Wes is One!

Just a quick (late) post to mark the fact that my baby boy, my wee swarthy pirate, somehow managed to go and turn one year old in the 20 seconds that seemed to have elapsed since he came home.  We celebrated in fine nautical fashion at my Mom's house.  I did a red/white/blue color scheme since his birthday is so close to the fourth:

Mommy in a late-night-before-the-party crafting frenzy....

Sailboat cake!

The SS Wes Is One!

Gramma in from California!

By the end of his big day, all he wanted was to be down to his diaper, holding his lovey, "Claude", and get snuggled on by everybody.  A perfect 1st Birthday!

We Meet Again

Ugh...cannot believe that it's been more than a month since I last updated this bad boy.  My intentions were so good going in, but blah blah blah kids/work/life madness.  Where do I begin?

We are done with the electrical roughing in.  What a blessing in disguise needing to do that has turned out to be- seriously folks!  Not only is everything now safe and to code, but I got to dictate where to put outlets, light fixtures, and security lights.  I have never lived in a house designed in this century before and am the queen of sketchy multi extension cord wiring jobs to make old electric work for modern living. No more! I have outlets coming out the whazoo, people- places to plug in blow dryers and coffee pots and nary a concern about blowing fuses when I dare turn on 2 or more things at once.

ALSO! We made a MAJOR (at least to us) design decision.  It turns out that we will be able to do the conversion to gas heat after all, and that means our aforementioned janky chimney is no longer strictly necessary for venting purposes.  If you remember, we were looking at 2500 minimum to rebuild said chimney, and to spend that on something largely useless (we won't be burning coal in that fireplace any time soon) felt all kinds of wrong what with our shoe-string thread budget.  So how about knocking the whole damn thing down and making the kitchen/dining room an open concept sort of thing? DUH DUH DAHHHH!!! "But wait!", you say "What about your beautiful fireplace and all the charm contained therein??" Well, I tells ya what.  We could save the firebox and mantle and move the whole kit and caboodle to another wall, effectively making a new fireplace and still getting open concept ju ju! A lovely vista of being able to cook a meal without wondering if the kids were murdering each other or the dogs dances before my eyes! HUZZAH!

Enter the menfolk and a day of dirty, crazy hard work (is there any other kind in the Elephant?) chipping the chimney down from the roof through the attic, 2nd floor, and 1st floor, and carting the old brick out to be used in our landscaping future.  I was home kiddo wrangling, and lordy, my heart ached not being there to help them.  But Gavin took video and I was totally impressed with what they accomplished in no time at all.  Seriously, you can't tell at all from the roof that there was ever a hole, and the room downstairs is already so airy and full of light.

Next we have to put up some support beams to make up for soon-to-be-gone wall framing,  and figure out what to do with the awkward place in the hardwood that will missing.  Of course the dang floor was laid perpendicular to the wall making patching it a royal be-otch.  I'm thinking of just owning the imperfection and using Morroccan tile or parquet inlay or something cool rather than trying to disguise it...we'll see.  Also, we will be trying to reclaim some giant funky piece of furniture or other to make an island to separate the rooms.

We also (did I not tell you this??) decided that the teeny tiny bedroom upstairs would be better suited to being a walk-in closet/office for the master bedroom since the OG closet in there wouldn't fit more than a pair of pants.  Seriously, it was the smallest closet I've ever seen.  Allow me to revel in pure feminine glee for a moment at all that closet space.....GAH!!! Plus gutting the place let's me put in super useful features like a hatch in the closet wall so dirty clothes can just drop right into the laundry room below. Now if only we can find a spot for a secret passageway...

In other news (and in other rooms) blessed Uncle A continues to fight the good fight in the upstairs bathroom.  It took a couple of tries to make the new plumbing synch up with the old drainage, but we now have complete rough-ins, a new waste pipe and GLORY BE! A BATHTUB! Things are starting to look like things again.  Tile should be going down shortly and then....a dream come true: a toilet the handle of which I shall not need to jiggle.  It will be the flush heard round the world.   Got a great quote on insulation for the whole dang house, so once the ducts are re-attached that will be the next step and then....WALLS! WAAAAALLLSSS!!!  I am well and truly sick of seeing every room all at once.

