Movin' on up.

No work on the house today. I went and helped Kenley and Mike move into their new house. They are moving on up to the East side of Midlo. Turnpike. OK so maybe its not the East side maybe closer to North. They moved into this new neighborhood called Micheaux (MESHOE) Creek which I believe is French for-big house small yards. Nah, actually they have a nice big house and a large yard too. It's bigger than my 25'x140' slice of the Earth. So that's about all that I did today. Nothing really to report.

Oh by the way I have noticed that some people haven't realized that if a sentence or word is underlined like this then it is a hyperlink to take you to another place. I its kindof like the transporter in Star Trek

It beams you to another place in the web. Some of you missed the leprechaun news clip that I had last posting. You need to check it out. It is hilarious. Just to let you know, I know some of y'all look at this thing at work and I have a mixed audience so I won't be sending you to girls gone wild or Breasts are us or whatever else there may be. Funny story though..........So I know these guys that were at work one day (no it wasn't me) and they wanted to get this calendar from some burn foundation in Florida. The proceeds go to help children that have been burned etc. All very innocent. Well I don't know what words they used in the attempt to search for this calendar, but from what they said all this porn shot up on the screen. Not only did that happen but if you closed one box 5 more would open up. They were frantically trying to shut the windows, but it wouldn't stop. They eventually had to turn the computer off. It was bad they said. Luckily their LT was sitting there the whole time and knew that the whole thing was innocent otherwise they could have gotten in trouble. Anyways, funny story. That's about it. Watch what you click on.

What the????? and working on the roof

First of all people are stupid. We all know this. We see them driving down the road all the time. This only "re"emphasizes how stupid people are. I particularly like the guy walking around in the bullet-proof vest.

Speaking of trees I went up in mine again today. But let me back up. First today I made a bunch of phone calls to get the ball rolling on the electrical stuff which precedes the heating and air stuff which is brought around b/c of the heater that is dying in my basement. The boiler has a laceration that is bleeding onto the floor at the moment. (Translation it's leaking water.) Transfusions are also enroute. (We ran out of fuel oil.) Lets just say we had 100 gals delivered when we first moved in. I was concerned 2-3 days ago that we were going to run out soon so I put the dip stick in the tank. The reading was that we had 50 gals left in the tank. OK. So we have burned 50 gals in like 2 months. Not too bad. So Grace goes to take a shower this morning and no hot water. Blah. So I go to try to prime the boiler to see if there is any fuel and no fuel comes out. I am thinking the pickup tube for the tank is probably about 50 gals off the bottom of the tank for sediment reasons etc. So I call up to order more fuel. Then I call the heating guy to get the # of a new electrician that is better (ie cheaper) than the one that came out earlier. His name just happens to be Emeril. (Insert chuckles here) OK so he had the name before that guy. That's such a bad pic. Anyways, I talk to him and he will get back to me. I run some errands and come home. I then get back on the roof of the garage to start to tackle the root ball that has grown into my bricks. I start out with the chainsaw. Everything is going fine. I am getting some of the major stuff out of the way and then I hit a brick. I was being careful about how high the last row of bricks were and such. Little did I know, but the roots/vines must have penetrated the mortar in the last couple of rows of bricks. They then grew and lifted the bricks. So what I have are bricks that are basically floating in this root ball that is on the roof. I figured all of this out by taking a crowbar and prying/ hacking my way into the ball. I figure now the best way to disassemble the whole mess is to get the sawzaw from Steve (Graces dad) and surgically remove all bricks and offending roots/vines from the wall. So it was starting to get dark so I cleaned up by raking the roof (How many people actually have to rake the roof of their garage?) and put everything away.

Off the subject

So we decided tonight we wanted some cake. Grace wanted to try out this new thing that she found on her dieting website. You use pumpkin instead of any of the liquids for the recipe. You mix the pumpkin with the cake batter and cook.

