Category: Home Renovations

Finally a weekend to work on the house!

And already we’ve made 2 trips to home depot 🙂  Although Friday night’s trip to home depot was to just get some weather stripping for the front door and some putty for the outside electrical entrance into the house (to make it water tight).

Today Ryan started removing the baseboards in the livingroom so we could wire, the sections that he removed and then drilled, i cleaned up and wired.  We’ve got one more section (behind the radiator) to do and the livingroom outlets will be done.  We also measured and bought the wire to run to the attic subpanel.  We decided the diningroom doesn’t need any outlets on the small section of exterior wall if we keep the current outlet locations in there.

What will be the fourth and fifth outlets
Feed and first 2 outlets

We made a trip to the dump to finally get rid of the last of the wood from the porch project that’s been laying around.

I ended the day by getting 3 boston butts brining (to slow cook tomorrow for pigging out at work!).  Then I made up a chocolate pie for tomorrow (just to enjoy).

Hopefully we can run some more wire tomorrow, finish up the tvroom outlets, run the subpanel wire and maybe wire the door bell.  Next weekend we can start on the front hallway/staircase which is mostly lighting.  It feels good to be able to work on the house again!

Happy Holidays!

Ryan surprised me after work today by putting up the xmas lights!  We need to buy one more strand but considering last year all we did was buy the lights and never put them up we’ve gotten quite far this year 🙂

I would like to get a wreath for the door as well and maybe we can decorate the columns too.

All lit up

It was hard to get a good picture since it was so dark out but the front of the house is nice and bright now 🙂

Out sick

Lack of posting has been due to the flu.  Last weekend Ryan had to work all weekend and Sunday I came down with what i thought was a cold after we did manage to clean up leaves in the morning.

Unfortunately by noon Monday (I was at work to get some important tasks done) I knew it was more than just a cold and I headed home around 2 to sleep for 36 hours straight under the influence of NyQuil.  On Wednesday I awoke from my stupor in less pain and finally able to get out of bed, I spent the day on the couch napping, this time not taking NyQuil which indicated I was on the mend for sure!

Now that I’m back to work I’m a little behind and have been busy.  I hope this weekend to get a little done around the house, Ryan has to work again but I will figure out some things i can do before I head out to CA for the week.

Happy Halloween!

Goblin pumpkin
Dragon!

We had a family and friend filled weekend!  We drove home Saturday and spent the day with Aimee, Jason, PJ and Erica.  Aimee and I made up a chicken dinner while PJ and Dad carved the giant pumpkins (above) – I got to pick out the patterns and draw them although PJ significantly modified the dragon I drew for the better.

Sunday after a relaxing morning we drove back home to make dinner for my friend Sarah and her boyfriend.  We had dinner and handed out candy. We got quite a few trick-or-treaters even though it was so cold.

When we first got home today however we realized that we had no hot water to shower!  I tinkered as much as I could but the heat is working  (furnace is working) so I didn’t have a lot of options after draining the water and refilling it.

Unfortunately neither of us can stay home tomorrow to get the boilermate fixed so I’ll be boiling water to wash my hair (again) and hopefully tuesday we can get it fixed.  UGG!  We just got the circulator thing fixed a few months ago, not sure what else could be the problem, there are not a lot of moving parts involved especially since the furnace is working just fine.

Anyhow on the good news front – the roof work is done on the cupola… some more pictures…

We are really glad we went with the copper, it looks great.  Now we just have to scrape down the soffit and paint it at some point (not happening before winter).

A few more hours of Halloween, time to settle in with a book for the night.

Roof work

The roof work continues, it took a few days to get the scaffolding up and they started removing the original slate and flashing on Thursday, replacing it with new copper. By friday they had the copper all the way around and had starting welding the seams and putting the slate back up. We climbed up on Saturday to get some pictures of the progress.


The copper goes all around the cupola now.

Nice job bending around the edge.

Started welding and putting slate back up.

So far we’re really happy with the work. I can’t wait to see it finished completely.

A little family, a little decking, a little costume work

On Saturday we had quite a busy day.   We had some visitors as well as my sister and her husband who came up for the night.

We worked a bit on the deck and used up the rest of the decking, we didn’t quite close up the gap but it’s down to about 12 inches.

Some new supports to help get rid of the sag.
New decking down!
stained

We had our night visitor again so we have little critter foot prints across the wet stain AGAIN.  Next time I’m putting up barbed wire for the night!

Aimee and I spent the evening up in the sewing room after dinner working on halloween costumes.  I got Georgia’s Gypsy costume finished up with Aimee’s help on the belt.  I was quite happy with this one, it was fun.  The only problem was that the belt is made of a plastic-y material that can’t be ironed which  was a pain.  It looks like fake leather though so it’s a nice affect.

Gypsy costume finished.

Sunday was the girls’ birthday party so after breakfast we headed over to Uncle Pete’s house for lunch, presents and cake.  Georgia got her costume – the other two will get theirs on Friday…

Georgia the Gypsy for 2010

I’ll post pictures of Maia and Chloe when they try their costumes on later in the week.

When we got home I started right back on the costumes.  Chloe’s black cat is just about finished after some planned hand sewing.  I wanted to get it ready to bring with me to Becca’s house tomorrow night (I’m staying the night) so I can finish it there.

Black Cat costume - ears and collar left to finish by hand.

Then I started on Maia’s dress.  I decided to just cut and sew the bodice, leaving the skirt for Tuesday and Wednesday night.

Pink princess dress top done

So the costumes are on track to be finished by friday at least.  It’s a little late this year but they’ll get to do trick-or-treating friday and sunday in them.  Then the real question is if I’ll get to working on my costume at all 🙂

Well time to call it a night, I have to get in to work at a decent time since I’m leaving early to watch the nieces – I can’t wait!

More scaffolding

Well today was full of putting up scaffolding – it goes pretty darn high.  We climbed up there tonight so i could take some pictures of our roof leak and it’s pretty obvious why it’s leaking…

120 years later and the copper has rusted away leaving just the bare wood

I assume that’s copper anyway.

The temporary fix last year was some shingles that mostly blew off. Rusted all the way around.

So that is why we’re paying for this copper installation.  Hopefully it will last our lifetime at least.

While we were up there I took more photos of the roof, found another possible leak we should probably fix up.

little hole

And here’s the scaffolding we climbed up to the top of tonight…

We signed a waiver of liability so the roofer is going to leave the scaffolding up over the weekend for us – we plan to try to get the aluminum siding off the cupola to see what’s underneath.  It’s also hard to do from a ladder so we figured we’d take advantage of the scaffolding we just paid to have put up.

Roof work

It sure is nice to be able to pay someone else to work on the house and see progress happen when we’re not here!  Of course we can’t afford to do it often so we only do it for projects we’re not comfortable doing ourselves – for example – putting in flashing around the top of the cupola where it leaks and fixing another leak on the backside of the cupola.

So yesterday the roofer came and started setting up the scaffolding – supposed to come back today so i’m working from home today.

the copper!

Can’t wait to see what happens today.

More painting…

I got the second coat of paint on the trim around the 2 tvroom windows. By then it was 6 and I knew I had less than an hour before it got too dark so I switched to the other side of the house and got the second coat of paint on the new section of siding. This is all done now and I can call the electric company to re-attach the meter. It was dark when I finished so I’ll have to get pictures tomorrow although pictures of a second coat of paint never show that much.