Blogging Bessy

I decided I would start writing in hopes that it would begin to keep me awake. So far, it’s not working. I haven’t been feeling very good the last couple days, so I pretty much slept all day yesterday… which means hardly at all last night. The 3am wake up isn’t so bad as long as I get to bed at a decent hour. Which of course I didn’t. So I didn’t have time to take a shower and I can’t even imagine how horrible I must look to everyone else out there… Oh well.

The ducks are doing well… They are getting so big. I have only lost them once so far. But they came waddling back like it was nothing. Until I chased them for a good half hour. Justin came back yesterday and shouldn’t be shipping out again for a few weeks. Wedding plans seem to be coming together more or less. I will sure be glad when that’s over. I’m sick of planning! I haven’t really done much on the house lately since I’ve been so busy. Hopefully now that Justin is back we will start to get some things done…

I think that’s all for now…I’m gonna go have another cup of coffee…

Got everything moved out of the apartment last week. My dad ended up helping quite a bit. I’m glad that’s over with! Justin ended up coming home for a week – he flew in last Wednesday night and heads back on Thursday. My mom came up this weekend and helped me clean and unpack the house a bit more. It feels WAY better being able to move stuff in. And shower without sandals. Things like that… Justin spent most of the weekend weedwacking and setting fires to ant hills. Almost all of the yard is clear now…Just a bit more to go. Things seem to be finally coming together. I’m hoping that by the end of August everything will at least have a place and not just be a pile in the garage.

We have a pretty severe snail and slug issue that we decided needed to be addressed… The solution? Ducklings! Muscovy ducks are great at foraging and will eat slugs and snails. They also don’t need a pond at all. So we picked up two little ducklings in Lynnwood and brought them back to the house. I slept near them in the living room last night. The cat didn’t seem overly interested in them, which is probably for the best. She looked at them, but that’s about it. They are pretty darn cute. Justin told me I shouldn’t name them, but I did anyways… They are named Light Brown and Dark Brown. If you saw the picture you would see why… Dark Brown makes a lot more noise than Light Brown does. We haven’t been able to identify the sex, but hopefully we’ll be able to figure that out soon. We are hoping for a male & a female, or two females. Pictures will be up soon…

With Justin gone it has been quite the roller coaster these past couple weeks. The bathroom has been on hold for now, so it’s just an empty room with no walls taunting me. Mostly I have just been slowly moving out of the apartment, trying to get everything into the house. It’s been pretty slow going. The other morning I was laying in bed when a tiny little insect started crawling on the sheets over to me. Thinking about how the other day Justin said he found a tick on him while mowing the lawn, I decided to take a picture of it before killing it. I did not get a good enough picture to get any identification out of it. The next day I found another one and got a better picture. This one I sent to a friend who identified it as a bedbug…

A bedbug?! What the heck!! They can live in empty houses for up to three years without a host. And of course this stupid house would have bedbugs… So I moved into my sister’s house for the weekend after stripping at her door and decontaminating myself, I was able to stay there bedbug-free. She helped me pack up more things from the apartment and drop them in the garage, so they wouldn’t get contaminated by the bedbugs in the house. I called a pest control company and he came out to look at the bug I had since captured to identify it, before I decided to pay to rid the house of them. Turns out it was just a carpet beetle. They are not that bad and are pretty much everywhere. Whew! Dodged a bullet on that one!

Now I just have to finish moving out of the apartment, which should be much easier now that I can actually go into my own house!

Well it has been quite a long weekend. With Justin leaving our bathroom plans have changed quite a bit. He is not going to be back until July 16th now, so I’m not going to have a new bathroom until after the wedding. Sad face…

This weekend was mostly focused on the yard work. Justin wanted to get it “under control” so I could be able to maintain it while he’s away. Did I mention I hate mowing the lawn? So I mowed the front and one side yard while he weed wacked the five foot tall grass in the backyard. It got more or less under control. I’m gonna have my work cut out for me for the next month.

Bathroom progress has been somewhat slowed but we got new subfloors layed down in there. The new stud wall is in place and the new bathroom door has been framed. Not too many problems with that, except that when we went to take out the old door frame, the shower wall began to move… It’s back in place now, just needs new caulk. It’s starting to look pretty, though! The recessed light fixtures are in place and the laundry room has all of the switch boxes in. Just a few things left for electrical. Wish I was able to work on it while he’s gone…but he won’t let me.

Saturday we had our Snohomish friends over for a mini bonfire. It was fun to have people over. There’s still a lot of moving left to do before we can really entertain though. And now I get to move the rest of the apartment all by myself! Joy… Luckily there’s not TOO much…but it’s mostly just that little crap that you don’t really want to pack up and takes forever to move. It seems twice as difficult since the drive is so far. When I went down there friday I ended up sleeping all morning instead of packing. Maybe this next week will be better!

So not much happened on Tuesday. We got a hole cut in the ceiling and began taking out insulation. After about five minutes we were both extremely itchy and decided it would be better to get a suit than to take cold showers every day… good old insulation. When we had taken out the walls, there was no insulation – which is not that surprising. But when we took out the ceiling, there was rolled insulation primarily with blown insulation on top of it (AKA Pain in the ass). After about thirty seconds the shop vac was full of what looks like the inside of a pillow. There were many bags filled…

Yesterday we (and by we, I mean he) got the rest of the ceiling down. The attic, which didn’t have any access from the house before we cut into the ceiling, actually looks pretty good; which is encouraging. The floor boards in there are non-weight-bearing, so we can’t walk up there, but it looks like there is no major damage or anything. After the ceiling was down, the floor came up. There were hardwoods down there which are not really ideal for a laundry room or a bathroom, so we decided just to take them out. So with no walls, no ceiling, and no floor, Demo is DONE! And I couldn’t be more thankful.