Easy enough. Well. Our oven doesn't have the best control features to it. The temp controller is missing the numbers so anywhere under 500 F you kindof have to guess at, which is a fair amount of guessing. Well, we figured after about 30mins into that the temp was a little low so we cranked it up a notch b/c the whole thing was the consistency of jello. Well it pretty much finished baking and it tasted alright when we ate it. It was sortof like a chocolate pumpkin very moist cake.

Well, Grace went to go and put it in the fridge and all I heard was ........"Help me I'm melting."

Well that obviously wasn't a good sign. When I went in to look at the cake this is what I found:

I guess it was a little warm when the icing was put on. Well it's still edible.

If you never saw afternoon cartoons don't worry about the first part.

Brain: Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Pinky: I think so Brain, but where are we going to find rubber pants our size?
Brain: Pinky your an idiot.
Pinky: Sorry Brain. Zoink! Oh I know, I know. But I can't figure out the air speed velocity of an unlaiden swallow unless I first know if it is African or European.
Brain: NO. I don't even know why I have you around. I was thinking of why Andrew hasn't written on TMP for a while. He must be out trying to conquer the world.

Sorry we haven't put anything on this in a while, but it doesn't mean that we haven't been doing anything. Ok, so maybe it does. Technically we haven't done anything on the house, but we have been trying to earn money for working on the house. Grace and I both went on a LifeNet call on Mon which took all day. Tues Grace went back to work at Ten Thousand Villages on Tues. I went on a courier run for LifeNet. Wed I went back to the fire station and Grace was working at TTV. Thurs I had another call for LN. Grace to TTV. Fri another courier run for LN. Grace to TTV. Sat work at the fire station.

So we haven't worked on the house till today. Actually today you didn't miss much b/c it still looks the same. All I did was sand the walls some more in preparation of painting in the future. I wouldn't say near future b/c you see how long it's taken us so far. But, I would like to try this new look and feel program that has now been downloaded onto your computer. I just created this program the other day that is similar to the old scratch and sniff stickers that I used to get as a kid. I call this program look and feel. What you do is look at the pic that I have downloaded below and feel the picture. You will magically be able to feel how smooth the wall is through my new program. Lets try it:

What do you think? Pretty smooth huh? Well enough of the idle chit chat. I am going to go and try to conquer the world again, one wall at a time.

I startedworking on stripping the window sill again today. As always when doing mundane work the mind is thinking. And what I am thinking is that this is going to be too big of a pain in the A$$. So I call up my dad and we throw around some ideas. Well let me back up. The thing that is going on is that we have these window sills and door trim and the likes all over the place. Since we are working in the hallway we have a lot of it, with all the doors going to the bedrooms and the base board and such.
So, I am on the path of thinking that is this worth putting this much time on a small portion of the project known as TMP. So I decide to go the the websites of some lumber places around the area to see what the prices of new stuff look like. Well that doesn't help. I cannot figure out where the prices of said lumber is on the website.
So I have come down to a couple options:
#1 If I go to Lowes or seiwers or the Depot and see that the price of the window trim is fairly inexpensive then I might just tear down the old and put up the new.
#2 If the price will be a large amount considering that we have a lot of it to replace then I will tear down the old, carefully, and try stripping it in pieces and putting it back up in the same places. Maybe with priming it prior to putting it back up.
#3 Burn the house down and use the insurance money to pay for new trim.

OK so maybe #3 isn't that smart.

I also thought of some other stuff today. Grace and I are throwing around the idea of making a built in bookcase in the foyer. This bookcase would be taller than the one that we had in the dining room of the old apt on the Blvd. Prob about waist high. Or it could be to the ceiling. Respond to this post if you think we should have one waist high, ceiling high, stained dark wood, or painted wood (prob a light color.)
I would be building this which isn''t a problem. Its just if I am staining it then I would be going with the more expensive birch. If painting then I would be using MDF more than likely. We were thinking of this bc we have a lot of books and a built in case would work out better and we have all this space in the foyer. In fact I am going to find a pic of the foyer for your viewing pleasure.

