when the going gets tough....

the tough move furniture. it seems to be what i do. i wish i had taken some "before" pictures of the basement, but the house is getting scrubbed from the ground up. first, as the old washer had died, i scubbed the basement floor while andy and tom went to get my "new" washer. what a mess that was, but the scrubbing made such a difference. i'm excited to see the clean floor then we had to move the book shelves to make way for the new plumbing. altho, of course, we didn't need to as that pipe was not replaced. it still gave me a good excuse to scrup and bleach that floor. little by little the change is amazing. this week i started in the area between the furnace and the outside wall, so we could move becca's storage area and make room for her. i got everything off the black carpet, an area about 8 x 12, and we cleaned that up. bins of toys have been sorted and the bins are ready to go upstairs today we emptied the rest of the "cement" area, so that we can re lay the carpet and make a bedroom and tv room down there, plus some book and dvd storage. i am really hoping to be able to move my ebay storage back downstairs and create a play room for the kids on the first floor. right now i feel as if every peice of furniture in my house is going to be moved, if not from one side of the room to the other, then from one floor to another. the only thing that is constant is change

The Plumbing Saga

I finally got my phone and my computer to talk to each other and play nice... at least to download the pictures that were on it

I can finally tell the story of the "drip", which started in late December. I walked into the first floor bathroom to see an alien had made it's home on my wall.....

It really was an impressive "bubble". My sister's friend said he had never seen paint hold that much water. I, however, was far from impressed. We've always had trouble with that bathroom being "water tight" when you took a shower and the curtain was not closed right, or one of the kids took a bath that was a little too.... splashy.....

So a few phone calls and we are searching for the sourse of the water. The floor upstairs is not wet. it is rather confusing. Votes including the over flow on the tub or the vent pipe.

Over the next few days, Dan worked on what he could do with Jeremy's guidance over the phone. I'd say it was entertaining, but i was still too mad that I had a leak.... soI was not Really entertained. But it seemed to work so I was satisfied. More or less. Every now and then, we'd see a pencil thin line of water running down the wall, so finally i called the plumber, who replaced my ugly toilet and $400 later, we are all happy. add some new caulking to the end of the tub and the leaking seemed to stop.

Not so! After my shower one day, I find a NICE puddle on the floor. Andy and I agree that we need to open the ceiling and part of the wall and see what is going on, and another phone call to the plumber confirms a cracked pipe in the wall. It was a learning experience.... at least we can finally learn how the plumbing lays in this old house. Again, I was only marginally entertained. My poor walls. I was not at all sad about tearing down the ceiling, because it had been so damaged over the years that it was about to fall down on its own. The plumber left me some notes, least I forget what he said. As if that was possible.

And so the tear down began. Susie and I went shopping, in an effort to stay out of the plaster dust. One wall, ceiling to floor between these two studs and the whole ceiling. An ugly mass of deteriating pipes were reveiled, and one repair that had been done before i owned the house.....

Not as much floor damage as we expected, although there is one place that has no floor boards at all. Methinks we'll be adding some bracing in there!

So now I have, in addition to these new pipes, a new pipe from the second floor down to these, which of course required one more hole in my wall.... this one in my office. This allowed us to tuck an old gas pipe into the wall, so that when the dry walling is done, the pipe will no longer stick out.

And of course Omega slept thru it all