9/29/24

Rick is busy with other projects right now and couldn't leave on Thursday, so we arrived together on Friday morning. We started with leveling and stabilizing the floor under the closet and master bedroom areas from under the house. We framed in the closets and bedroom walls, ran electric wiring for closet lights and wall plugs, ran the water line from under the house up through the closet framing and out into the backyard (it will hopefully prevent the faucet from freezing in cold weather), and sheet-rocked most of the ceiling in the 3rd bedroom and all of the new walls in the 2 closets and master bedroom and 3rd bedroom. 

I also pulled up the flooring in the pantry to explore the wood flooring situation in the kitchen. There is beautiful oak flooring underneath the 2 lays of linoleum and 1 layer of red linoleum-type tiles, but unfortunately, they used a heavy black tarry glue to put down the tile many years ago, and it probably won't be feasible to remove the flooring and get that substance off of the wood floors. (Update: a YouTube review of the issue revealed several potential solutions. Rick doesn't want to mess with it, but I'm going to take on the project myself. The kitchen area isn't that large.)

There's lots more sheet-rocking to do, but we need to get the old windows out and new windows in before doing most of it. The next trip will likely involve replacing windows in the 3 bedrooms and putting up more sheet rock if time allows.

9/22/24

It was a fairly successful weekend (and very hot one until Sunday). Rick installed a window in the master bedroom on Thursday. The old windows are high, small, and in poor condition (3' x 3'). We'll upgrade to 3 x 4' windows and will work them in as we can. The hot water heater closet in the 3rd bedroom was framed in, and a new dryer vent area was created.  

On Saturday, we tore out the back of the original master bedroom closet that has the crawl space for under the house and attic access. That area will now be the 3rd bedroom closet. The initial plan was to have a much bigger master bedroom closet that would be the previous desk and closet areas for the 3rd bedroom. We were having a hard time deciding on closet doors--it was a much larger closet area but was narrow and long and the doors presented problems. We decided that since we were going to have to knock out most of the wall anyway for long closet doors and since the room was over 15 ft long, it made more sense to just knock all of it out and make a walk-in closet using a little of the ample room space. We can now make the other (3rd bedroom) closet a little bigger too so that it's easier to access the attic and crawl space.

Rick started setting up the closets today, and I worked on cleaning up and carrying out all of the demo stuff and removing nails and staples from the hardwood floors. 

We also had a large snake visitor (a 6 ft"ish"coach whip, we believe) twice this weekend that is most likely that same one that left his skin in the backyard a month or two ago--not too thrilled about that!

9/15/24

 We finished the sheetrock in the 2nd bedroom, 2nd bathroom, and hallway. Rick worked on electricity for several areas (we now have a few functioning wall plugs!), electricity under the house for the dryer, plumbing for the hot water heater/washer & dryer/kitchen sink, and secured & tied the washing machine drain into the sewer line. We also pulled down the ceiling tiles in the 3rd bedroom, took a large load of trash to the city dumpster, pulled paneling off of the 3rd bedroom walls, worked on the pantry, and did some planning for windows and walls in the living room, etc. It was about 100 degrees and really hot.