Update July 4

Happy Independence Day everyone! We wish we could have been with family at the pool and at fireworks, but the only way we'll get moved in in time is to work on the house instead. Hopefully we'll have a housewarming in the fall to make up for it!

Got up entirely too early, rarin' for the day, got our coffee and tea, and took an unexpected, unplanned nap on the couches for about 30 minutes. We're a bit tired. :o) Made a good breakfast and headed out.

Went to Food Kitty for more Gatorade, and fixins for dinner, then went to the dump to unload the truck from the night before. Then headed to the house.

It was already too hot for Rich to get into the attic, and we're not really ready to run electrical anyway, so we started on the beasty kitchen. Had to move the fridge into the dance hall, without mangling the wood floors, which I think we succeeded with, considering the number of times we've seen floors gouged, even WITH cardboard down. Then we moved the stove into the dining room.

Started with the kitchen walls. Had to take down the entire wall on the window side, so that Rich can run new electric. 47 years can accumulate a lot of things, none of them pleasant. No cool surprise like a 47-year-old empty bottle of Dr Pepper or anything, no writing on the walls saying "help me! I'm trapped in the wall!" or anything else remotely interesting. Just lots of roach poop, spider eggs, etc. Blech.

Then the evil floor. Ugh. Sheets of plywood, with layers of vinyl, more plywood, linoleum, more plywood, more vinyl. Screwed, nailed, and God only knows what else. It took us just about what seemed like the whole day to pull up about 10 x 12 worth of flooring in the kitchen. We used crowbars, wonder bars, hammers, grunting and screaming to get the job done. Now all that's left is the original sub floor and some tar paper that has permanently melded into the floor.

Got a nice surprise when Darron and Patti dropped by to see the progress. The last time they'd seen the house was the day we closed, so a few things have changed since then. LOL. It was great to see them.

Took a load to the dump again.

Then we had to tackle the rotted(?) king post, jack post and stud walls around the kitchen window, where clearly something had leaked for a very very long time. Luckily, we discovered that the king and jack posts (gotta love the new phrases we're learning from Holmes on Homes--we would have just called them the support studs that hold up the window and header over the window before, but now, we're experts ha HA) weren't rotted after all, just blacked with who knows what. The stud directly under the window was rotten, though, along with a 3 foot section of sill plate. So we pulled all that out, along with the tar paper coated sheathing that backed up to the brick facade, and got down only to the brick. Then we (meaning Rich and his circular saw) cut a new piece of treated plywood the exact size of the rotted sheathing we pulled out, put it in place, then tar papered over it, then put in the new wall stud. LOTS of work for a small area. Word to the wise: if you hear dripping in the walls, or notice your floor newly buckles, or you have a new infestation of animals that are far too large for the openings you remember in your walls, then water has created a new problem and you should go fix it! Otherwise, yahoos like us have to go in and fix it all later.

Now the joint where the addition meets the original house is exposed to the inside of the house, and we've seen cockroaches the size of small children and black widows in there as well, so we need to get some bug spray in there. Then we plan on sealing that area up better . . . geez . . . it's amazing this guy didn't die of something like the bubonic plague for all the openings in the house to the outside world.

Once we got all that addressed, we had time to roll out new tar paper in the old kitchen floor (mainly wanted to do this so that overnight the entire population of bugs under the house didn't decide it was a good time to migrate to cleaner spaces). With a unified floor in the kitchen, it suddenly looks much nicer--like a real room.

Treated the "black" wood with a bleach solution to soak overnight.

Decided to head home by about 8:15 and shower, make burgers and collapse. I was sad about not seeing any fireworks, but too pooped to move. Around 9:00 we started hearing fireworks from everywhere, and then suddenly started hearing loud boom-booms. I went outside to see, and realized that there were large ones being set off nearby. Ran inside, got Rich, and hopped in the car and drove about 1/8th of a mile to the nearby parking deck at the hospital and drove to the top. To our surprise, you could see for miles around from there! We saw the large boom-booms close by, as well as about 6 or 7 more celebrations, like in Wake Forest, Rolesville, possibly Wakefield High School, possibly even Knightdale. The largest boom-booms were an interesting discovery that Rich and I had when we lived back at Ashebrook . . . some neighborhood fairly nearby has quite the extravaganza every year. We discovered it by accident one year a while back. Apparently they're still doing it. What's funny is, NO ONE knows where it comes from, or who does it, or which day to look for it, so we never know when it will happen to catch the beginning. We've asked around, and most people seem to be baffled by what we're talking about. Either it's a secret society thing that no one is supposed to talk about but we're too stupid not to ask, or it's a collective hallucination by the both of us . . . we'd love to trace the source, but cannot figure out how, without missing the actual show. Regardless, it totally made me happy to end up seeing fireworks from almost our own backyard. And no one else was with us, so it was a low-humidity, breezy, solitary show. Too cool.

Today I hope to get the bathroom floor addressed with tar paper and concrete board. I have to figure out how much to build up the floor to meet the toilet flange, which may end up ruining the threshold effect I was hoping for, but oh well.

Off to work on the house, and then work for real for clients!