one of the simple pleasures of rehabbing a house is the seemingly bottomless opportunities to make caulk jokes. i sure caulked that up. nothing that a little caulk won’t fix. hang on, i’ve got wet caulk on my hands…for the 14-year-old boy in all of us, it never stops being funny.

like making fake blood, caulking things is on the list of weird tasks i happen to be really good at. there were several months, back in 2011 or so, that our apartment in berkeley was overrun on a daily basis with EIGHT INCH WIDE RIVERS OF ANTS (i do not exaggerate). first we tried all the hippy, natural solutions (orange peel spray, cayenne pepper, borax and sugar water traps), then we tried the ant baits and pesticide sprays, and finally an exterminator. but the only thing that was really effective was to determine where the ants were coming in, and caulk up that crack. over the course of one rainy, angst-ridden and ant-filled winter, we slowly but surely hermitically sealed up that apartment.

finally, something good came of all that ant-related ennui. i’m good at caulking bathtubs, sink surrounds, window casings…you name it.

it’s been a couple of weeks since the last update on the house and we’ve done so. many. things.

ben, with help from his father, installed window and door casings and basedboard through the entire rental unit. now i’m coming through and painstaingly filling, patching, sealing, caulking, sanding and repainting all of the trim (reinforcements in the form of my mother are coming in next weekend, thankfully). it’s an enormous job.

we also: fixed the garage door, programmed new garage remotes, caulked the bathroom, bolted down a toilet, installed towel bars, installed robe hooks, key hooks, tool hooks, pants hooks*, hooked up doorbells, put up clothing rods and closet shelves, fixed the thermostat to the wall, started setting up the basement tool room, selected and ordered cupboard hardware, trued up cupboard doors, diagnosed, ordered parts, repaired and re-installed both dishwashers (one of which broke again), fixed the gasline to the stove, tested the bathtub for leaks, took apart and repaired the bathroom door, had the city replace the exterior water valve (which involved digging up our sidewalk and replacing it with a big pile of gravel), made no fewer than a half dozen trips to hardware stores, and like a dozen other things that i can’t remember right now.

nearly all of this work was done on the rental unit, and a good part of these tasks also need to be done in our apartment eventually. but it will be a lot easier to do this stuff once someone is helping us pay our mortgage. because, in addition to all the work listed above, we also photographed the apartment, made it a website, posted it on craigslist, held an open house, accepted applications, checked references, ran credit reports, wrote a lease, and RENTED THE APARTMENT!

we’ve gotten so used to the rental apartment being ours as well that it will be strange when we can’t walk through there. but having the first floor look occupied will be good for security as well for our bank account.

there were months where we were so impatient for the contractor to just get out of our way, and finally this past month we’ve been able to dig in and get our hand dirty and actually fix stuff. these are the simple pleasures we had in mind when we started this crazy journey 9 months ago. to fix something instead of buying a new one. to build something permanent instead of only investing in the transient. to have a place to use all the power tools that we received as wedding gifts. to (someday) construct the awesomest bookcase ever**.

* pants hooks 1) are a thing and 2) are key to my husband’s method of wardrobe organization. but then again, i have three different categories of tank top, so who am i to judge?

** we sometimes refer to this mythical, future bookcase as the 6-figure bookcase, since the desire to design and construct our own built-ins is what sparked the entire house purchase in the first place.

we’ve move in! i fear that our lives may never be free of plaster and drywall dust again. i’ve already mopped more times than i probably did in the year and a half we lived in our last apartment.* the cats don’t yet respect the territorial boundaries, which means that every time we leave the gate open one of them invades the other half of the house (dubbed East Germany and West Germany based on the cardinal layout of the house). snarling and hissing ensues until one of us chases the cats back to their respective Germanies. the other night we woke up to such an incident taking place on our bed. i cowered under the covers while ben yelled sleepily over the sound of their caterwauling, “wrong cat! wrong cat!” the double move has been a stressful transition for the cats, made worse by a parade of movers, electricians, inspectors, and in-laws tromping through during the first week of residence.

