And the work goes on...

The work this week has gone on. Slowly but surely things are looking better and better. Not many pictures this week. Most of visible work happened in the last two days. Here are some pictures...

We rented the big floor sander and Patrick went to work. You can see the first section done for the first sanding behind him.

Lisa took on hand sanding the edges. Thank goodness for power tools.

Bye, Bye big machine. Notice it is still light outside! It only took us two days of sanding. Not too bad for sanding 1520 sq. ft.! Next on to fixing the walls - lot of old holes and a few places where the plaster has come off the laths. And the hole in the wall for a mailbox. Our first day working the mailman introduced himself to Patrick and told him that our mailbox sucked. We agreed - a giant hole in the wall during winter didn't appeal to us either.
Speaking of introductions...we've met more of our new neighbors in the past two weeks than we have met in the place we are at now.

Lows and Highs

Well we made it through the first week. Tired, tired and more tired. Still more ahead of us, but at least we have a few things looking up for us.

Low----This a picture of one of the lows...the water seepage/leaking into the basement. This is the leak on the basement floor. The outside wall was still damp on Saturday - two days later. We have a guy coming to look at the mold in the basement room on Tuesday and a co-worker of Lisa's has a husband who worked mostly in concrete. We are going to see if he can recommend someone to look at the leak and give us some suggested next steps.

Middle---This is part of our documenting the wallpaper. This green floral is the base in the bedrooms as well as part of the hallway closet. I believe I'm up to seeing evidence of 8 different wallpapers. Luckily not all on top of each other, but the 4 layers in the back bedroom are proving difficult.

Again more of the wall paper documenting. Oh, and Lisa in a blue hat. Normally this is my rock hounding hat - keeps the sun off the top of my head and ears and is easy for Patrick to find me when he wanders off on his own rock hunt. I has proven helpful in keeping things from falling in between my eyes and my glasses, as well as keeping sweat and stray hairs out of my face.

High---This is the linoleum in the back bedroom. As Patrick was pulling up the carpet staples it just came up in one giant piece. As Patrick says, "The house rejected it." And nice surprise - hardwood underneath!

This is the hardwood in the back bedroom. After everything else this week, this was a very nice surprise. I have to end on the good things.

Almost 1 week with the new house

Here are some of the interesting pictures of the week. We have also been keeping track of the different layers of wallpaper. So far we have the gold/cream stripe that is throughout the house, a green with roses, a gray/red/cream plaid sort of mixed stripe, a gray mix of paisley and square pattern and finally a red. Interestingly the red is on a wall that I had been thinking about painting red. We've also run into a few paper clippings - if we could find when the first mass in the new Catholic church in Aberdeen happened we could date the one piece. We've had a piece of base board with a signature and a piece of wallpaper with a name and a phone number.

Here are some pictures of the house in progress....


The back bedroom reveal some interesting linoleum underneath the carpet.

Although this might look like some nice hardwood floor in the hallway, it is actually "wood" linoleum! Luckily this started peeling up as we pulled the tack strips off.

Tack strip destruction! Good safety with the eye wear - as well as fitting with the music in the background..."I wear my sun glasses at night...." You can also see where the original house ended and they enclosed the porch - nice line across the floor!

These are the disappointments this week. We had been watering the lawn - we weren't expecting the basement to be watered as well! grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

The moisture proved to infiltrate the one "finished" room in the basement as well. Now to deal with mildew and refinishing the room right. Lisa might not have a work space for a while.

New House!

Well, we got the keys to the new house today. Everything went smoothly. We spent the afternoon pulling up the carpet and discovering what was underneath. Oh, and we watered the peach trees.

Here are some before and "after" - not really done yet, but at the end of today.



This is a shot of the front of the house with the carpet and all the wallpaper.












Here is Lisa pulling up carpet.













Here is Patrick at the end of the day with a pile of carpet in the background and the beautiful wood floor underneath.