Holes!

First, there was a hole in our posting schedule, since I got halfway through a blog post on the mobile app, but didn't finish it and it didn't save. oops! So just in time for this weekend, I'm posting LAST weekend's adventures.

Eric went to the house a couple of times during the week to prep for the asbestos removal. That included removing the remaining grandma drapes, and unscrewing every faceplate in the house:

And then this happened last weekend:

Trench in the planter bed

BIG hole!

view of the hole that goes under the walkway and into the planter bed

The hole was not dug by us, but by the plumber who was fixing the sewer line and eliminating the multiple root intrusions from the tree on the other side of the yard. go roots.

While the plumber worked on the outside, I kept busy with (re)painting the master bedroom, to cover up the one wall of dark blue we didn't like and the rest of the white walls with a nice midtone gray:

Starting to paint over

I apparently don't like to paint with my shoes on.

I even made a friend!

When I finished the first coat of paint, I was about done with that task for the time being, so I moved on to making a mess stripping wallpaper in the art room (which I'm not supposed to be starting working on yet):

Wallpaper layers 1 + 2

The first layer came off very quickly!

And then I found layer 3. 

For now, the art room looks worse than when I started, thanks to the retro 70's wallpaper. 

From there, I moved on to something that was bugging me (literally) since the day we got the keys. All the windows in the house were cobwebby and many had dead flies lying around (ick.) So I popped out the screens and started sweeping down the window frames to get rid of all the built-up grime.

sticking my head out the window to peek at the other dormer.

I couldn't resist having some fun and sitting on the roof, since I had very easy access from the dormer that is shown above, where the two parts of the roof meet.

We did take some time off from working to celebrate my birthday and eat a LOT of food! It was yummy. When we got back to working on the house, we found a few more holes that we missed filling the first time around and filled those in, started on the second coat of paint in the master bedroom, then shifted work to the kitchen. We started pulling out all the old and dirty kitchen liners from the cabinets. We will be living with the kitchen as-is for at least a year before we make decisions on how we want to renovate it, so we plan on washing down the cabinets and adding a coat of paint for a cosmetic update to the kitchen. We plan on painting the wood white and the back wall a bright turquoise. If we think that the hollow doors won't handle putting on new hardware, then I will most likely spray them with an enamel spraypaint.

This lining is being a bit pesky and will take some extra work.

A paint scraper, some patience and a lot of ripping sounds lead to fairly easy removal of most of the linings

On Monday, the asbestos guys started their work in sealing up the house for removal. They work FAST! By lunchtime nearly every room was sealed off with plastic, and I forgot to take pictures but it is reminiscent of all the scenes in alien movies where they quarantine an area. :) By the time the gas company guy showed up to turn on our gas, everything was fully taped to the point where he couldn't turn on the gas because there was no access to the furnace. So we have to wait another week for the gas to work.

The asbestos work is done at this point, and tomorrow we get to see more holes. We will now be without flooring in the kitchen/dining room, a ceiling in the living room (too many asbestos layers), and some drywall and all the air ducts and registers that were insulated with asbestos. Photos to come.