I wish I had good news to post on the progress the crew made this week, but alas, I don't have any news on that front. A few guys came a few days this week, but no noticeable work was done. So frustrating! We have now issued an ultimatum that if they don't complete certain tasks by Thursday, they're fired. Frankly, I hope they hope they comply, since it would be a pain to find a new contractor. But I'm willing to follow through on our threat.
W got quite a bit done on his own this week. We're trying to seal the house as best we can, in the hopes that our utility bill might go down a bit. He hung a door to the attic, keeping the warm air downstairs. As I previously posted, hanging our doors is no small challenge. It involves first squaring up the old door, then building a frame, then hanging it and getting it to swing correctly. I think we still have 12 doors to go! W is getting good use out of his nail gun.
This weekend, we focused on the back "new" part of the house (it's an area that was originally a porch, but enclosed at some point, a while ago). We insulated the pipes so they don't freeze up. There's a crawl space under the laundry/ half bath area, and those pipes are fairly exposed. We still need to get insulation under the floor, but that isn't quite as pressing.
We also pulled up all the old flooring in the laundry/bath area, so that the crew (hopefully) can easily and evenly lay the new flooring. We'll use the flooring that we salvaged from upstairs, a nice looking pine. Some of it looks like heart of pine with a nice, tight grain, although I'm not sure that all of it is as high quality. In pulling up the layers, we noticed some water damage and cut floor joists, so we were able to repair those. I'm glad we did that ourselves to be sure that the foundation is solid.
I'm really looking forward to the point when the crew is done with their stuff and we can get into our part. We certainly have a lot of work we can do now, but it's hard when we have to clean up our stuff every night to make sure it's out of the way of the crew. And even more frustrating when that crew doesn't show!
I'm hoping we'll get started with hanging the cabinets this week, but it's tough with the holidays approaching. Hopefully we'll have a few up by Christmas. That's my Christmas wish.
For those who have asked, my pregnancy is going well! I'm going into month 5 and still feeling really good, although I need to find some better clothes to work in on the weekends. My jeans aren't cutting it. My doctors are aware of our home renovation and I really don't have to change my behavior too much. I'm more careful about the things I lift, but I'm still able to haul things around. I'm also careful around any chemicals, but we haven't had too many of those around. To strip all our doors, we have a natural product so I can still help with that. I think I'll get out of painting, but I'm not upset about that at all.
This will probably be my last post for a couple weeks, but I'll try to get some pictures up. I realized that I haven't posted any since the walls were primed. It's coming together, albeit slowly. Seasons Greetings to all!!