the really good news is that the house finally, on the 4th try, passed the city’s electrical inspection. the politics of this issue are complicated and not very interesting, but suffice to say that our house’s electrical system is reeeeeeeally safe now. the only item left on the contractor’s punch list is the water pipe seeping in the basement, and then he is out of our lives for good, fingers crossed. but to fix the pipe, the water has to be shut off at the street. to turn that off, a faulty valve must be replaced. to get to the valve, the city deemed it necessary to cut down the ginko tree in the front yard so they can backhoe the whole front yard (it’s a VERY small front yard). in another situation i might have fought to keep the tree, but this news arrived in the midst of move, tech, frantic unpacking, painting and carpentry. so i just rolled over and accepted the loss. once all is said and done we’ll pick out a new tree to plant out there. maybe another ginko, as they are supposed to be a sign of good fortune and prosperity, and I think the shape of their leaves is neat.

the rule i established in the last post continues to ring true: our dishwasher washed exactly 1.5 loads of dishes before giving up the ghost, and the next day the garage door jammed shut (thankfully with the car stuck outside, not inside). back to hand washing dishes and parking on the street. which frustrating, but we’ve both lived many years without either of these modern conveniences, so they go on the bottom of the list while we concentrate on preparing the rental unit instead. once there’s an income stream coming from the rental unit well be in a much better position to tackle repairs that require service calls.

there was a deadline for getting the rented moving boxes unpacked and returned; after that we’ve tried to turn our attention away from our apartment and focus on getting the rental unit ready. ben’s father and step-mother came to visit last weekend; while i was in tech and working 10am – 1am shifts every day, Ben and John put up half the moulding in the rental unit and Michele cooked meals and unpacked all of our kitchen and books. for which i am eternally grateful, as “unpacking” would otherwise have literally been dumping the boxes out on the floor in heaps an hour before the box company came to pick them up. with Michele’s help there is a functional sense of order to the apartment that will carry us through the remaining weeks of work on the rental unit.

books on shelves and dishes in cupboards go a long way, but our space still looks raw – there’s no window or door casing or baseboards, so you can sort of look into the guts of the house. i suspect the danger is that we’ll quickly grow used to it and stop noticing how unfinished it looks. the fact that we have to get the house reappraised and refinanced within a year will provide a useful deadline; otherwise there’s the risk that 5 years from now we still wouldn’t have any moulding up. there are no window coverings, so we just try not to walk too close to the windows while naked (no sense in offending the neighbors before we even meet them). none of the closets have shelves or clothing rods in them so stuff sits in boxes and suitcases and heaps on the floors.

and those pesky jobs, which pay for us to have this nice new project house, they want our attention, too. Ben left for California last week for work, and I’ve logged three 70-hour work weeks in a row.

to say we’re stretched thin is an understatement.

but at the time of writing, i’m on a flight to California for a much-needed, long-anticipated 4 day vacation from all things house and work. i will dress like a viking and run across san francisco with my husband, brother and sister-in-law. i will meet my 8-week-old nephew for the first time. i will go to Maker Faire and be inspired by all the cool creative things on display, i will hike in marin county, go for a run across the stanford campus, eat tofu tostatas in Mill Valley, admire the fog rolling across the bay, and maybe, just once, sleep the ef in. we’ll be back to house and work reality on Wednesday. till then.

* cleaning is really really not our forte

so, i think that this photo pretty much summarizes everything about the quality of the work that the previous owners did in our house:

(that’s the sticker explaining how to install the bathroom medicine cabinet. which is most definitely installed upside down).

ben and i have a new rule for the MoneyPit: just because something breaks off in your hand doesn’t mean that you broke it. we’ve spent the past 5 months fixing the big things that were done wrong; now i expect that we’ll spend most of the next year chasing down the little things. bathroom vanity installed upside down and so high that my under 5’4″ guests can’t see themselves in the mirror. crooked kitchen counter jams a drawer shut. the kitchen faucet leaks back down into a bucket under the counter. the bathtub handle doesn’t stay on. doors that won’t stay shut, or won’t stay open. mushy floor boards that need to be pulled up and supported. rain water that seeps under the shed and down the basement stairs. rats (or rabbits. let’s hope for rabbits) that tunnel in under the back stairs. gutters that leak directly over the back door. the list is WAY too long to post it all here. and this is before we start making the upgrades and hacks that were the whole reason we WANTED to buy a house. a customized bookcase installation. premium kitchen lighting. closet shelves that make sense. a basement workshop. backyard fire pit. a coldframe for starting tomatoes early. raised vegetable beds.

