We first laid eyes on this house (well, the for sale sign outside of this house) on Nov 1, late at night. Since then we’ve visited it on a weekly, if not daily, basis, and this morning was the first time we’ve seen sunshine inside it. The east-facing living room windows get a faceful of morning sunshine that pours through the living room, into the dining room and down the hall. It’s just that the sun hasn’t really BEEN out since Nov 1. Everything about this house has been grey – grey stone façade, grey bricks, grey plaster dust everywhere, dirty grey peeling walls, grey brick buildings next door, grey sky outside the windows, piles of dirty grey snow outside. The house is tucked between two taller buildings, so I was concerned about how much natural light it gets. So even though it’s more customary to make the 1st floor the owners unit (opportunities to duplex down into the basement eventually), I wanted to live on the 2nd floor because natural light is everything to me. Seeing the sunlight pour in this morning helped reaffirm that decision. I’m trying to imagine what it will look like once we’ve added color to the walls and the floor is refinished to a nice shiny blond oak. The sunlight will bounce around and fill up every room, I hope. That is, until we can afford to install remote skylights (living in the future will be so awesome).
The rest of this week’s update is mostly pictures:
The 1st floor kitchen ceiling continued to deteriorate in the hunt for leaky pipes:
Mostly it deteriorated onto the floor:
Ben fixed some stuff with a hammer:
I won the door battle with our contractor:
We got to see (more of) the house’s bones:
They removed the wall between middle and rear bedrooms to make the new master bedroom:
And finally, they installed a rat slide! (The hole for the dryer vent was one of the places that rats have been using to get into the house. Now that there’s a dryer vent, it’s sort of like a water slide for the rats. Won’t the rats be surprised when one day they end up in a dryer! I guess we need some kind of mesh screen).