So the book case would be where the bookcase is located right now. On the left side of the pic. This was the only pic of the foyer that I had, sorry.

I don't know. Let me know what you think.

Nothing

We did nothing new today. We got the majoity of the paper down. The only spot that is missing is one I can't reach at the moment. By the way, I was using the little giant ladder that I borrowed from my dad. It is working pretty well with one or actually two exceptions. Those are 2 spots near the top of the stairs. Now let me tell you. This little giant ladder can go in like 2 hundred different positions. It is worse than a kama sutra book. But it will not go in the one position that I need to complete the hall. I might have to build up one of the stairs to actually make it work. Well Grace is taking some pics of what we have done to the hall so far. So I will be posting them in a couple mins.

Here's a pic of the hole that I am repairing:
And here's the pic's of the exposed plaster:
(Note in the first pic the one spot that I can't reach.)

Long- Short Day

Today we had a a long, short day of working. We started late b/c I needed to go to work and do my time sheet. I then went to Lowes to pick up some supplies. Before I left to go to work for a bit we found that the belt to the dryer had shredded. So as I went to work Grace went to the repair shop to pick up a new belt. When we got back we started to work on the dryer. That took a while since we have never done it before. We got that working and it was already the afternoon.
We then continued to strip the hallway. I had gotten some pieces parts for the wall that had crumbled so I went to work on that. I had to first make up some wooden sticks to nail to the wall. then I took the wire mesh and cut it to size and nailed that to the sticks. Next was the mud work on the first layer. I put a thin layer on the mesh just enought to have a 1/4" on top of the mesh. That started to dry so I went to work on the wallpaper again.
I am starting to believe that the hallway is the hardest place to do any kindof work, b/c it is right in the middle of everything. It also has a high ceiling over the stairs thus requiring ladder work. The bad part is all the problems you find while doing the work. It seems as though the keys have come apart in the plaster and lath thus causing the ceiling to sag above the stairs. I may be able to keep it together by basically glueing it back to the lath and pushing it up from the bottom. This would require getting up in the attic and basically squirting a bunch of glue. Then someone on the floor would take this T shaped contraption and push the ceiling back into place. It could work if it is just the plaster that has separated from the lath. If the lath has separated from the beams then that is a different story. We won't think about that story just yet. Its not a good one.

Strip'n ain't easy

We started back on the hallway again. We were going and going taking off the layers. I was sanding Grace was stripping. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) Jason came by for lunch and all. The electrician came by. We started to go at it some more. Then our masks were getting pretty full of dust so I needed to go to Lowes again and get some more. While at Lowes I picked up some wallpaper removal spray. When I got back we tried it out and OH MY GOODNESS it worked so much better. I have used this stuff before but it never worked as well as this. The only thing that was holding us back was the speed of us scraping it off. We got like 3 walls done in an hour. it was crazy. We ended up using the whole bottle so tomm I will have to go back and invest in a gal of this stuff. I got some paint stripper too while I was there so we can take care of the window sills. We will start on that also tomm.
Thats about all that went on for today.

Sand sand sand all day long. Sand sand sand as I sing this song

Today all we did was start to strip the hallway upstairs. If you have never remodeled a house before it is interesting how lazy some people can be. There was about 3 layers of wallpaper and maybe 2 layers of paint. It made it a little easier b/c the last layer of wallpaper was so weak it was barely holding on. So you could put a 4" putty knife under it and scrap it off fairly easily. The hard part came where whoever puttied on top of the wallpaper. So you had a layer of wallpaper, putty, paint, wallpaper, and paint. It is sortof like a the rings in a tree looking at all the layers of decorating that had been going on since the house had been built. The worst part is the window and sill. There are so many layers of thick paint on there that we are going to have to get some paint stripper to get all of it off. We will prob start on that tommorrow. We finished up by cleaning up b/c our friends were comming over for dinner. We had put up all this plastic over the doors to try to control the dust and the upstairs looks like we are in a bio dome. But its taming the dust so its all good. Back to scraping and sanding tomm.