This whole process has crawled on since we are all working around our various making-ends-meet-living-life schedule rather than just throwing money at some pricey builder types (Har de har har! Like that's an option!), but there is so much love being put into this place by so many amazing, generous souls that the house just feels happy, dust, and all, every time I walk in there.  Every bit of progress is a gift in every sense of the word, and the delays only make those baby steps sweeter.


Not much in the way of pictures but I'll see if I can't get some chimney-killing video up here soon:

And lo! It t'were a bath tub!

What's up, waste pipe?

Chim Chim Cheree...

I check on Gwendy every night before I go up to bed.  Last night when I first walked into her room I noticed her basket of hair accessories spilled on the floor, and as I squinted in the dark room I could see something black was smeared all over and around it.  "Oh God, please don't be poop!" was my first thought, but no, upon closer inspection it was a small plastic tray of greasepaint leftover from some Halloween years ago or a scene study from school or something.  I had (stupidly) left an old makeup bag in Gwen's room from having painted her nails and she had climbed up to get it and smeared said greasepaint all over the rug:

With a sigh of resignation I bent down to start cleaning up.  And suddenly it occurred to me that I hadn't actually looked at Gwen yet.  And when I did, this is what I saw:

You guys, I couldn't even be mad-  I was laughing so hard I nearly peed my pants-  but now I had the problem of what the hell to do.  I couldn't very well leave her like that, but I knew full well she was not going to take kindly to be awoken at 11:30pm to wash up.  Well first, I got the camera.  Because, come on?  I then took a baby wipe and started cleaning her face, and eventually she woke up enough to go with me to the bathroom for some bigger intervention (the baby wipe was a bit like fighting a forest fire by waving a towel at it):

after wiping her face a bit...making progress....

enjoying this way too much.

When we got into the bathroom, I began running the water to get it warm and figured I'd show her what she'd done.  "Look at your face, baby!" I told her as I held her up to the mirror. "AHH!!! NO!!! I SCARED OF THAT SCARY THING!!"  She refused to accept any explanation I offered that it was actually her own face that she'd seen and once I'd gotten her settled and somewhat clean she still kept mumbling "Makeup is scary, Momma" every so often.

I had to change all her bedding and I'm still not sure what to do about the rug- my attempt to clean it has made a giant black vortex a la "The Ring".  And even after several washings Gwen has a distinct swarthy look today, kind of like Captain Jack Sparrow:

vs

...But every so often, your kid does something that you just know will go into the Legend of Her.  And this one, this one's for the books.  Well played, my little Chimney Sweep.

I got the POWER!

Progress! Thank GOD! Pause to picture Gav doing a jaunty victory strut, maybe dressed like Uncle Sam? I don't know why, just do it.  Ok, done? Good. Anyway.

We started the week out on a rotten note- we were on our 4th dumpster, still battling an endless miasma of dust, and to top it all off we got a notice from our home owner's insurance that they were dropping us because our house was under renovation and not yet being lived in.  Wait, what? So people don't renovate their houses? Whatever. Jerks.

Turns out it was a blessing in disguise though.  We used the motivator of needing to have another insurance walk-through with whatever new company we go with to get serious and call in some reinforcements.  We were all set to blow whatever we had to on a Yellowpages electrician when a small miracle happened.  The Taper got an electrician who happens to be a good family friend to agree to make room in his uber-busy schedule and get cracking on getting us wired and back in business.  And better yet, the day after we called him it was supposed to rain so his job that day had been cancelled.  In less than 24 hours we had a licensed master electrician rigging up all sorts of fabulous new sparky magics to our house.  And in a couple more visits (scheduled this weekend!) we should be ready to move forward with insulation, plumbing, and-dare I say it?- closing up the walls! BOO YAH!

