I'm so happy, I'm sick.

My personal definition of sickness is not eating on Thanksgiving. It’s my holiday. One I still get legitimately excited about. And this year – like last year – I spent it curled up on the living room floor, sleeping the day away. Not that I’m complaining about sleeping all day…that was nice. The food thing still irks me a little though.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I’ve got a version of the same thing everyone has lately. Cough, sore throat, running nose, achy, hot/cold, sweaty/clammy, tired, dehydrated, no appetite..Basically worthless. There for a while, I legitimately thought it was the Mesothelioma catching up with me from ripping out the old insulation. I stopped short of calling the Law Offices of So-and-So for my free consultation because my dad ripped out way more than I did and he seems Meso-symptom free.

So, I’ve been drinking plenty of water, eating lots of oranges (thank you FFA fundraiser!), and sleeping almost constantly. This includes while riding in cars with friends. In addition to my newfound narcolepsy, I seem to have also found a drywaller! My local guy came through! Disclaimer: he was a little slower getting started than he let on…but I also called him last minute after he had sworn off new jobs for the year and persuaded him to take me back.

The last two days have been mostly prep-work – fixing screw heads, putting the corner strips on (including the cool flexible ones for the arches), and getting set for the real deal. In our conversation last night, he thought he might be done a day before he initially planned, and that he would have the entire house taped by tonight! That fancy equipment makes things easy!

Pictures to follow – I’ll sneak in after he’s gone tonight and check progress. It’s coming together, gang!

Windows: IN!

Thought I’d take a moment to show you my new windows!

Once we’re a little closer to finishing, I’d like to see about adding muntins/divided lights to the upper panes so the windows will look more like the originals. That could be a ways down the road, though.

Anyway, we’ve installed the six windows in the back of the house – this is the area that will get sided this year. The remaining windows will be replaced next year (or the year after) when I get to siding the rest of the house. Since finishing the windows, we’ve started – and nearly finished – insulating the back of the house. Once that’s finished, it’s time for us to hang more drywall and for my mudder/taper man to come and work his magic.

Kitchen windows - right over my imaginary sink.

Speaking of siding, I got a phone call this morning (before I even got out of bed, thank you) saying that they’ll be delivering it tomorrow which is a few days earlier than anticipated. No problem: I’ll just have to make a run to the store to hunt down the window/door trim I want and pick up the corner pieces that work with fiber cement siding.

Big hole for a big bedroom window!

Big things happenin’!

Playing Catch Up

Hello again!

In the time I’ve taken between updates, we’ve hit a stall in our progress. At the moment, we’re waiting on a coordinated effort among the cement contractor, the electrician, and the electric company. Getting everyone’s schedule to align (even without including my own schedule) is proving to be a slight challenge.

What we need is this: the current electrical meter is attached to the side of the house right outside my side entrance – when we built the garage addition, we thought it would be awfully nice to move the meter to the alley side of the addition and bury the line through the backyard so it’s both out of sight and out of the way. This is a matter of aesthetic preference and practicality – we need the overhead lines out of the way if we’re going to re-roof the back of the house, let alone reconfigure the pitch of the roof.

Once we have our trench dug (32” deep – which seems excessive to everyone but the City code), we can bury the connection from the existing breaker box in the basement to the new breaker box/meter in the garage. The new breaker will connect directly to the incoming power source and will run the circuits on the back half of the house. Running the circuits in the back of the house from the breaker box in the garage will save a small amount of wire/money, but will save more with regard to time and energy involved in installation.

At any point during this process, the electric company is supposed to be coming to remove the power from the house, trench through the alley and backyard and reconnect the power to the new meter box at garage’s new meter socket. (I learned that a meter socket is a fancy word for high priced metal box. It’s the housing for the dial that records how much power you’re consuming.) In speaking with the territory manager, I found that the power company we have locally will provide 25’ of trench and 25’ of cable free of charge. Anything past 25’ is charged to me as the homeowner, but the charge is pretty minimal when you consider I won’t have an overhead wire getting in the way of the goings-on at the jobsite.

Once the power shenanigans have been resolved, we can get to work on the roof.

I’m in the process of finding a new roofing contractor. The one I had contacted and verbally committed to has more or less flaked on me…which is unfortunate because I received a great bid from him. So meeting contractors starts again. It’s not my favorite part – they’re pretty quick to tell me I should’ve just built a new house. It’s unprofessional to stick out your tongue at someone, otherwise I might.

At any rate, we got a pretty good deal on the materials for the roofing project. Trusses conveniently went on sale and there was an 11% rebate on most other building materials – including sheathing, shingles, building wrap and all the other odds and ends we will need. So, in an effort to save money and a little time down the road, we bought most of what we’ll need in the near future and then some. I likened spending all that money to ripping off a Band-Aid…do it quickly and it won’t hurt as much..