Getting rid of a few things

We started back on the jungle today with reinforcements. I went and got the chainsaw and the pole saw from my dad. What we really needed was some good ol' deforesting agents from the US Govn't. About 8 hours later you can actually see the bricks on the garage. Of course now that we piled everything up in the alley you can't see the door to the garage, but the city is going to take care of that for us soon enough.

Before:

After:

Mess at the garage:

After I posted last night I decided to try to put the new drain on the kitchen sink. You see the old one was leaking around the gasket so we had bought a new one when we went to the store yesterday. I figured that the way the drain was set up it would take the most 5 mins to change it out. Yea yea I know famous last words. Well lets see what happened. The piping was easy to take off b/c the guy just had that cheap screw on stuff. Not a prob. The difficulty came when I tried to get the main holder off that held the drain to the sink. Well I am sure there is some kind of special tool that fits over this thing to make it easier. My special tool of choice was a pair of vice grip pliers. Well the lugs on the screw were maybe a quarter of an inch long and would break off in an instant. The screw thing must have welded itself to the drain over the years b/c no amount of coaxing would loosen this thing. Insert choice curse words throughout reading this monologue and it would sound like you are live in the kitchen with me. So without being able to get this thing loose what would any good truckie do to get it off? Bend the heck out of it and break it away from the sink. So basically I took the vise grips and bent the whole overlapping lip on the inside of the sink into itself. This went on and on till enough of the lip was bent in so the drain fell from the bottom of the sink. Grace came back in after my exclamation of triumph and said "How did you get it undone? What did a cougar eat that or what?" Well, it wasn't pretty but I had a new one to put back on so it looks great now. It is not leaking a bit. And that was the rest of that story.

Taming the jungle within

Today we started the day out by going to Home Depot. I got tired of going to Lowe's so we went to a different place. We got home and started to work on the yard again. I first took the tiller attachment on the weed wacker and tilled up this little area that Grace was going to plant some flowers. The tiller is small but it was perfect for this job. Grace started to work on planting and I went around back.
The back yard near the garage is nothing but a jungle of vines and more vines. The vines are so bad that they are killing the trees back there. I attached the chopping blade to the weed wacker and went to work. I started slowly at first trying to not kill any good plants. Soon it became apparent that everything would have to go so I just started chopping. I would stop and pull some of the vines out of the trees. They would just come and come and there didn't seem to be any end to them. I eventually ended up with a large pile on the ground of a mix of vines and dead limbs. The problem that started to arise was that the piles were getting bigger and there was no place to take them. Well it needs to come down so I'll just have to find another way to get rid of the stuff. I eventually got to a point where the vines were too high for me to reach with the weed wacker so I climbed onto the roof of the garage to go for the arial attack. I made sure to sound out the roof where ever I was walking to make sure I didn't hit a soft spot and take a quick ride to the ground floor. The problem is that everything is becoming a mesh weaving within one another. The branches and vines and such are growing within the brick on the garage. I cut back a fair amount but the limbs and all are starting to get too big. I think I need to go and borrow the chainsaw to surgically remove the cancerous growths to my brick garage.
Anyways I raked off the roof of the garage the best I could and started to clean everything off and put everything away. It's time to take the dog on a walk so we are going to head on out now.
Till tommorrow.
Chow.

A picture is worth a thousand words....

Hello! This is Grace, the other half of the dynamic duo of home repair. Well, I don't really do any of the repair, I'm more the unpacking/laundry/cleaning half. Which, honestly, is more fun than it sounds because I'd much rather fold clothes then crawl around in the crawlspace. Although since Andrew and I have the week off and lots of lofty goals, I will probably have to expand my repertoire.
Since Andrew is providing the nitty gritty details of fixing up the house, I'll take on the more fun stuff... like pictures! Here is the outside of the house:

One of the things we really like about it is that it is not attached on either side. The porch is pretty cool too:

Note the neon green ceiling on the porch, with matching chair! (The chair came with the house. We were so lucky).

Next, the inside:

This is the foyer when you first come in. The living room is to the right:

After the living room comes the dining room:

To the right of the dining room is the kitchen:

Now so far, we love every room in the house. They are pretty big (well, big enough for us) and with some paint and cleaning will look nice. The kitchen, however, is a little small:

I am literally standing as far back in the pantry as possible to get this shot. Not only is the kitchen short, it redefines the term "galley kitchen." I think that kitchens in submarines are bigger than this. There is not enough room for two people to pass each other. Also, not the best design, with the stove and the dishwasher:

As you can see, you can open the stove. You can also open the dishwasher, although it doesn't open all of the way. The bottom rack has to be held out so you can put dishes in.

But, there is no way to both cook and do dishes at the same time:

Smart.

Next, the upstairs!

(Note the evil evil dog walking down the stairs. grrr.)

First, the little front room that all of the row houses in Richmond seem to have. It is currently painted a hideous blue (fortunately, you can't see the bright red trim. You should feel lucky).

We are currently using it to store all of the boxes of stuff we don't need right now, like books, framed pictures, and knick knacks. Some family members think we should use it to store babies, but that is another post.

Next is the guest bedroom/Andrew's office:

This is the bedroom that faces the front of the house. The one in the back is the one we use as our bedroom:

It is nice and sunny, and it even has room for our green loveseat. Off of the back of this bedroom is a little sunroom, which I'm using as my office:

This overlooks the backyard:

Just to keep everyone in suspence, I'll save the pictures of the basement, some cool light fixtures, and the opening of the oil tank with the brick on top for another post!

Update 15 mins later

Snickers- 4
Andrew- 1

Two at one time in 2 different locations.

The weather is here I wish you were beautiful

We had some nice weather today so I decided to work on the yard for a bit. I weed wacked and cut the grass. Grace was inside organizing more boxes and cleaning things. Today is our first day of the working vacation. We made up a list of stuff we would be able to work on this week. We continued to work throughout the day Grace in the house and me outside. We have Snickers (Graces parents dog) so I tied her up with some line and let her wander around the yard as I was raking. For being a small yard it took a while to even start to make a dent in it. The lady beside us old us that the guy before us didn't do much in the way of yard work. I am going to need a machete and some natives before I attack the jungle near the garage. But at least it's nice outside. One bad thing about warm weather is no A/C right now. I am glad it's not too bad yet.

Poop in the house total for the day so far (with a newly visiting dog):

Snickers- 2
Andrew- 1
(Dang I need to catch up)

Hang'n out in the basement

So I pretty much hung out in the basement today. I finished up the dryer vent. Of course to complete this job I had to go back to Lowes to get yet another section of flex tubing. I got some hose clamps and such and came home. Grace helped me mount the exit to the wood plate that I had made going to the outside and I started connecting all the tubes. All of the hose clamps had the screw type tightener to them, so I was using the screwdriver to tighten them up. I get to the last hose clamp that connects the hose to the dryer way up inside the machine. Well go figure that is the only hose clamp that doesn't have a screw slot in it. It is just a bolt. So lets do the math here (I think I have the numbers right). What size nut driver is larger than a 9/32 nut driver and smaller than a 11/32 nut driver? If you answered "My fingers" you are right. I couldn't find the right one to fit bolt and it wasn't metric. I didn't feel like taking the thing back apart to take out the clamp and have to mess with fitting that back on again so I tightened it with my fingers. Luckly it was easy enough to take care of and get the hose tight on there.
I then spent the rest of the day straightening up the basement. We got some free shelves from Grace's work so I rearranged everything to fit them up near the walls. As I was moving stuff around I would vacuum the floor to get up some of the accumulations of dust etc out of the basement. I also got rid of a lot of dark spider webs that seem to be all over. Some spiders will be homeless this spring. Please send money to the spider homeless shelter at my house to help support the need.
Speaking of donations I got a call from Charley today. He is buying a new lawnmower and is giving us his old one. It's more of a mower than we need, but its good and works well. He is just getting a new one and so he's getting rid of the old to make way. He also said that he's getting a new weed wacker soon so he'll give us that too. Sweet deal if you ask me. Kurt, my old LT, is donating 100' of 14 ga wire that was left over from when he rewired his garage. That will help with the wiring of the downstairs.
All in all it was a good day. Lots of stuff finished in the basement. So its good to go for right now. Next week we have off so lots of more work for the future.

Not too much today

I didn't really get much done today. I unpacked some boxes in the office to try and be able to fine all the important stuff such as bills and all. I pulled the Enron for a while shedding documents that I deemed not necessary. I like to shed all the credit card things that we get in the mail so when the bums go looking in the trash they don't find all the offers for a new platinum, gold plated, diamond encrusted, frequent flier mileage gathering hoopla of a Master card that has a low introductory rate of 0% and then after a year they start to rape you with high apr's, just so some bum could buy $200 shoes from thugs for life. Trust me it happened to me before, the pizza delivery guy ordered $2500 worth of stuff from timberland, thugs for life and various other fine establishments. Luckily, the Bank of America people were on the ball and stopped the payments before it became a mess. I mean I order from thugs for life all the time so I wouldn't have noticed the bill right away.
But anyways, I digress. I then went to Mom and Dads house to steal.....I mean borrow some tools. Then I started working on the dryer vent. The genius that lived here before us decided he didn't need a vent to the outside for the dryer so all the heat and lint and such went right into the basement. So It wasn't too bad. I just used the hole where the window used to be in one of the basement windows and made a small piece of board with a hole in it to accept the vent cover and the tubing. I painted it up some and as the paint was drying knocked out the rest of the window and old chalk. I then put the board up and re-chalked it. Its drying now and tomorrow I will put all the vent together. The heating and air guy came and we talked about some options. He is going to work up some stuff and let me know how much it is going to be. Of course it won't be all that simple cause I now need to get the electrical service increased also to accept the air units. So now I need to meet with the electrical guy to figure that one out too. But it will all get done eventually. Like the old joke says:
Everywhere is in walking distance if you have the time. (Steven Wright)

Day 1/2

I realized that I had forgotten to take about our first night in the house. We spent the whole day moving in. The lady that owned the house before us was supposed to have taken care of the back door which was cracked from what I can only think of from someone kicking it in. Or if I feel imaginative from the police SWAT team that broke in and arrested the ladies ex-husband that used to live here. Yea thats a different story in itself how it took 2 extra weeks to close on the house b/c they couldn't get the title straight due to the ladies ex who is in jail in West VA. Anyways, So we have a broken rear door and a furnace that isn't working. First the door. So trip #1 to Lowes to pick up the stuff to fix the door. I find this nice brass c-shaped plate to basically put the door into a headlock and hold it all together. Hmmm, Mr T would be proud. "Don't give me no backtalk sucka." Say that in your best Mr T impersonation and it would probably be better than mine. Sooo then I put on the dead bolt with little fanfare. Now it was time for the furnace b/c it was going to get a little cold that night. There is a little red button on the boiler that starts it up so I press that a couple times. No luck. I call up my dad and we decide it is prob out of fuel. Well I don't have any containers to put fuel in so I go back to Lowes. Second time today. I get some cans and then get some fuel from the gas station. I guess diesel is the same as fuel oil. Ah, who knows. I put it in the tank in the back yard, adding to the HAZ-WOPER site that I have going on back there. I go back in and press the magic red button. Nothing happens. I press again and a again to no avail. Call up dad again. Well he's like you need to prime it probably. Try to loosen the fuel filter and put some fuel in that. Well I think the filter is welded on to the line with rust so no amount of cursing makes it come off. I then call up the handy- dandy Heating and AC repairman at CO 12 on C-shift. He tells me there is a primer nipple on the front and to loosen that up and bleed the air out of the line. Well there it was. It was just like bleeding brakes on you car. I had a cup catch the fuel as it came out and so I took that and dumped it back in the tank. Now we have heat. The fuel truck came by a couple days later and put a bunch in so I think we will be good for a little while now.

First and second days

Well Grace and I bought an old row house in Carytown and it needs a little work done to it. The house was built in 1925 so it has a lot of nice old things about it. Then again it has some not so nice old things about it. Like the postage stamp sized kitchen. Well we will blow out a wall here or there to make it a little bigger. Anything is possible.

So I was inspired to start a blog by Grace's friend Aileen. I decided it would be a daily log "sort of" of the remodeling of our house, hence The Money Pit or I think I'll call it TMP for short. Yea that sounds good. So since I am technically doing this on the second day of remodeling I'll talk about the first day.

Day One
I was going to change out some of the plugs around the house b/c they were 2 prong and not 3 prong like my surge protectors and such. After flipping 30 breakers or so, we actually only have like 15 but I must have flipped every one twice or it felt like it b/c I was walking up and down the stairs every time that I would flip one to see if it was off or not, I finally got the one I needed to go off. I changed out the plug and I was on my way to the second plug that I wanted to do. I opened up the next plug after shutting off the power only to find that there were 2 wires coming out instead of one. I thought to myself, this is odd. So I started to take away some of the plaster to take the box out. Well I got the box out and come to find out that everything that is on this circuit has old knob and tube wiring. This wiring was put into houses pre- 1930. So I decide to see how hard it is going to be to take care of this and I decide to crawl under the house and take a look. Well little did I know they must have put about 2 inches of lime , or some other white powder in the entire crawl space b/c now I am covered in it. Luckly I had changed into some coveralls before I went under there b/c I was wearing shorts prior to that. So anywho I went crawling around and didn't find much. I came to the conclusion that we are basically going to have to rewire the entire downstairs, or at least everything that is on that circuit. Actually I will prob put the different rooms on different circuits and their own breakers just to help out on the long run. So then I give up on the changing plugs deal and decide to strip the paint and all in the pantry. This requires me going to Lowes to buy stuff which like my Dad said I might as well go ahead and drive past Lowes and throw my wallet at it b/c I am already seeing a trend of going there daily. I get home with my various impliments of paint destruction. I realize I forgot some stuff but I don't feel like going back today. Then I start on the pantry. Pretty uneventfull stuff and then I am at a good stopping point. I figure I will stop for the day. I take a shower and unpack one of the many boxes that form trails around the house. You know it takes me about a half an hour to find anything. I always end up opening 20 boxes just to find stuff to make coffee or 45mins to find a box of sscrews that I need. It sux. But anyways I am done for the day.

Day Two
Unpack some clothes to try to tame the whole box situation. The phone guy comes and goes so now we have a phone which is nice. Grace goes off to work and it's time for me to work on the pantry again. I need some heavier grit sandpaper so I go to Lowes again. I get some more odds and ends and come home. I start on the pantry. I get done and clean up. I am going to put down some shelf liner but after finding out it takes one whole roll for the one shelf, these are big shelves, I decide to nix the idea and put the cans and all on the bare shelves. We have plans to put the fidge in the pantry anyways so I don't want to waste the stuff just to rip it out later. I finish stocking and clean up. I decide to clean up the kitchen real well b/c we never had a good chance to do it before we moved in. I finish that up and decide to start this blog. It seems kind-of boring but maybe it will get better later. Who knows.