Keeping Pace

The bathroom, finally tiled - Kitchen in progress -  Kitchen odd-counter gone - Bathroom walls patched - The tile grouted

This weekend we worked long days, got very little sleep, and got a lot done. Thank goodness for close-by family and friends who are kind enough to volunteer to be my slaves help. We owe big thanks to my parents, Katie & Betty for the weekend (thank you, thank you!). Seriously some house-butt kicking.

On Friday night Mike worked into the wee hours of the night to get all the tile up on the wall - over the new wall patch the contractors put up, over the window and under it. The next step was to grout - Saturday night after a  very long day, very late into the night, we grouted. It took 3x longer than I thought it would and that was with 3 people instead of 2 (thank you Betty!). I thought we might be sponging and wiping forever. The other big job in the bathroom for the weekend were the walls. Mike and I pulled out the medicine cabinet, original to the house (we're relocating it downstairs to the half bath) by pulling out some very impossibly stuck nails. Apparently the house builders didn't like screws back then. Everything in this house is nailed in with large rusty nails. But that's a longer story for another day. We patched the hole with a piece of sheet rock we cut down to fit, screwing it into the frame and taping the seams.

Dad went to plaster our walls (he has some 1920's house experience from their first house) in the bathroom only to discover some crazy water damage behind the toilet in the wall. Chunks of plaster just falling away. This led to a field trip to the lumber yard, purchasing a giant piece of green board, a lot of cutting out in the garage, and creating a complicated corner wall-rebuilding patch with Mike that took most of the afternoon. Wall patching wasn't able to commence until Sunday in the 94 degree heat, with no air conditioning upstairs (not enough power until the electricians add it), Dad kindly rescheduled his Father's Day celebration until after we move to instead toil in hotter-than-hell heat. The walls are starting to look really great.

We also started working on the kitchen. Katie spent Saturday and Sunday sanding my kitchen cabinets, Mom sanded and started priming the kitchen drawers. We don't really have a lot of cabinet space, but boy do we have a lot of doors. And disgusting shelves covered in frighteningly sticky mystery substances that took hours to remove. We pried that odd counter-table out of the wall and removed it from the kitchen. We were thrilled to find out it was never screwed back into the floor, the tile underneath was totally undamaged. Betty and I sanded the walls down in the kitchen to prepare them for future plastering and patching. All of this sanding caused the entire house to be filled with this fine yellow dust. We wore masks but it's going to take forever to eradicate all this dust. It's too fine to be caught in the vacuum filters (therefore gets spewed back into the room in a giant dust cloud), too thick for a swiffer, too fine for a broom and covering everything. I'm just glad our furniture isn't in yet.