Who's your daddy now, house?!?

Things started looking up considerably last Wednesday when I was able to cut through all the caulk around the dining room casement windows and pry them open. It's amazing what a difference a little bit of fresh air can have on a person's general demeanor. For example, my demeanor was hovering in the general vicinity of "about to go batshit crazy" and when those windows finally popped open I felt an almost immediate down-shift to my normal level of psychosis. I can't wrap my head around what drives a person to caulk perfectly good windows shut. While I was working on the project I started to worry that once the caulk was removed I'd find that there was a rotten sash or that one of the chain winders that controls the casement was broken, but I found no such problem. Famous last words in this house, or any house, tend to be "I'm just going to [insert project here] REAL QUICK". The house threw me a bone with this one, though. It was a fairly simple project, hindered only by my inability to use sharp tools without gouging myself and then narrowly avoiding falling off the ladder.

A couple of days later we were also able to get two of our more stubborn aluminum storm windows open. The previous owners must have relied heavily on their A/C, that's all I can come up with. The whole air-lock system on these two storms, where the plastic weatherstripping fits into the groove of the fixed sash above when closed, was somehow fused together either due to a moisture problem at one point or the age of the materials themselves. While I was working on the one in the upstairs bathroom, Tom took a pry-bar to bottom edge of the one in our bedroom and that provided just enough force to free it up. The one in the bathroom, though, seemed to be fused on a molecular level. You couldn't even cut that weatherstripping away with an Xacto knife. We had to combine Tom's pry-bar technique with several "love taps" from a rubber mallet (::cough::) in order to get that one open. Officially every window in the house now operates, it's just that some of them operate a little better than others.

In other news, Tom got the laminate installed in the entryway in plenty of time for the carpet install on Thursday morning, and it looks beautiful. We still have to put down the quarter round molding but even with the red spacers it looks a million times better than the carpet. Our house sees way too much foot traffic for a carpeted entry. (I think every house sees too much foot traffic for a carpeted entry, personally.)



Then after a quick 10 o'clock supermarket run to pick up sack lunch components for my son's field trip the next day, I pulled up the remaining wall-to-wall carpet in the living room and we took it to it's new home out in the garage. At this point I'll share something simply for the sake of sharing, but it's something that Tom and I do not want to spend any real time or energy thinking about:

The living room carpet had the distinct smell of human urine. Human. Urine.

Now let's never mention it again.




There wasn't a layer of PetFresh in this room, probably because there's no such thing as HumansWhoPeeOnTheirCarpetFresh (that we know of). We also were told to leave all the tack strips in place for the new carpet, so it wound up being a fairly early night by our standards.

[Although after I showered (three times) I found Tom removing more random weatherstripping from around the house. The POs must have gotten a fabulous deal on weatherstripping at one point, or else they had a penchant for sticky-backed foam, because we find it all over the place and it's become Tom's mission to remove it all.]




New carpet! I don't know too much about it except that it's Karastan carpet, the color is "cashmere tan", it's a Stainmaster carpet with Stainmaster carpet pad, and also it's not covered in urine. That last part is really all I need to know about my carpet. It could be Bob's carpet in hot pink and as long as it wasn't soaked in urine we'd find a way to make it work.

This particular carpet came from Independent Flooring, and I have it on good authority that their carpet is of a much higher quality than their volleyball skills. I'm giving them another free plug tonight because I was told they read my blog on someone's Blackberry tonight inbetween their double-header match and anyone who kills their time reading this deserves some sort of reward. Although there was beer involved, and I'd imagine beer makes the whole experience easier.

Thursday night we celebrated the new carpet by going to bed at 10:30! Its installation marked the light at the end of the tunnel as far as livability goes. We knew there were things, like ripping up the carpet, that we were going to need to do immediately for our own sanity. What we never really took into account is how emotionally draining it becomes to have nowhere to relax in your own house. Tom and I also work about 10 feet from one another every day, and after only 3 or 4 days in the new house we found ourselves drawing ... out .... our ... work days just so we didn't have to go home yet. WE FOUND OUR OFFICE MORE RELAXING THAN OUR HOME. That's just sick.

I have a new appreciation for the chaos a little remodeling can bring to a person's life.

For Mother's Day weekend we took it way easy by our standards, although when I was telling my friend Gwen about the things we'd done she seemed to think we we were still accomplishing way too much. There wasn't much that we did over the weekend that wasn't voluntary, though, and mainly we focused on sprucing up our outdoor spaces, lest we forget about them entirely. We got the lawn all mowed and watered, and on Saturday we took my mom out to Chippewa Valley Growers to pick out some annuals for container gardening - because I'm not even going to entertain the idea of doing any actual landscaping. While Nicholas and I planted flowers, Tom reassembled the wood swingset in the backyard with the help of our EXTREMELY nice new neighbor, John.

Then on Mother's Day we drove to Minneapolis because I had found a new (to us) ceramic cook top on Craigslist for $100. It will replace the original coil cook top that came with the house. The search goes on for a wall oven. I can't say enough great things about Craigslist. The people we bought the cook top from are in the process of remodeling their kitchen and living room, and he was sharing with us how hard daily life has become ever since they gutted both of the rooms. We just nodded along somberly. We didn't have anything near that going on back at our homestead and we still found it hard to suck air from day-to-day. If we had been tearing walls out of our house I can only imagine how horrifying the scene would have been. I was only another day or so away from showing up to work in sweats with strawberry jam in my hair and two different colored shoes. (But I would have rocked that look.)

We also stopped at Ikea and picked up a few things. Tom got a Poang chair in Alme Medium Red for his office downstairs and the coordinating footstool. He says he's wanted it for two years, even though on the Ikea site they list the chair as "new". Sure he did.

We also picked up some other odds and ends for around the house, but mostly we looked for some inexpensive ways to attack some of our future projects, like the upstairs bathroom. Also Tom bought Nicholas this little SPÖKA light for his bedroom and you would have thought that he bought him a puppy by the way Nicholas was going on and on about it. We stopped at my mom's for ice cream cake after we got back to town and now she wants a SPÖKA of her very own so we're going to have to make another trip to Ikea at some point.

Damn. Road trip, anyone?

Tom asked if I wanted to install the new cooktop last night after we put Nicholas to bed and I gave him an emphatic "No!" As much as I'm looking forward to the new cooktop (I loves me some cooking!) I wasn't about to fall for the whole "It's so simple!" instructions that the seller gave us. Supposedly you just unscrew some brackets under the old one, pop it out, pop the new one in and wire it up, then screw the brackets into the countertop underneath. But knowing our luck this simple install will require 6 trips to Menards, a new section of countertop, a complete re-wiring of the south wall of the kitchen, and probably a monkey.