still, it’s ours. we’ve both lived in other apartments with at least as many broken items, but have never been free to just FIX things, because they weren’t our buildings. there was nothing to invest in. i know that buying a shiny, fully-equipped and modernized condo makes a lot of sense for a lot of people in a lot of housing markets, and i don’t doubt that there will be days in the future when i want things to just work. but for our own first house purchase, we couldn’t wrap our brains around buying a box of air*. we wanted the visceral experience of getting dirty and using our hands to make things. well, we got that. plenty of dirt, plenty of stuff to make. about 20 years’ worth, i’d estimate. there will be days that i hate this. i pretty much hate this part right now – walled in by boxes, electricians tracking drywall dust up and down the apartment, our domestic lives generally in chaos. but if we can look past the toughest six months, i’m still glad we opted for the project house.

* i realize that the definition of ownership, and the freedom to customize, varies greatly with the condo building. but i was particularly struck when a coworker, years ago, explained to me that in her luxury high rise apartment building, she technically owned her unit from the paint inwards. all i could think was how bizarre it was that she owned a million dollar box of air.

in the owner’s unit, we combined two bedrooms to make a larger master bedroom and closets. when the dividing wall and closets were ripped out, it left a track in the floor where there weren’t any floor boards. our floor refinisher did an amazing job repairing it. he felt like it was a compromise to leave a vertical stripe, but i sort of like it. it tells the story of the house’s history. i’ve lived in many rental apartments with inconsistencies like this, and i love trying to guess how the house might previously have been laid out based on clues like floor board patterns, mismatched moulding, bricked over windows or doorways.

so…we didn’t quite make it. the painters fell behind, then caught up, but in the mean time we’d pushed the sanders back, and then there was a more extensive bedroom floor repair to be done, and we decided to add another step to the floor refinishing to better mask some stains, and then the floor guys made off with the keys and the painters had to wait in the rain…and the end result is that tomorrow we are moving OUT of our apartment, but we are not moving into the new house for another week. all of our stuff is going into the garage and basement, Eddie is off to live with our friends Chris and Carly, and Ben and Zeke and i are moving into the basement apartment of our friends Mark and Collette. where would we be without the generosity of friends!? (living out of our car with two cats who hate each other, is the answer). if all goes accordingly to plan (what could go wrong?) we’ll move into the new apartment the following monday.

this is what the floor looks like after the first pass of the sanders (the old color can be seen around the edges which hadn’t been touched yet). we had hoped to do a clear coat and leave the floor in the pale natural oak color, but as predicted, a 110-year-old floor has some stains and damage that is best masked by adding a deeper color. sunday i had the following conversation with one of the guys sanding the floor:

him: “see, there’s a stain here.”
me: “what is that, do you think? is it grease?”
him: “pee pee.”
me: …
him: “might be dog, or human, or cat. it’s pee pee.”
me: “right. can you sand it out?”
him: “nope, can’t get it out. it’s like a cancer. a cancer in the bone.” indicating his elbow joint.

most people are usually more euphemistic about the source of stains, but i appreciate his no-nonsense approach. however i admit that my first attempt to parse the cancer analogy just led me to think, “will this spread? is my house going to die?!” though i realize that he was actually saying, “don’t ask me to get it out because i can’t.” it’s not as gross as it sounds, like, there isn’t actual PEE soaked into the floor. the boards are just a darker shade and it goes so deep into the wood that they can’t sand it away.

still, stain or no stain, i continue to be amazing at how well the bones of this house – the wooden beams, the floor boards, the sandstone and brick – hold up over more than 100 years. even after all the work we’ve put in, and will continue to put in, this house will have it’s imperfections and quirks. i’m okay with this. pee stains and all.*

* seriously, don’t be grossed out by the floor. i promise it’s sanitary.

so in the last two weeks, the house has gone from looking like this:

to looking like this:

that’s actually just a corner of the pantry; but it was the cleanest, whitest, smoothest surface in the entire house.

i spent some time narrowing down the paint color selections:

and the apartments are being painted at the time of writing. and i’m amazed but delighted to discover that, so far, i love all of the paint color choices i made. it’s a nerve-wracking process, color selection. ben left it up to me aside from retaining veto power, which he exercised only in minor ways. it feels a little wussy, paying someone else to paint. but it will take 3 professionals 7 days to paint both apartments. the two of us, working nights and weekends, would have taken a month to complete the painting, and that’s another month that we’d be paying rent on three apartments. in the end, it was cheaper to pay someone to do the work quickly. i’ll have to settle for painting the closets fun colors later.

