Holy house

December 2, 2010

Sorry we've been MIA, but we were in Mexico for a week for Alok's cousin's wedding. Here we are on the beach:



There have been some big changes in the house over the past week, and not necessarily for the best. First, here is the current outside of the house:











Here is the lovely trash pile, swan included:



We had a bit of an almost pipe-freezing incident due to this lovely spigot on the outside of the house:

We had all of the pipes that weren't insulated and were on outside walls drained as a precautionary measure.

The interesting work has been going on in the apartment. I took a cell phone video, but apparently I held it the wrong direction. For those of you who would like to turn your head and watch it, here you go (Hint: turn your head to the left):


For the rest of you, I will try to re-film later.

Here is the photo tour version:

The butler's pantry. The fridge had to be moved out to get to some pipes. What a great pile of wires.


Pipe behind the fridge leading into the bathroom


The apartment bathroom. Notice the lack of the bathtub.


Pipes going into the butler's pantry


Wood floor in the apartment bathroom- it's old, wide planked wood

And here is the actual apartment:


So, apparently the termite damage was much, much worse than we thought. The termites not only ate through part of the top layer of the floor, but they also ate through the subfloor and floor joices. I was not very happy about having to remove what I thought was the original wood floor. It turns out that the floor that was visible in the apartment was actually a new wood floor and what we thought was the subfloor was the original floor (aka the wide planked, hardwood that the termites ate). Anyway, it couldn't be saved and now we have this lovely view directly into the basement:



We also had a bit of an insulation issue around the window pictured above so that was also fixed.

Sigh.

Here is the comparison between the floors:

Top wood on the left and the original, wide planked on the right. The top floor is literally about 3 inches taller than the original.


Floor differences

Here is the last picture of the apartment (this is the bedroom area):


Moving out of the apartment, here is the happenings in the rest of the house.


I have no clue what is stacked up around here or where it came from, but this is the new fireplace area


Some of the double layered carpet was pulled up in the master bedroom (aka former mold room) upstairs. Here you can see the wide-planked wood floors.


Lastly, here is the lovely mold window. We will obviously uncover it, but right now there is no window here and we were losing heat.

That's all for now. No more trips are scheduled so more will be coming soon.

Jessica