jonathanhickman.com

Not sure what this says about me

Tomorrow, I’m finally going to get to take a load of stuff to the dump. I’ve got a bunch of “gifts” from the previous owner that really need to be cleared out - everything from drywall remnants to an old bicycle to ancient car batteries (they can take those at our neighborhood dump) - and I have been dying to get the stuff out of the house since we bought it a year and a half ago.

I’ve just got to remember to carry cash to pay to get rid of it. It wouldn’t be good to get there with a load of junk and have no $ to pay for getting rid of it.

Anyway, I’m pretty excited. I’m even taking a day off work!

Doctor, it hurts when I do this

I spent just about the whole day yesterday painting J’s room. Until this weekend, the walls were an incredibly dry, flat, white. The walls probably hadn’t seen fresh paint since they were put up forty to fifty years ago. Not only were they incredibly dingy looking, they also had hand prints and other signs of wear. In short, they were depressing.

And it’s a really cool room, too. Our house is pretty unassuming from the front, at least as far as the size is concerned. But the lot slopes down to a creek in the back yard, so you can’t really get an impression of the size of the house except from the back. J’s room, on the back of the house, has an incredible view of the creek and park.

And last night, after I finished up with the second coat of paint, the walls glowed. I hope to have the room habitable again by the middle of the week (carpet and a new light fixture will come later).

Katie and I are pretty much through with the work on our bedroom for a while (refinishing the floors and installing new closets will come at some point in the distant future), and soon we’ll finish J’s and E’s rooms and get started on fixing up a first floor bedroom for C Bug. I almost feel as if the house is thanking us for bringing it back to life (which isn’t to say that the previous owner didn’t sink some serious $ into the house). It’s going to take us a long time to get the house where we want it, but we’re making progress.

And I feel that progress in most of my muscles this morning. Ouch.

*gasp*

That’s me coming up for air.

I thought I had a ton of stuff to blog about this weekend and today, but I just haven’t had a chance.

This weekend I finally finished painting the trim in our bedroom. When Katie and I bought this house a year and a half ago, the first major project I undertook was to paint our bedroom. I thought it was going to be a 2-3 day job, but I didn’t count on wallpaper. I spent a good forty hours just on the walls, and I never got around to the trim.

And you’d've thought I’d learned at least one lesson - every project in an old house takes longer than you’d expect. Yet I still spent a good twelve hours on the trim this weekend. I had tons of stuff I wanted to do around the house, and the only thing I got done was the white trim in the bedroom.

But I did get it done.

What the time change means to me

(Other than all the clocks being wrong, of course.)

What the time change means to me: when I get home tonight, I’ll have a good two hours to paint the fence.

Yay?

The joys of home ownership

I got home from work today feeling exhausted. Katie wasn’t feeling well, and we thought we’d have a fire. So after eating some delicious supper, supplied by my parents, I headed out for some firewood.

At our house, we keep the firewood under the mudporch. It’s a nice little outdoor room with a ceiling, 2 1/2 walls, and a brick floor. And it’s really nice, too, that I can get to the firewood via the basement - if it’s raining, I don’t have to get wet, and I don’t have to be outside in the cold for long.

So I wandered down through the basement, opened the back door, and reached up to pull the chain to turn on the light … and the light was gone. Someone actually stole the light bulb from the fixture. Bizarre.

Feeling a bit stressed about the theft, I decided it was time for my monthly inspection of the basement (I try to look it over pretty carefully at least once a month). And what did I find in the? Not only is our refrigerator taking the fast road to the great beyond, in a completely unrelated stroke of good luck, it’s also pouring water down the wall behind it and into the basement. Apparently, there’s a hole in the water line for the ice maker.

Argh.

I’m so going to do this

I’m so going to do this with our massive, ugly, ’50’s, cast iron, kids’ bathroom tub.

Have I mentioned this before?

I am psyched about all the changes going on in our house. Within weeks of refinancing our house, we had a fence put it. We’d been talking about doing that since we first looked at the house just over a year and a half ago, and now it’s in and getting stained (grumble). Then we bought our Elvis bed this weekend - also something we’d wanted to do since buying the house, and now it’s done. And the hvac people should be there any minute to replace the decrepit system upstairs - again, something we’ve wanted to do from the start.

Next will be getting the bathroom gutted and replaced upstairs and redoing a few bedrooms. I’m also hoping to get the floodlights out back rewired, replace a broken window, and put in a few more ceiling fans.

w00t.

Everything breaks sometimes

Well, I think I’ve got a few leads on how to get the stove repaired without having to buy a new one. Yay, right?

The first thing I discovered on getting home from work today is that the refrigerator appears to be rather quickly dying. Luckily, we do have a spare (this one came with the house, although it’s fairly new). But I probably don’t have to tell you how frustrating it is when everything needs attention, especially if everything needs attention during the one time of the year when I have zero time to spare.

Today, our oven shattered

I’ve never seen anything like this before, and now I’ve got to clean it up and figure out where to go from here. One of the kids accidentally bonked the front of the oven with a bowl, and the oven shattered all over the floor:

Gettin’ stuff done!

We’ve already got our fence up. Now we just need to stain it (how?!?), and the new hvac upstairs will be replaced within the next few weeks. Those are two things we knew we wanted to do when we bought the house.

Next comes turning the closet upstairs into a bedroom, putting some carpet down in the kids’ rooms, and giving them a working bathroom. And we’re already getting bids on that work.

w00t!

I measure fixerupers in terms of work gloves

Katie and I have lived in this house for about eighteen months, and I’ve already on my third pair of work gloves.

I can only imagine how many I would use if I had more time to give to house projects.