Words cannot explain.....

So it's a good thing we have pictures/video!

August 25, 2010

When I first walked into the house today, I had a mini-meltdown (completely internal, so that's OK, right?)Craig and Jim are still working on tearing up the master bedroom and master bath. It was pretty much completely water damaged (even the ceiling, as it turns out), so we would rather be safe than redo the room and then find out we still have mold. You've seen many before pics of the master bedroom, but again here is the bathroom as of yesterday:





Here is a video tour of what everything looks like now:


Unbelievable. Don't get me wrong, Craig and Jim are doing a GREAT job at this and are working fast, but it's just a little overwhelming at this point in time.

For those of you who still need a visual or who couldn't view the video here are some more pictures:

Bathroom sink in our hallway


Hole in the wall going into the bathroom. This hole was actually already here. It was a patch from previous plumbing work.


Master bath




Master bedroom









All I can say is that this will be really impressive when it's finished (or at least that's what I tell myself).

The cool thing about tearing up walls is, as you see in the video, there is a lot of random stuff in the walls. We already showed you all the music boxes and the hall pass for Betty Brown, but here is more random stuff that was found today:





We couldn't unroll this without it crumbling, but that flower is a piece of it


Outside of a calendar


Calendar from 1881


Almanac from 1887


Advertisement for insurance from 1935


Back of the ad

Is this a spur or something from one of the saw movies?









This kind of makes me want to tear out more walls (Jk.... I better not say that or we will have to!).

After getting over this shock (Alok wasn't fazed at all, he said "wow, this is amazing!"), I went to work on this wall:



This is the wall that contained the massive bookshelf before. It needed to have the rest of the wallpaper scraped, washed, and the holes knocked out. With some help with my mom, here it is after:




My mom working

We really can't get off that brown stuff (it's not paint), so we'll tackle that later. Alok thinks that sanding it may get it off.


My dad cleaning up

Alok (with some help from my dad) worked on removing the air conditioner from the apartment area and then getting rid of the carpet. Here it is before:





This light fixture has nothing to do with the carpet, but it is an original light fixture





And after:














Removing all of those staples will take forever.

Alok working on the staples

The floors are in pretty decent shape (what you see on them can be sanded off), with the exception of this area:


Area right under the window air conditioner

Anyone hungry? Apparently some termites were. We did have a termite inspection prior to move in and the inspector said that there was previous termite damage, but no active termites. They definitely destroyed part of the porch too, but we're waiting to tackle that project.

One interesting thing we found when we pulled up the carpet was this:







Gotta love the fact that some old, but working, outlets were covered with carpet. That's definitely not a fire hazard or anything.

Alok then took a break from pulling out staples and went to the basement to pull up some nasty, moldy carpet.

Prepared with his gear

Here it is before:




And after:




Other mold/water damage



There is still a bit left to go, but Alok said he'd do that later.

Here is the high-quality pipe that connects all of our sinks in the kitchen (there are 3). We had to have a plumber clean it out yesterday, which contributed to the water on the floor. Regarding pipes, the good news is that the kitchen pipes, with the exception of this one, are good to go. The bad news is that we, of course, need to redo all other plumbing, which will require us to rip out walls. That's fine, as long as they get ripped out before we fix them all.

Gotta love this pipe

We also saw this gutter in the yard (one of our new ones) and was very confused as to why Peters would come and put a random gutter in our yard.


Random gutter

About 3 hours later, we noticed that they had started putting up the gutters (we are very observant). Here they are:





Again, we picked white gutters because we will have white trim when we paint next summer. They don't look as bad as I thought they would with these colors.

We also ordered pizza for dinner. The only relevance is that the delivery guy commented on how much progress we've made since the last time we ordered and that he can't wait to see the finish project. We'll see what lasts longer: finishing the house or his career at Pizza Hut.

Jessica