House Update #3

You will notice now (standing in the kitchen) that the wall is gone! Yay!! I'll probablly fill in teh gap with lower cabinets and a nice counter top. That's the plan anyway. That wood paneling also gone. I'm sure teh floors under there are beautiful but we'll be getting to them last on teh list.
So here is the view from the living room. We need to replace several windows and want to replace all of them.
Yeah, so this was a great surprise. I'd dreamed one night that we pulled back the carpet in teh living room to fine a huge hole in the floor and out from it came this strange man with his odd daughter who informed us that they lived in the basement and came with the house. So imagine my weirded-outness when I pulled up the carpet to find... a different type of floor! we're thinking that this portion was originally a porch. Even the outside brick on this part looks different. So we'll have to add some hardwood to this little area (18X5) to match the rest of the house. Fun.
The surprise whole in teh wall is never as be as I remember it to be. This room smells like pee. They didn't clean so when their dogs or child peed on the carpet it soaked through and this carpet padding was different and is stuck to the floor at parts. I air it out several times a week and Aaron's dad scraped some more off teh floor so it isn't has bad now.
Why did I include this photo? As a tribute to Aaron's father who spent an entire Saturday of his life reattaching this electic meter to the house. No small task but necessary since the city refused to turn the power back on before it was done. I'm glad he knows about wiring and stuff. I'm also glad the city didn't make a huge fuss about it not being up to code (it's at the wrong height). I don't think they cared about that part. Or I'm wrong about the code....

So it has been several weeks now (like almost 3) and I've been to the house several days a week to do stuff. Usually I head over there when Katherine goes down for a nap and stay for like 2.5 or 3 hours. Aaron has been wonderful about playing with her when she wakes up and not harrassing me about his more involved daddy role while I'm working there. Yesterday (May 10th) Katherine got to go hiking with Daddy, Grandpa and great-uncle Dane so I got to work on the house for 9 hours (Yay!!!). That was great. But the pictures are now a little outdated. Currently every ounce of carpet has been pulled up, all the tack stipping upstairs is gone (okay, like 95% of it), one wall is covered in joint compound and another is further into the sanding process (in an effort to be rid of the textured walls), the ceiling crack has been patched and I'm trying to blend it in with the rest of the ceiling, the toilet is gone, Aaron's dad took out the bathroom floor (which contained asbestos), I tore off most of the bathroom wall and knocked out parts, the ugly wood paneling is gone to reveal ugly green paint, a huge crack in the livingroom wall has been filled in with Great Stuff (love teh stuff), Aaron's dad fixed a leak, I made another leak, the contractor created the open floor plan by knocking out our wall b/t the kitchen and living area, I've cleaned up all the upstairs mold and began in the downstairs, Aaron and his mom picked up the yard, and other stuff.

But progress has felt slow at times since not everything can be seen. Like tack stipping? Takes FOREVER. And peeling wallpaper border off - awful.