I failed to post a blog for Sunday-Monday, so here it is.
On Sunday, we procrastinated by taking a tour of some pretty cool loft apartments that were put in older buildings on 4th street, with a view of Washington Park. They were really nice. Then, we went to try Ice Scream (on 6th and Maine), which was awesome! We also met some of our new neighbors, one which brought us some pesto that we ate for dinner on Sunday night.
When we got started, I continued to pull up ivy. Alok didn't like my technique so he stopped destroying the deck to show me. I didn't like his technique, so we went back to working on our respective things ;-) Here is Alok on his ivy hay-bailing technique:
Here is the ivy when we were finished:
You still can't see a bit of difference. Our attempt to get rid of the ivy has been questioned many times. Basically, it is full of bugs and overgrows really easily, which leads to it ruining things like your foundation, sidewalk, patio, house, etc. I think it looks pretty when it's maintained, but we're going to go for something different. Many types of ivy are also poisonous to dogs, so we definitely want to get it all out of the back yard.
My mom continued to work on our curb appeal and went a little nuts on this front tree:
Here it is after:
Those are all of our yard waste bags.
Alok continued to work on deck destruction as seen here:
He really wanted to start in front of the front door, but I convinced him to wait until we could at least get temporary steps set up so that we can use the door, get our mail, etc.
On Monday, we moved into the apartment, where Alok finished pulling up tack strips and my mom and I decided to start peeling off the wallpaper. We were going to leave it, but we are at a bit of a standstill with some of the other indoor aspects of the house and we figured, why leave it. Here is the wall when we started:
And when we stopped for the day:
We're going to have to probably just take out the ceiling in the apartment, as seen here:
If you look next to the light, you'll see the cracked plaster that has been covered in wallpaper and painted yellow. Knocking it down and just hanging a new ceiling is the plan.
My mom also took down the curtains the old owner left (we recently were asked why we started decorating the apartment, referring to the curtains). Here's my mom overestimating her height, as per usual:
One thing that I don't really talk about on here is cost, etc, but I have to share this. We recently got a bid from a house painting company in Quincy. The bid was $40,000 to paint the outside of the house! I'm not kidding. Needless to say, buying some scaffolding, paintbrushes, scrapers, and paint is going to be the way to go. I just can't get over that. You could buy a small house in Quincy, take the newly painted siding off that house, and put that siding on our house for cheaper.
The only other (major) discovery of the day is that the front part of our house that is detaching from the rest of the house appears to be more detached. That's really not good. We got the structural part of the house started today. More to come on that later tonight from Alok (I'll be at roller derby).
Jessica
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