My Old House

Greetings All!

Sorry it’s been so long since I last posted. I did a LOT of planning in the last few months for my wife’s 50th birthday party, which was June 7th. We had about 70 guests to that party… so that tells you how much planning it took to pull off. And now, following that, we don’t have enough money to do much of anything on the house right now, other than take better care of what we already have… and sell off what we don’t need.

GARAGE CLEANING
I’m especially proud that I recently took a solid day-and-a-half to totally clean and reorganize the garage (which we haven’t been able to park a vehicle in for two years)!

I hauled out 4 1/2 55-gallon bags of trash / stuff we no longer needed.

I then vacuumed the entire thing… even the walls… and whatever ceiling beams I could reach…. and plugged up the holes at the base of the deteriorating exterior siding with foam. I sprayed down the base of the walls with insect-killer… and then started putting stuff back in there.

I’m also tore out a very old set of cabinets that were in there. These things didn’t have backs to them and were in VERY bad shape.

I can’t say enough about how wonderful it is to be able to take stuff like those cabinets to the Lee’s Summit landfill… anytime during weekday business hours and Saturday… and pay about $9 per pickup truck load to dispose of it! It’s a bit of a drive from my house, but I simply can’t wait on Independence’s one-Saturday-per-month solution.

I’m currently on-the-lookout for used cabinets…. especially the kind that hang from the wall. I picked up an oak kitchen cabinet from a garage sale for a measly $15. Had to put knobs on it, but otherwise it was in good shape.

We now have areas in the garage set up exclusively for “garden stuff”, “car stuff”, “bird seed (cans)”, etc. And I’m slowly doing more organization in there. My truck now fits inside. Terry’s still got a lot of her side-business stuff stored on her side, so she can’t get her car in there yet. She seems to have almost zero desire to anyways. Even when it was empty, she didn’t like making the large “S-turn” that it takes to navigate her car from the main driveway into her side of the garage.

CLAWFOOT REVEALED
One thing I did manage to do was remove the tile-covered plywood that was covering the clawfoot tub in our second floor bathroom!

Here are some pics!: http://www.myoldhouse.com/gallery/categories.php?cat_id=22

I was HOPING I’d be able to completely remove that wooden frame. However, there’s a gap between each of the claw feet and the floor. And the gap is just as thick as a new layer of flooring would probably be. Sure, I could still remove the frame until then, but you see, the supply lines going to the tub are solid and inflexible. I would think if I removed the frame, even though the “drop” to the floor would be quite small, it would probably put a lot of pressure on those pipes.

At the very least, I need to have shut-off valves installed on the tub, the toilet, and the sink before we do anything. I do have a list of plumbers that folks have recommended to me. And I’ve been intending to call them.

But my money keeps drying up. My wife’s work has cut back quite a bit in the past 8 weeks. (Seems like whenever’s there’s a holiday that causes a 4 day work week, they don’t schedule any business at all… I think because somebody in management takes that whole week off… and then it takes them 2-3 weeks after that to build up enough sales to require my wife to work steadily. *Sigh*)

I’ve been looking at ways to try to cut costs. Been posting a few things to Craig’s List. But I still seem to keep losing ground. We’ll see. I haven’t missed a meal yet. *GRIN!*

Thanks!

-= Dave =-