Weekend Update #6

This weekend it was just the two of us and we only were there on Saturday. This is what we did:

• had all the metal & old appliances (fridge, AC unit, water heater, & furnace) picked up and made some moolah
• cleaned out & organized the garage since we now have a garage again instead of just a Metal Pile
• cleaned out the basement, especially the utility room
• built another compost pile
• chased a mouse out of the garage (we're softies), set up a bunch of mouse traps out there, & temporarily blocked (we need to buy some expanding foam) a mouse-hole
• sanded the putty in the bathroom from last weekend
• removed all the random brackets from the windows & floor trim
• fixed loose siding in two places
• brought in two more chairs so now 5 people can sit at the table
• temporarily plugged the hole from the old wiring for the old AC unit
• cleaned up the house so there isn't stuff in the way for the workers

So many brackets! I took all of these down from around the house on Saturday:

Ah, so fresh and so clean, clean, clean;

Here's a more detailed list of what we got done in the garage this weekend:

• got rid of all the metal and appliances
• got rid of all the random garbage (breezeway carpet, bags of ShopVac dust, etc)
• brought up another metal shelf from the basement (left by previous owners) to help organize
• put gardening supplies, extra tiles from the bathroom (left by previous owners), scrap wood, and grill stuff up on shelves
• put long scrap wood, plywood, and foam board up in the rafters
• put the extra door and old screens up on a pallet
• got the snow thrower attachment for the tractor into it's permanent home (my god that things weighs one million pounds)
• moved the tractor into its parking space (who knows how to get their hands on a parking space concrete bumper thing?)
• cleaned the garage window (oh god the bugs)
• swept & Shop Vacked (that's a verb now) forever and ever

We forgot to take a picture before the scrapper guys started taking the metal, so here's a Before that isn't a true Before (the pile got much, much bigger than this, probably double):

And AFTER:

And next time we're in the house there will be a new furnace with all new ducts, new water heater, new PEX tubing replacing all our old iron pipes, a new drain for our sump pump (that doesn't drain into our septic system) and hopefully a new AC unit unless they run out of time in the allotted two days. We'll also get estimates for redoing the two sink drains since they aren't pitched right. Hopefully once that's fixed the bathroom sink will drain again...

Also in the next week or so we'll get normal house insurance instead of the expensive catastrophe plan that we have now.