Last night we also took a trip to Home Depot (So far we have been averaging two trips a day – no joke). We got plywood for the new subfloors, 2×4s for the new wall to separate bathroom & laundry, all the electrical boxes for switches and plugs, a new bathroom fan, recessed lighting cans for the ceiling, a new drill, and some other random tools. $500 later I am hoping that the room will begin to look like a room again. Surprisingly it’s already looking better. No more mexican fiesta/neon puke on the walls (or black mold). I’ll get some pictures up soon, I just need to find the camera cable to get the pictures. It’s in a box somewhere…

Yesterday I also headed down to Seattle and grabbed another load of stuff. Comcast came yesterday as well, so now there is internet at the new place! Only thing is that I forgot to bring the computer speakers, so no Glee finale…

The cat seems to be acclimating to the house finally. I had her shut in the bedroom for a few days so that she could get comfortable with the change. Then after waking up every ten minutes to her jumping, playing, scratching, digging, meowing, I decided that she was comfortable enough to go in the rest of the house. She had mostly been sleeping under the covers for the few days before, so it was a big difference. She had taken a few field trips to the rest of the house, but they were “supervised”. I decided that sleep was much more important than trying to control her eating something random, so I moved all of her stuff into our “Master Bathroom” (aka salmon colored tile room with partial plumbing and no fittings). She seemed to do fine last night. This morning when I got up for work she was pawing at the bathroom door just like she used to do at the apartment.

Justin got a call yesterday to go back to work. Monday he is headed for Nevada to help set up a hyperbaric system for a tunnel under Lake Mead. It looks like it will only be about 10 days of work, but that means ten more days til I get my new bathroom. And he’s going to miss my birthday. At least some money coming in will be worth it!

Since our current bathroom is absolutely disgusting and not functional, we decided to do something about it. The bathroom is very much a hallway. The actually dimensions are 4′ by 8′. Seriously…why would you ever do that?!

The bathroom shares a wall with the “laundry room” which is about 13′ by 8′ (HUGE for a laundry room). It has blindingly bright mexican colored walls (bright red, bright yellow, bright orange, and lime green) all with black mold growing on them. We decided that the room could easily be split into two – a new bathroom and a smaller laundry room.

Thus begins the demo. Sounds like fun right? No. It’s hot, sweaty, gross, dirty, and lots of airborne particles that can give you lung infections. Yeah! At least we got all the walls out thought. No major problems with that. There was no insulation in the walls which made it easy. And the wiring is all aluminum (the oldest most dangerous kind) so that will be disconnected and updated. Now for today we just have to take out the ceiling and floor then demo will be complete!

So far we have filled about 25 large industrial trash bags with drywall…and many more to come. Whew.

Today we rigged up the shower so that it will hopefully work now… We also dropped a hundred dollars on a low-end kitchen faucet (can’t believe how expensive they are – it’s ridiculous!) We bought the fixture for the drain, but then realized that we need an entirely new pipe because the broken piece can’t come off and the new piece can’t come on since everything is stuck together.

We headed back to Seattle to pick up some more stuff. Among them, we got Gracie to take her up there. She was not happy to leave, but seems to be doing alright. She slept under the covers next to me the whole night. Every time I left the room she would hide but then come out to explore while someone was in there. Hopefully she will acclimate soon.

I headed back to Seattle for an appointment and to finish wedding invites. My sister came over and helped me pack up some stuff to head back up to the house. With a couple bookshelves and one cute dog, we made the short treck up to the house. We arrived to find the dishwasher running (successfully!) and began unloading after a quick tour. Justin came home with a new lawnmower and some lunch so we sat down for some fuel.

During lunch, we discovered a dripping noise coming from the dishwasher. We discovered that the sink drain (where the dishwasher connects) had a crack in it, so when water shot out of the dishwasher, it overflowed out of the top and dripped into the cabinet below the sink. Luckily, it wasn’t the actual dishwasher that was leaking.

So I headed back to Seattle for a shower and then came back for another restful night. I’m starting to realize how great indoor plumbing is, and how much we take advantage of it…

Last night we packed up the storage unit into a Uhaul (only took two and a half hours). Today Christy and Justin unloaded everything into the garage. We still  need to move the entire apartment though… We also attempted to fix the drizzling kitchen faucet. It had gotten blocked by the rust that formed in the pipes and came out when the water got turned on. Instead of unclogging it, the cheap plastic faucet broke off. So now we have absolutely no running water since the bathroom sink is also clogged. I take that back… the bathtub works (not the shower).

I also decided to get the bed out of the garage and put sheets on it so that we could spend our first night there. While opening up the garage, we discovered that the track/wheels/springs are broken, so it’s quite difficult to lift. But I got the bed out, put on some sheets, and after a Hornsby’s crawled in for a good night’s sleep. I think this makes it official now.

So I’ve decided to use this blog to log my homeowner experiences as the house (hopefully) transforms into something…livable…? Maybe I will actually write some things about it so that we have a record. Here is what has happened thus far:

Today we officially closed on the house. We went up to Marysville and got the keys and headed over. We turned on the water and headed upstairs to check if there were any leaks…There were. The kitchen sink was leaking, so we did a quick fix on it and then turned the water back on. The other pipes just had large chunks of rust coming out of them, so we did our best to get clear water coming out. Justin kept thinking he heard a leak, but there were no other visible leaks, so we unloaded the one load we had brought up. When we were done and closing up the house to head back to the apartment in Seattle, Justin headed downstairs to lock up and found a giant puddle in the basement. Evidently the company that “winterized” the house had disconnected the pipe that goes into the water heater, so it drained straight onto the floor. We turned off the water, prayed that when the electricity got turned on that the sump pump would activate and drain out the water.

So it begins…