In other news, we pried all the stick-on tile up from the kitchen, mudroom, and bedrooms.  Let's take a moment, shall we, to focus on the fact that at some point in recent history people thought it was a cute idea to glue mustard-colored tile over their hardwood floors.  When you wrap your mind around that concept, you kind of understand how there is war and strife in our world.  Anywho, turns out whatever money was not spent on maintaining and repairing this house (I'm talking plumbing fixed with duct tape, y'all) was apparently spent on floor adhesive procured from NASA for use on space shuttles.  Like, that tile was on FOR KEEPS.  Now that it's gone there's this horrid gluey scum on the floors that shows no sign of coming up easily. It's like a giant Scratch-n-sniff sticker of evil, the scent being "Musty Old House".  Bring on the gloves and caustic chemicals, yo.  I will get that glue off if it's the last thing I do, if only to show them they haven't broken me.  And by them I mean the those guys at This Old House, the smug bastards.

I spent a long day with the the Taper getting that fourth dumpster packed to the gills, and literally just as we were talking about when to go to the scrap yard with our pile o' metal and junk appliances, some guys came by with a panel van and offered to buy it off us.  So I made $120 off a pile of garbage, recycled like a good green girl, AND I didn't have to lug it anywhere.  <For the win.

So yeah, this weekend should be way productive.  And that's the best thing ever, because I don't mind hard work- I just hate sitting on my hands.  Once the wiring is done, everyone else can go about doing what they do best.  And when everyone involved with this project does their best...well....it's pretty badass.

ahem.

Fourth dumpster.  FOURTH F@#*%N DUMPSTER.

The Weight

Blog title reflects both content of said blog and a sad farewell to Mr. Levon Helm of The Band who passed away this week. Rest in peace, talented man. And now your local news:

A somewhat uneventful week.  Gavin went back to work so there can no longer be great long stretches of house work- we've got to get as much possible done on our days off.  In a way it's a relief- as much as I want/need/am obsessed with working on the Elephant, families with babies thrive on routine our routine has gone to hell in a hand-basket of late.  It's nice to have naps and meals and even the odd toddler meltdown back on a loose schedule rather than coming out of left field- that kind of existence makes you feel like you are losing your damn mind one day at a time.

The (third!) dumpster went on Thursday, bringing our grand total for the approximate weight of all the crap we removed to 12 tons.  I kid you not, 22,000+ lbs. of plaster, lathe, junk and mishegas out of the house and out of our lives.  I can only imagine our houses frame just sighing after all that weight was lifted.  I spent a rip-roaring day with my sister and Uncle A just carting plaster and nail-studded wood out for like a hundred million hours.  I managed to cut my arms like I'd gone to prom with Edward Scissorhands in the process, but it felt really good to get my hands dirty for the day instead of speculating from afar what was going on without my help (or without my micromanaging :).

Uncle A got some lights working in the basement so I don't need to fear I will stumble upon a sleeping vagrant or hibernating bear when I fumble around down there with nought but the light of my cell phone to guide me.  And Gav's friend Dan spent a thankless day doing miscellany and removing hundreds of nails from our wall-less walls so we can one day aspire to put sheet rock up (live the dream!).

Next step- the wiring and duct work, on which we hope to get cracking on this week.  Other than that, I ordered a mailbox so our mail won't just be tossed in a rubber-banded roll on the porch any more (as much as I cherish the idea of identity theft and/or missed bills).  I do so love making small purchases for our home- some sappy domestic-reveling nest-making part of my being does a small jig of glee when my debit card goes swipeddy-swipe for things that don't fall in the boring (drywall/nails/safety-goggles) category.  Anywho, here's our super-cute letter box:

I think I'm going to add a bit of  "patina" to dull down the gold, but aint it adorbs?