the contractor is finally out of our hair, minus a few lingering issues like the pipe that is still seeping in the basement. and the rodent problem, as evidenced by the little rat foot prints left overnight in fresh concrete:

we got to see ben’s basement stair design fully realized (rat prints and all)

and more importantly, the inspector signed off on it.

the new windows went in, and watching those go in (from our usual spying spot in the cafe across the street) was amazing. the window guys were like cats. or, like cats who are really good at installing windows, that is. perfect balance, zero fear of heights. if there was an olympic event for tearing out and re-installing windows, i would totally sponsor these guys:

Ben installed shower curtain rods. I fixed the bathtub faucet only to have someone else snap it off 2 days later. I razored every sticker off every surface in the building. Ben installed some more door hardware. i boiled door hardware. there was some paint archaeology.

we still don’t know if we’ll move in on time, or be homeless as of next tuesday.

We have a clean white box!

so much to do! No time for blogging! So, I leave you with this portrait instead:

there is a threshold for how much time we can spend in the house on any given trip. before the gas was on, we could only stay in the house as long as we could stay warm in coats and hats in 10 degrees (about 20 minutes). then, without water service, we could stay only as long as the next bathroom break (about 4 hours, if you planned your beverage consumption appropriately). now the water is finally on, which has extended our threshold for spending time in the house considerably.

currently we are able to stay as long as daylight lasts, because most of the power has been temporarily disabled again. it’s a two steps forward, one step back kind of thing. we can stay for > 4 hours, but only if those 4 hours fall into the daylight set. (can someone tell me how to write that in math notation? i wish i still knew.)

for weeks we’ve been asking when the water will be turned on, and not really getting a good answer, until now. it turns out the problem was that there was one bad solder joint left to repair, but it was in front of the first water shut-off valve. so the water needed to be turned off at the street level before it could get fixed. it has been slowly leaking into the ground against the front wall of the basement for who knows how long. the complication was that the ground was so frozen that no one could get to the water valve. once the ground thawed, they dug up most of the front yard looking for the valve before giving up and calling the city. who came out and apparently only pretended to off the water. sneaky city services. but someone attempted the repair anyway, failed, and left the joint basically at a steady trickle (like, at the same rate as a water fountain) overnight while they waited for the city to come back and really turn off the water. for an additional service fee of $40. because that’s how chicago does business. Ben and i go by the house most nights after work to check on progress, and on Thursday we discovered the basement floor covered in puddles, and water basically running down the pipe into a hole in the floor. and by floor, i mean, the place where the concrete basement gives way to bare dirt. we raised hell, and the foreman was sent out, and a call was placed to 311 for overnight service, but nothing really got fixed until the next day.

the water in the basement evaporated/drained pretty fast, but i am concerned about what is under (or rather, no longer under) the house in that area. the next day when the contractor called to say, “your water is on!” Ben translated that to, “your sinkhole is ready!” i do kind of worry that someday soon the front of half of the house will just sink 6 inches or a foot without warning. we should probably get a foundation guy out to look at it. but for the short term, the joint is fixed and we at last have water service. toilets that flush! sinks with running water!

the power is mostly off because electricians are working seven days a week to finish what is turning into basically a completely new electrical system. it was regrettable that we had to do it, or rather that we started this project without knowing that it was necessary, but i am glad that this will now be this:

the other success for this week? the burrito is gone!

one of the things that drives me bonkers is how filthy the house has gotten. the construction dirt is one thing, but the garbage is another. the tradesmen leave in their wake a spectacular trail of half-eaten food, takeout containers, coffee cups, wrappers, tools, boxes, discarded bits of wood and wire and conduit and receipts and whatever else just falls to the ground. has it occurred to no one to bring in a garbage can? or to repurpose a plastic bag? or to sweep up at the end of a work day? i am a deeply cluttered person myself, but there’s a difference between clutter and pure slovenliness. it speaks of a lack of respect for the job and the work that is being done. theatre carpenters may leave a trail of sawdust behind them, but my guys clean up their shop every night and put away the tools and through that, demonstrate respect for the space in which they work. and in turn, it raises the quality of the work that they do.

