a rainy weekend's accomplishments

it rained here finally. i kind of had forgotten that it actually rained, like it was some far off place you could only dream about but not visit. so we stayed home and worked on the house. well ... i worked on the house. sean watched football and worked on the house during commercials (shhh don't tell him i said that. he thinks i didn't notice). i do have to give him credit though - he did a job i would never do (ill get to that later though).

here are a few photos of my accomplishments

yep. we still have that hideous beam.

it was a lot harder than just painting because over the years the house had moved and the walls had cracked. and then some lazy person did a terrible job patching the cracks. so i sanded them down, re-patched the cracks, sanded again, and then sprayed with this can of stuff that adds texture to surfaces so the patched areas would blend in with the rest of the walls.

after about 15 hours of work, i finally finished. and then i treated myself with these little cuties

$2.95 each from anthropolgie. i thought it was a score considering the non-sale knobs were around $10+ each.

all in all, i would say a good weekend.

my handyman, mr. atwater

this whole process has made me realize how impatient i am. in the last couple of days, i have come up with four projects for sean for this weekend (things that i am unable or unwilling to do). he just looks at me like im crazy and keeps telling me that things take time. last weekend he rebuilt the porch columns - because if you remember, they looked like this. now they look like this:

next step: wrap them, and then guide the plants to grow up them.
project for today: start prepping the living room to paint it, and get sean on a project before the gator football game starts at 2:30 and productivity officially ends. my goal for him: seal some of the holes in the attic that critters make their way into our home through.

speaking of rodents - i think it's time for an update on the rodent war.
we haven't killed any new rats in about a week, though sean did ask me this morning if i smelled something funny (aka a dead animal) in our room. ugh. and yesterday morning i was sitting at the desk and above me i heard something running around and making lots of squeaks. after about 30 minutes of researching possum sounds on the internet, i convinced myself that a rat couldn't be that loud. oh, and on thursday in the middle of my bikram (hot and very sweaty) yoga class i found a rat turd on my towel. and then spent the next 30 minutes trying to decide if i should flick it off or leave it on my towel. ill let you guess what i decided.

tally: rodents are still winning.

phase one: complete

well the workers finished last week, and we have been enjoying our home. it's crazy how much we appreciate our home after living in chaos for what seemed like eternity.

after a couple of mishaps (which included drywalling our cat into the wall and covering three light switches), the guys are finally done. here are some photos of how our house is currently looking:

welcome to our home, E.T. lives here

for the majority of this week we were living in a scene from E.T. 

it was pretty terrible. the highlight of it all was the drywalls guys drywalling our new kitty in the wall. i came home for lunch one day to find the bedroom door (where i had locked the dogs and kitty), and the back door open. i didn't have time to find the kitty, so i just left and hoped that she would come out. in the back den there was a spot in the wall where the kitty liked to jump in and hide. by the time i came home at the end of the day the guys had drywalled over the spot where the kitty liked to hide and there was no kitty. after a (now hilarious) conversation with the guys (they don't speak english, so it involved a lot of hand gestures), they told me that the cat had jumped in the wall and that they hadn't seen her since. i then insisted that they take the drywall off and get the cat out. 12 hours later the kitty (now named lady olivia after olivia newton john from grease because she ends up being a bad ass at the end) came out of the hole no doubt traumatized. 

here are some pictures of the progress:

well that's all done, and we had a cleaning party thursday night. it feels so much better to have our home back. now on to the real work!

update on the rodent war

just a quick update. mostly because im grumpy and want to share my misfortunes.

i had a bag of bird seed in the outside laundry room and went in yesterday morning to find it open and a bunch of rat ('could be squirrel' - sean keeps saying) poop all around the bag. and i heard something rumbling around. so after hightailing it out of there, sean set a few rat traps. yesterday he came home and found a few that had been trapped. he was trying so hard to not tell me that he actually caught any, but i finally got it out of him. why i insisted on knowing the truth, i have no idea. so, with a few (im going to keep in vague for your benefit) dead rats, i have decided that we should keep a tally on this war.

here's where we are so far:

humans: killed a few rats, reset rat traps, going to get a free kitty off of craigslist tomorrow (name suggestions, anyone?)

rats: ate bird food and made it so i am scared to go into the laundry room
denied me a restful night of sleep for now 3 nights
made it so i can't have a chicken coop because rats like chickens
and caused me to scream out loud four times last night because i thought i saw a rat (including in my full bath), which then led to sean being on edge

the rats are still winning. but just you wait. by the end of this, im going to be spearing those assholes with my own hands.

piers and beams and hedges, oh my!

hello everyone! our major house repairs have been on hold because it turns out (to our surprise) our ceilings look like this:

pretty huh? our ceilings were really sagging, which we thought was due to the movement in the house and the old drywall. our solution was to replace it. sounds easy, right? house lesson #1: nothing is ever easy. the guys came to start the drywall work, and they found this below. they were kind of stumped on what to do. it wasn't just the drywall that was sagging, but the wood below too. a previous owner removed a wall at some point that was a major support for the living room ceiling. they just plain took it out. which leads to house lesson #2: don't remove a wall without asking a professional first.

to solve our sagging ceiling problem, our foundation guy, the drywall guy and his carpenter decided to pour some more piers (things that support the house from a couple of feet in the ground) and then build supports from there, eventually going up through the walls and to a beam that would go through the middle of the living room. i was imagining something beautiful like this:

but to our surprise we came home and found this

hideous, right? the one in the bedroom isn't so bad. but definitely not dreamy.

we have been standing around in the living room a lot looking at the big hunk of 14" wood that is hanging (off-centered) in our living room. sean last night thought of an idea - he is planning on framing out the piece of wood, and then boxing it in with nice wood. so we will potentially have a very large (but rustic) piece of wood going through our living room. and im also trying to talk our man douglas into putting one more beam through the dining room so it won't look so off - and because our dining room is still sagging (so it will serve a structural purpose as well).

while all of this has been going on i one day decided to take my frustration out on our hedges. they previously looked like this if you remember:

they were all thin and overgrown. so after lots of research, and asking sean a million times if i should do what the experts say, i did this

yep, i cut them down to 1'. they're so so sad now. in an attempt to make our porch not look so naked, i planted some flowering bushes in between where the hedges used to be, and some vines that will hopefully grow up our columns (and texas lavender and oregano). ps - like the column that is just a couple of 2x4s? that one kept falling down, and eventually just rolled itself down the hill and into the garbage. and after a couple of funny looks from the contractor, he decided to replace it temporarily himself. ha!

the most horrible, awful

im going to keep this brief for those of you that have sensitive stomachs ... the rats that previously ran this house had established our oven as their master bedroom. which i discovered after i tried to broil something. ugh, just thinking about it makes my stomach turn. after bribing sean to clean it out for me, and doing some rat poop shoveling myself, i went to buy a new oven on sunday. it's nothing glorious, but i absolutely adore it. it's most important quality: it's never had rats living in it. hooray!

nevermind, it is glorious - look how it glows!

the rest of the weekend was spent doing things that aren't too glamorous: hooking up a water heater and building a room for it, hooking up the washer and dryer, and cutting down a tree. speaking of, anyone have any suggests on how to cut the rest of this tree down? it's leaning pretty far over the house, and sean's kind of stuck on how to not have it go through our roof and/or windows.

the contractors are arriving this morning to start their work. hopefully by this time on friday, our house will no longer be crooked and have a kind of large crack running through the middle. ha!

here's a glimpse of what the middle of our floor looks like now. i don't know if you can tell, but it's pretty wonky. cheers to the paid workmen!