracks in our foundation blocks
• finished taking down all the old ducts
• carried all the old ducts out from the basement and into the Garage Metal Pile
• took out all the old returns (good God I could not imagine a more terrible job)
• took down half the old furnace (did I mention that the house has no heat?!)
• installed a new sill plate on the (person) garage door
• disconnected all the old knob & tube wiring & took down the old fuse boxes (an important step towards normal [aka better & less expensive] house insurance!
• made some electrical updates to quickly replace a little bit of the knob & tube (at one point there was only 1 working outlet upstairs...not even any lights)
• took out some of the basement clutter
• cleaned the basement windows inside & outside
• raked some leaves to start our compost pile
• came up with a new plan for the guest bedroom (for once we combine 2 of the bedrooms into a master suite)
• took back a bunch of garbage that we found around the property with us (yay for no more ugly garbage pile in our driveway)
• trimmed tree branches that got in my way as I was mowing
• cleaned the bathtub & tile
• scraped out the old caulk
• took down the glass shower doors (I have [mildly] major bathroom plans for next weekend!)
• shut off our water as we left on Sunday (did I mention we have no heat?!)

Never fear, we have somebody coming in 2 weeks who will install a new furnace, air conditioner, completely redo all of our ducts & returns, install a new water heater, & update all of our plumbing to PEX tubing from old, rusty iron pipes & valves that no longer work. I don't think I'll ever take heat and hot water for granted ever again!

Now for pictures:

The matching Worker Guys taking out some knob & tube

The knob & tube is gone!  The knob & tube is gone!

It used to look like this:

No more shower doors:

I like showers with doors, but not with tubs. With tubs there's all sorts of crevices to clean, plus Corey couldn't even really get into the shower with the doors there.

Here's the before:

I also took pictures of the caulk removal, but it was gross and you can't really tell that it's gone in the picture. So I'll save you from that.  Here, however, is a gross before picture (and even this is after 1 cleaning attempt the first weekend we had the house) of our tub:

And just to gross  you out further, here is the before before pic, the day of our closing:

Don't you just want to take a bath in this?

Here it is after I cleaned it:

And after Corey gave it some oomph:

Much better! It's a cast iron tub, so we're looking into resealing it so that it'll be easier to maintain from here on out. Man I can't wait for hot water!

Let's go outside for a bit. Guess which side I cleaned!

And the view from inside

Before tree-trimming:

And After:

Ah, now I can mow under this tree.

Some high-up tree-trimming (of dead branches) in progress:

 Look! Now that the corn came down we have neighbors!

Can you even see their house in this picture?

 Our corn is still up though. 

Compost bin!

 And back inside. Everyone, please go get your ducts & returns cleaned because this is what is inside of them:

The view from the bottom of our basement stairs Before:

And After this weekend:

We're almost there, folks!

I can't even begin to explain to you how hard it was to get those returns down. I just, can't.


And because I can't get enough of these two, here's more: