Breakdowns and Timbers

It has been quite the two weeks.  I apologize for not getting a blog post to you all sooner. 

I had a little bit of a breakdown last week.... 

Let me tell you the reason for my lapse in house pride.

The beginning of last week the electritians came over to start working.  My brother-in-law also came over to look at our bathroom and to give us his expert opionion on tile.  Little did we know they, along with our Uncle Steve who is doing the majority of the work on our house, were all conspiring against us.  Between the electrian, my brother in law, and Steve, they all decided that we were going to need to take down ALL the drywall in the rest of the house.  That meant the exterior walls and ceilings were all going to have to come down and the insallation along with it.  What?! I thought we were done with demolition, just last week we had been talking about picking out paint colors! We were supposed to be moving forward, not backward! That was my issue with it.  I was expecting to see things start coming together, not getting pulled apart.

What calmed me was our reasoning behind why we decided to do it.

We decided to go ahead and tear the rest of the drywall down because:

-We are doing A LOT of electrical work so opening things up would make things a lot easier/faster for the electrian.

-We found various wires chewed through by critters, so opening things up would help us have some peace of mind about the safety of the electricity in our house.

-The insulation that we could see looked like the same little critters were tunneling through the insulation and we were just worried that there were tons of nasties that we might be breathing in.  Gross!

-We had a lot of repair work to do with the drywall because of all the walls we had already taken down.  And the current walls were textured plaster.  So having to match the new drywall with the old stuff would have been very challenging.  And our drywaller told us it would probably be cheaper in the long run for us to hang all new.  Plus it would look sooo much nicer and be sooo much nicer to have all new drywall vs plaster.

I just kept going over and over those reasons in my head as I was getting blown-in-insulation all over me last week.  It WILL be worth it, it WILL be worth it.

And then, I learned something about myself.  When I feel like everything in the house is chaotic, I sweep. 

"Oh, I have to decide where I want all the electrical outlets?"  I sweep. 

"You need to know where and what kind of lights I want in each room?"  I sweep. 

"There is water dripping from the ceiling after the terential downpour?" I sweep.

"We had a bunch of shingles blow off the roof?"  I sweep. 

And that might have been another reason I was feeling so stressed last week.  That blown-in-insulation was everywhere!! And I didn't have time to sweep it up until the end of the week and it was just stressing me out!

But then I swept. 

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..................... Much better.   I've never been such a clean freak in my life but it just helps me feel like I have some control. 

Switching gears now, this happened too in the last couple weeks:



We had 3 of our trees cut down last week.  That was exciting! It was slightly unforturnate, however, because these trees were all a pretty good size and gave our house some nice shade.  However, that was their only redeeming feautre.  They are walnut trees.  

 

You may recall the waterfall of walnuts I encountered while tearing out the basement ceiling (see above).  Or the tons of walnuts found underneith the bathtub.  Or even the walnuts stashed in our fireplace.  Yeah... these trees are the culpret, or at lease accessories to the crime.  That must have been one ambitious little critter, he stashed them everywhere he could.  In the picture below, you can see he was storing them in the hallow center of this walnut tree. Bob, the Tree Guy, said that when the tree "timbered" there was a rush of walnuts from the bottom of the tree.

So we cut them down.  Many of you probably don't know the unfortunate truth about walnut trees.  I never did! But they are really terrible trees to have in your yard.  They are extremely messy with twigs and walnuts which is enough to drive you crazy.  But then we also found out that walnut trees are actually toxic to most other plants.  So that meant we would have a very difficult time landcaping around those trees.  So they had to go.  And go they did. 

Other things that happened in the last two weeks:

-We chose our front door

-We chose and ordered our bathroom fixtures

-The plummers started working

-Our 2nd dumpster was delivered (that's never a good sign)

-We chose the stain for our hardwood floors

-The electritians started installing can lights and outlets




Next week will be a pretty busy week so I hope to get something posted for you by the end of the week! We'll see!

And also, a quick shout out to our Nephew Max who turned the big 0-1 this week!