One thing leads to another

I have been admittedly behind in my updating- I think that’s because now that I’ve had a restful vacation I’m actually getting work done at work. There is much to update- where to start.

Friday we had two plumbers come out for estimates- of course we still haven’t received those estimates but it didn’t sound too terrible. It’s tricky because there are a few things that we know are going to cost a good chunk- replacing our bathroom walled-in behemoth of a heater with an energy-efficient, tankless model in the basement for starters. And so with that I will illustrate the phenomenon that everyone warned us about- that it just starts with one thing, and then all the sudden we’re gutting the house. Well not really…well ok so we probably will…but at least not immediately. We are, however probably going to gut the bathroom. Let me demonstrate the logic (if we’re going to call it that). See the crawl space, which is actually standing room (for me and Clint anyway), is only about the size of half of a room. Running the entire length of the front of the house, and also the back of the house, is about a two foot tall space. This is where all the plumbing is located and so for anyone to work on it there are two options- 1. to pay about triple for someone (preferably non-claustrophobic) to shimmy back there and hope that they can do a good job even though there’s probably not enough room for them to roll over, or 2. take the bathroom down to studs so that they can work through the floor, rearrange the layout of the bathroom while we’re at it and then Clint and I will do all the finishing work. I’m guessing we’ll go with 2- although again we have NO idea what this might cost since apparently we’ve scared them both off by just making them walk into the crawl space. (I will say it is slightly fun to see everyone’s reaction when we open the hatch in the floor of the closet and they realize they have to descend into that pit.) Hopefully that will be the extent of it but there was one scary plumber that pointed out one of our pipes is really old and should be replaced while they’re in there, but it’s connected to the one that probably leads to the alley, which is something breakable (ceramic?) so if they get in there and even if they are as careful as they could possibly be, something could chip and then all the sudden we’re replacing the whole pipe underground. We also learned yesterday that if we run the water in the kitchen sink too long the bathtub fills up with grime (just discovered yesterday). I’m optimistically assuming that would be an easy fix though.

So with all this you would think we would be discouraged- but no! Somehow it has had the opposite effect and completely energized us. Because we realized that we are going to take this house, take it down to the frame room by room, and make it amazing. We’re not sure how or when, or more importantly how we’ll pay for it, but I’m pretty confident that it will happen. Clint was energized because he realized that rather than tinker we’ll probably just end up gutting, room by room, and getting everything exactly how we want it. It’s an exercise in patience and delayed gratification but rather fun at the same time.

On another front some great news- we have a garage door opener! After approximately 15 hours of labor, several trips to Lowes and Home Depot, emailed pictures from Dad and assistance and consultation from Billy the magical moment happened- we pushed the button and it went up. Just like that. We still can’t get over the wonder.