Oh! And our tree out front and azalea bush have both bloomed be-yoo-tifully! I must say, I LOVE finding out about all the flora and fauna we've got in our yard, like little bonuses every week.  On Saturday my sister and I saw two baby squirrels poke their wee heads out of their nest in a knot in the black walnut tree and I've seen heaps of cardinals in the trees out back.  I found a rose bush and a couple of hydrangea (I live for hydrangea!) and big rangy bursts of forsythia just about everywhere. I don't think I'll get to do more in the yard this year besides make it presentable, but OH the fun I'm gonna have next spring....

Azalea realness

Crab apple? 

More Guts, More Glory?

Ugh...where to begin? It's been a helluva two weeks, friends.  First, we had a wonderful and all-too-brief visit with Gav's folks, who were able to see what we see in the Elephant and so were, as always, supportive and optimistic and all-in-all perfect.  Gav got to log some manly-man hours with his Dad knocking around the house and doing all sorts of fun jobs and the kids got to love on "Gammy and Pawpaw" for Easter so it was a perfect visit.  And then mid-week, the fun REALLY began.

I'll cut to the chase- turns out the knob-and-tube wiring we were told was inactive in fact powers about 1/2 of our house.  Glory be.  When it's in decent shape it's not necessary hazardous (though pretty inadequate to power our modern appliances, etc as it was largely used prior to the 1930s) but when it's janky and sort of all over the place mixed in with modern(ish) wiring, like ours is, it has the potential to cause fires and blow fuses and all sorts of fun and games.  So it needs to go.  Thankfully we have some great family connections to electricians and after they poked around a bit it was determined that to do the work we needed to....wait for it....gut the rest of the house.  We called Israel to see what he'd charge to do the remaining walls (the upstairs hallway, the horrid blue room, the kitchen ceiling, and....gulp...my beloved foyer) but because he'd gone so over weight on the past dumpster he needed more this time around- money we just don't have to spare.  Enter Gavin (with help from myself and a rotating cast of good and benevolent friends and family) doing the demo his damnself.

Today I got to join him for a lovely demo date (Mom was able to take off work and wrangle the kiddos for the day). In some ways, it was satisfying- swinging a giant pry bar at the walls that have caused me so much anxiety and consternation- but mostly it was dirty, tedious, and immensely strenous labor. We set up a make-shift shoot out the window and into our new (third) dumpster using a ladder wrapped in tarp and dropped bucket after bucket of crunchy plastery goodness down and out of our lives.  Gavin's been at it for a few days and honestly, after putting in just one good day myself, I don't know how he's held up so well-  I feel like I've gone over the Niagra Falls in a friggin barrel. Suffice it to say I am crazy-proud of my hubs.

I have had some reservations about this final gut- it becomes increasingly difficult to save those traits of the house that add that infamous "character" since working around old moulding and plaster medallions can be really hard when you are trying to smash through walls.  There have been a few casualties along the way -one example- the aforementioned plaster medallion crashed to the floor without warning today and broke into a million peices so it will have to be replaced with a salvaged one or a reproduction- but I think we have managed to keep enough original details to add back in once the walls are up that the house will still be itself, but better.  Like the Six Million Dollar Man. Or something.  Plus the more we open the more we discover potential problems (I'm looking at you, furry grey/black mold monster under the kitchen ceiling) before they have a chance to really become catastrophic.  We will truly know what's what with this house, and that does feel good.

Anywho, once all this is done the electric can be roughed in and we can FINALLY get moving on insulating and PUTTING UP SOME WALLS.  I really, really cannot wait.  But for now, enjoy our new "open concept" Victorian...

It is I, Demo Goddess

His and Hers Matching Aspirators! How cute!

Gav's Dad sanding all our cabinet doors

The crazy "Baker's Rack" set up so we could get to the plaster on the stair wall

Uncle A planning our upstairs bathroom.  

Goodtimes

The infamous Joe Da' Taper

Beauty in Destruction

The view from upstairs into my poor, poor foyer