Trees please

Our house is looking a little... exposed lately.

The big day

Well our big day has been very big indeed. We finally decided on the paint color for the kids room! Tada!

Just kidding. We did decide on his paint color but that certainly wasn't the biggest action of the day. It's hard to say what the biggest accomplishment was today. Maybe we should have them fight it out. In fact I think we should have a cage match: new gutters vs. no kitchen!

First up, the interior contender, our former kitchen!:

Surprise! We found a chimney!

We have a lot of kitchen cabinets in strange places right now. Like, they are three times bigger in the middle of the room than they seem on the wall. You can still swing if you don't mind getting up close and personal with an ancient mouse nest we discovered in one of them. 

Technical foul! What happens when you have guys coming to destroy stuff and the dumpster doesn't show up until 5:04 (ten minutes after the guys had to leave?) This. This is what happens. It's all gone now, no big deal, and totally on the dumpster people (and perhaps the people ordering the dumpster). 

The challenger: new gutters!

I am sad to see the copper gone. It was so lovely and added such character, but it was literally destroying our house with its complete failure to direct water in appropriate directions. So I will use as much copper as I can reasonably and stylishly afford on the inside. Sorry, house. 

I said a lot of prayers for these guys. At one point the Kid was shaking their ladder. (!) 

I hustled him off to school. 

Our aluminum/copper combo is now all aluminum. Sad face. But a dryer basement! Preserved masonry! 

I hear these are worth big bucks. I also love them and would like to use them for something, but I'm not sure what that would be without causing undue damage. Like, a planter? That I could cut a bigger hole for?

Also, I like money. See: no kitchen or bathrooms

The Kid is the winner! "Hey look at my muscles! I'm a super hero!"

In other news, the electrician is scheduled for next week, the guys are coming to take down ceilings on Friday, and I have a big dilemma in front of me for next week: refinishing floors or painting cabinets? Stay tuned!

Accentuate the positive

We're having the kind of day where everything is going wrong and nothing is going right and costs are spiraling wildly out of control while our quality of life diminishes rapidly... so, here. Here are some 'after' pictures. Sort of. This is the basement sprayed with Kilz!

Leftover pile of debris from laundry chute removal. It's all gone now. 

We got $40 for this pile of wire. We would have gotten more money if we had stripped all the insulation off the wire. Yeah right.

So here is the 'big bad' of the day. We're trying to get rid of the dumpster, as it is becoming mattress and box spring central. (None of us have ever put a mattress or box spring in our dumpster. Strange how that happens.) So I thought, we should take down the ceiling tiles in the kitchen and get that in the dumpster. That's about all the demo left to do in this phase.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

This is the original plaster ceiling of the kitchen, completely in shambles and full of water and god knows what else, being supported by some flimsy boards and a sheet of plastic. The box for the kitchen light was completely rusted out. Super safe, I'm sure. If I had a couple of big guys, we could have taken down all the upper cabinets and let it rain down upon us. Alas, I have no big guys lounging around my house waiting for orders. There doesn't seem to be a way to take down the ceiling without taking down and/or potentially damaging the cabinets, which I do not have the funds to replace. While the removal of the upstairs bathroom floor may have helped this destruction along, we still can't clean this out from above and if we could it would only go halfway across before the upstairs bedroom covered it up again. Not to mention that next week we lose our helper and I am supposed to be studying for boards. We have no idea when we will have the money to tackle the kitchen since it's tied up in our current house so it appears that this is going to be here for a bit. Until something miraculous happens, or whatever. 

In case you're wondering, I do give up on this house. I give up on it all the time. Sometimes several times a day. I just usually get over it pretty quickly. 

This time... we've been broken up for about four hours. I'm still not speaking to it.