The renovation continues. Although we are seeing no physical progress, there has been quite a bit of mental progress. We are in the agonizing process of reviewing our final plans and looking at the price difference, or shall I say price increase. Pete and I had everything figured out until we went home to my parents and shared our two different floor plans. We were sure the family would see how cool our ideas were and say...it's perfect! They, of course, went with the opposite plan and left us in a whirlwind of self doubt. I honestly felt 13 again when I left home today. Although the reflection is good and makes us look at options we snubbed our noses at, the self reflection is the pits. I'll save my symbolic prose for a different blog when I'm wiser.

I've made pros and cons for the two different floorplans, discovering that I’ve made equal pros and cons for each plan. No help there. I did however read something quite inspiring last week at Malaprops…”make your own mistakes for you will have no one else to blame if you don’t like the outcome”.

Progress!

The poo is gone and so are our winged friends...hooray!! We spent most of the weekend prepping our upstairs guest room for painting. The windows were in bad shape and a couple of holes needed to be patched. Thanks to Pete's skills he took care the patching and it looks great. Thanks Pete! Tonight we began painting, which is so gratifying. We have a ways to go but the results so far are nice. The paint color is called "fond memory" which is totally ironic because it is the color we used in our old guest bedroom. I was having fond memories of AC today when I was sweating my ass off in our 100 year old home painting the walls.

They did more demolition today creating the hallway from the kitchen to the dining room and removed the sexy linoleum from the kitchen..I was sad to see that go. The unfortunate part is the hardwoods are rotting in one spot, which might be cause for tile in the kitchen. I really was looking forward to the charm of hardwoods in the kitchen. They also removed the gutters, which of course prompted a huge downpour. Hopefully we will have new gutters by the end of the week.

Lastly, we don't have pocket doors in between the den and dining room. We were hoping for this, but we can easily put the doors back in.

If you would like to donate to the bluecumberland fund please contact me directly. We will be hosting a lemonade stand in a few weeks. I just need to borrow a kid for cuteness. Takers? No Sean, you don't count :)

Preconstruction pictures

Tangled up in poo

We had big plans last night to put on masks and gloves to raid the basement for a dead varmint. Unfortunately we discovered the flies are back and since all the poo was gone we figured it was in our spooky basement. Right before we sat down with our architect, Pete goes in the attic to check the holes in the roof and put buckets around because there is a huge raincloud sitting over our house (not metaphorically either). To our dismay, we found more insulation and varmint poo over the kitchen nook. Hopefully the crew will come back and clean up this afternoon. We can't rule out the fly infestation until it's all gone. However, Pete and I did have a short entomology class on the back deck last night trying to determine if the flies where from garage or crap. Glamorous I know.

On a good note, we met with the architect for 3 hours last night. She is so helpful and practical. We looked at three scenarios for the downstairs renovation. This is my favorite part. I love thinking about the design aspect...not a big fan of the heavy lifting but I do enjoy design. We can't afford the beautiful spindled staircase but we will have a few other options to keep the light flowing through the house. The house is covered by 2 huge oak trees in the front yard so we don't get a ton of light.

We had a crew in the house today ripping out walls and patching holes in the roof. We are exposing 2 fireplaces on the lower level. There are a total of 5 fireplaces in the house. That was the only source of heat in 1908. I leave you with my thought for the day..How did they refrigerate their beer in the 1900's?

Poo Progress

We had 26 bags of insulation and possum poo removed from our attic. We originally thought this would be a "couple hours maybe half day" project. It has taken the poor guy 2 days. It's Sunday late afternoon and he is still in the attic cleaning away. Through the process we have discovered several holes in the roof. The insulation was preventing the drywall from being ruined. Now that there is no insulation we have buckets in various places to prevent rainwater from damaging our whole upstairs. Hopefully by Tuesday we will have the holes patched and life somewhat back to normal..or as normal as you can expect in our current conditions.

As soon as the attic is fumigated we'll bleach and clean the upstairs. I almost forgot to mention...yesterday one of the workers stepped thru the roof. Pictures are coming soon!

In the muck of it all I went to the farmers market and purchased 2 ferns for $20 to hang on the porch. Our porch is a nice refuge. We pressured washed the porches and cleaned all the porch furniture yesterday. Now if we could only get rid of the mosquitoes.