Remember my emails chronicling my house remodel? Ah - those were the good ole days, weren't they? Vacation time spent beating down walls, crawling under the house in the mud and the muck to put in new pipes, and trying to line up drain lines with the beams under the house (which, of course, were never where I wanted them to be). The wife fussing about a wall being a couple inches off from where she wanted it, and the near-fights we had trying to determine the best way to do something that satisfied her need for a perfect bathroom and my need for the job to get done and have a functioning place to shower and sit upon our throne to contemplate why we embarked upon this journey - ah yes, great memories indeed.
Well, welcome to my new level of Hell. I would say I moved up, but that is only in floor level. Actually, I guess I have moved up - up to a higher level of difficulty and pain. Yes, I am taking on our second level! So, here's the scoop:
Karen came down for the weekend. Well, we went to Aunt Doris' birthday party on Saturday - a fun time -, came home and slept very late Sunday morning - but then the "fun" began. See, I was doing pretty good about being all gung-ho about fixing up this house, then came Dad's heart attack and subsequent early exit. As a result, all my motivation to work on this blasted house went bye-bye, and I had pretty much quit, save for the necessities, such as putting in the furnace up front. Karen decided that I needed to get re-motivated, and proceeded to bug me until I gave in and started doing some things around the house Sunday.
I decided that the project that is bearing down on me the absolute worst is the upstairs. It is an absolute disaster. I had ripped up 95% of the floors in order to have clear access for the new wiring by Carlos the Electrician (not to mention the floors were installed poorly and kept breaking). The drywall is old, brittle, crumbling, and the nails are backing out. The bathroom consists of a toilet and a sick crammed together with another sink in a vanity, which was right on the verge of useless. It had to be remodeled, but the thought of it has been weighing me down like nobody could believe.
The work has begun! Karen worked on getting everything out of closets up there and putting it in tubs. When I got home from work Monday, I took the tubs down and put them in the carport (to be moved to the garage soon). Step 1 complete (except for some heavy items which I will get help with this weekend).
Today (Tuesday), I grabbed my nailbar, claw hammer, and 2 pound shorty sledge hammer and commenced to tearing down the drywall. At first it was going quite smooth, as it was on an interior wall, and I was thinking "oh yeah - this won't be too difficult", but then I got to the exterior walls! It was about the time that Karen, who had finished working in the yard) came up to help destroy some drywall and swung the sledge hammer against an exterior wall that I remembered the exterior walls are backed by 1X8 boards! This is still a manageable situation, but the going gets much slower. We worked for a while, maybe an hour and a half, and got about half the room done. I removed a very built-in bookcase and the molding for the window. There is now a huge pile of rubble in the middle of the room.
Speaking of rubble - I thought it would be a great idea to rent a dumpster to simply toss all the debris in, then have it hauled off. I called U-Rent-It, but they don't rent dumpsters. So, I called Home Depot. They can't rent dumpsters inside city limits in Terrell. I called IESI, who handles the garbage pick up in Terrell. That is when I found out that they cannot rent anything smaller than a 20 yard roll-off dumpsters, and the minimum cost would be no less than $500 for even a couple days! If you are unfamiliar with the size of a 20 yard dumpster, imagine cutting the top off a school bus, ripping the seats out, and throwing debris in it. That is a 20 yard. Now, obviously, I will not be getting rid of that much drywall. So, I get to buy a couple boxes of the contractor trash bags and let the garbage guys pick up dozens of heavy bags full of drywall chunks. Oh well.
So, check back here often. I will make an attempt to post how this mostrocity is going.
Jeff
PS: as soon as I get Picasa and Blogspot to cooperate, I will have a slideshow on here of all the progress that is made. For now, to see pictures, visit http://picasaweb.google.com/jeffrey.n.dickson and click on the folder "Jeff's House of Pain."
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