Eleven

1. Found book #2. No title, but filled with short stories.
2. Found medicine bottle. Brown.
3. Found shoe shining brush.
4. Kevin leveled the spacers he put on the walls.
5. Uncle Jim and Aunt Nancy visited from IN. Jim ran electricity to the back room. (Thank you!)
6. Ridge vent put in (not by us).



7. Gutter guards put on by nice roofers (see #6).



8. Kevin and I graded around the barnage. Kevin seeded the area.
9. The three piles (mulch, stone, and dirt) have pretty much disappeared from the back yard. (Or at least their contents. We still have to grade and seed.)


10. We worked on the front yard's garden.
11. Kevin built this wonderful, temporary, walkway so that this winter/spring we aren't slipping on the rocks and stepping in the mud.

Spacers

All the exterior insulation has been removed. No bats (thank goodness--although I did give Kevin specific instructions to NOT let a bat leave the room without either killing it or 2) chopping its head off (which, of course, would then kill it). We did find an old book:







From what I could find on line, this book is about role reversal and had a great voice in feminism. First published around 1880. (I would like the know the story as to why or how it ended up as insulation in the eaves! I have my own theory.)

So, we have learned while working on house and barnage that doing prep work helps decrease aching shoulders/arms later. We pre-drilled and partially screwed the spacers before trying to level and screw into studs. Minus the squeaking screws, it was a pretty painless process. (We did wax the screws, which helped a little, but wearing ear plugs worked bestest!)





While Kevin screwed in the spacers, I removed the tack board and a few staples around the perimeter of the room. I was thinking, while working, that those small, one inch wide boards could do some serious damage as torture devices. YIKES!!

Rain Barrels and Garden

Dad and Mom came last Thursday and helped me put together the rain barrels. Not difficult, just had to have the right tools. Now we are just waiting for rain.

And our ever growing garden. I saw cucumber blossoms this morning.

No More Closet

Of course, taking it out wasn't as easy as we had hoped. First of all, neither Kevin nor I had ever taken down drywall. It took more elbow grease than we had expected. Second, the previous person used metal studs instead of wood. We had to unscrew instead of just hammer out nails. And lastly, it was a sauna in the room. Wearing face masks, goggles, and proper clothing made for two sweaty beasts!





Here is a picture of the insulation board. I am assuming this is the actual insulation. This stuff is heavy.

The previous builder used newspaper to insulate where the roof meets the walls. Although the paper was so dry and instantly fell apart when I touched it, I managed to get a date! So cool! 1938!

Update

Here is a picture of one of the raised beds that Kevin constructed. Our garden is doing pretty well now that I have sealed it in from deer and little creatures that were crawling underneath the fencing. This box has two different kinds of carrots, peas (hopefully), peppers, and strawberries. I think the strawberries will have to be moved to their own box because they are taking over with their shoots.



And we finally put up rain gutters! We were originally going to go with white gutters, but then I found brown at Home Depot. I love the color! It blends so well with the green, you'd never know they were there. The last step is to make rain barrels--we are off to purchase two 55 gal. drums we found on Craigslist. Hopefully they will both fit into Kevin's car!

Round Two... Attack

And now for the next remodeling project: the back bedroom.


It is a cold room in the winter and a hot room in the summer--indication of little to no insulation--thus the reason for remodeling. Luckily, the walls are not drywall or plaster and lathe, simply luan. Easy enough to take down with a hammer and crowbar. The only place where we were going to try and save the new construction was in the above picture--the closet. But upon further inspection, we saw that the closet was an after thought, making it so that the luan was caught under the drywall and still used to line the back of the closet. To cut out the luan on the ceiling and not damage the drywall just to save a few extra $$ wasn't worth the headache. (It's coming down today.)


(Before...duh)


(After)

Much to our surprise, there was insulation. It was H E A V Y and slightly moldy. The cardboard holding the insulation in place said "Sears Rock Wool Insulation." Lots of dust, but no dead animals or bats. (Thank goodness!)





My original idea for this room is to leave the chimney exposed and add a few sky lights. Hopefully we can afford to do both!

Memorial Weekend

What a wonderful, productive weekend! Friday Maggie, Kevin and I made a quick visit to an animal adoption center to see if there was a kitty there for us. There wasn't enough time to play with any, but we saw the selection. Then that evening, some Art Therapy friends came to visit.

Saturday morning Kevin and I went to see about adopting a cat. From the visit the day before we had a few selected that we wanted to see. The center has a room where they bring the cat to us and let us interact with the cat for as long as we want. It is a nice way to see right off the bat how the cat handles stressful situations and change. The first cats we looked at were a mother/daughter pair. The mother was 2 years old and the daughter was 8 months. They would be bought together as we didn't want to separate them. The mother was nervous and not very sociable. The second cat we met was Simone. Kevin saw her while we were filling out paperwork and said, "Carrie, she just looked at me a meowed. We have to look at her!" She is a 9 year old, 17.5 lb cat who was nothing but a mush when she was put in the room with us. After about two minutes of allowing her to explore the room, Kevin went over to her while she was in a corner. She flopped down on the floor and rolled over on her back for a belly rub. I think right then we were hooked. She was purring and meowing, loving every minute of it. And that is the way she has been since she's been home. She sits on the back of the couch as I type this, purring away.





The rest of Saturday involved filling up the planter's boxes with soil and cow manure and cutting down the lilac trees that were rubbing on the roof of the porch and allowing moss to grow up there. We weren't really sure how to trim a lilac that had grown so big. There weren't any branches of green below four feet on the trunk. We are hoping that the trunk sprouts, but if it doesn't there are a lot of other lilac saplings around where Kevin cut the others that will hopefully take over.










Our neighbors took down the old fence to replace it with a new one, but we kind of like how big the backyard looks now. The mowed down the ferns and forget-me-nots :( which, as I mentioned in an earlier post, were apparently on their property.




We also went to the Public Market for flowers because they were having a special event this weekend of just flowers and vegetable plants. We bought 5 strawberry plants, tickseed, butterfly bushes, cone flower and some other flower I don't remember the name of but love the deep purple. It kind of reminds me a lavender, but it doesn't smell and is a deep purple. I'll have to take a picture once they are planted and bloom. Oh, and Monday morning, Kevin and I made about 5 trips to the free mulch mound and mulched around some of the trees and flowers in the yard. The front flower bed needs some attention!

Kevin cleaned out the tool room upstairs--making piles of Dad's tools and ours. We put ours in the garage and Dad's downstairs. The paint cans all have a shelf in the basement and will (hopefully) stay somewhat organized. And Kevin put molding around the closet between the bathroom and the hallway closet.

I was too beat last night to plant the garden and now it is supposed to be cooler and rainier for a couple of days. I might wait a bit to plant to make sure the seeds don't get too wet.

It was a productive, well spent weekend.