(i’m still getting to the burrito part, bear with me). of particular note was a big box that had become a trash box. someone had thrown the remains of a lunch in there, and it got rotty and more and more smelly. and the worse it smelled, the more stubborn i got about NOT TAKING IT OUT MYSELF. we worked every night for a week pulling moulding down amongst that burrito smell, but still i did not cave. in the end i won. i waited out the carpenters for more than a month. but, when we came in this afternoon, no more burrito! i win!

actually, everyone wins now that the burrito box of horror is now gone.

today we made what is becoming a regular weekend sweep past two of our favorite salvage shops (reBuilding Exchange and Salvage One) and picked up a few more bits of door hardware. i am about to start boiling these door plates in a solution of hot soapy water, as the internet tells me that is a good way to get the layers of paint off. or make a deadly soup for your worst enemy. either way. for obvious safety reasons, the directions recommend that you do not use cookware that is used for food prep. that’s okay, because i have pots for cooking food, and other pots for making fake blood in.*

we also went to home depot and bought all the door locks and had them rekeyed so the various apartments and common areas all coordinate. it was easier to do it ourselves than trust that the carpenters were going to buy the brand we’d spec’d or coordinate the right keys with the right doors. ben is installing them now. because he’s awesome. and we’re really impatient to get into the house, there are less than 3 weeks until moving day, and this is something that we can do.

we started packing. ugh. because when all the stress of the house renovation becomes too much, what we really need to do is come home and worry about having to move. but i am kind of excited about trying out this reusable moving box service.

this week we also began the dance of scheduling the window replacement, the floor refinishing and the painting. all of those things we bid out to other contractors, so this is where we’ll begin functioning as our own general contractor. which honestly, can’t be any harder than chasing down our contractor and trying to get him to actually communicate the information we give him to his foreman and crew.

the really good news is that we found a place to stay for a few weeks in may if we can’t move into our new apartment by april 29. a friend is working out of town and generously offered us use of her apartment and will even let us bring the cats. so while i am not psyched about possibly having to move twice (while in tech for my biggest show of the year) i am thrilled that we won’t be living in our car with two cats who hate each other.

it wasn’t looking so good around Thursday (burrito, flooded basement, possible homelessness), but by the end of the week the balance was looking to be in our favor. the basement is dry again, the roof is done and the neighbors only said one passive aggressive thing about all the nasty creosote that got all over their porches, the burrito has gone to a better place, the toilets flush,** and probably the house won’t burn down in a tragic electrical fire.

* i also have a very patient husband.
** which means i no longer have to wonder where the workmen are peeing.

When last we left our heros, it was Sunday night, we’d returned after a weekend trip to find that the drywall had been installed and was ready for taping and sanding. No more leprosy!

We figured that last week’s question (just how ugly CAN the house get?) had been answered. We’d bottomed out.

We were wrong.

This was a very expensive week. Expensive for our bank account, our dwindling reserves of patience and emotional fortitude, our remaining confidence that this was ever a good idea.

On Monday morning Ben got a call from our contractor saying that the electrical inspector had come for his scheduled approval of the kitchen and basement electrical work. The drywall in those areas was still open so that all the work was visible, just like it’s supposed to be. The inspector signed off on everything that was on the permit, but proceeded to accuse the crew/contractor of throwing up drywall in the rest of the house to hide shoddy electrical work. He insisted that all the newly-installed drywall be torn down, the plaster walls underneath demo’ed, and all new electrical conduit and wire be installed throughout the house.

You can imagine how much money that we don’t have that that was going to cost. After all, if we could have afforded a gut rehab we would have done it in the first place. We sure can’t afford do a cosmetic drywall, then UNDO all that drywall, and THEN do a gut rehab on all of the walls and conduit. The BX conduit that runs through the house is not current code-wise, but both housing inspectors we had come through assured us it was safe. It’s still standard all over Europe.

We might have freaked out a little bit on Monday night. Combine this news with sheer exhaustion from all the recent road trips, upcoming travel, trying to jam 40-hour work weeks into 3 and 4 days between all the travel, and a super hellish few days at work. I started to actually wonder if we’d made a horrible horrible financially ruinous mistake. This house had been under contract and then back on the market 4 times before we bought it. We were just too naive to see what all the other potential buyers saw. Calling it the Money Pit stopped being even a little bit funny or clever.

Besides the cost, we are on a timeline now – our current apartment has been re-rented and as of May 1 we don’t have anywhere to live. Yes, we can put our stuff in storage, and couch surf, but I’m in tech for all of May so that would really be hell. Plus no one wants couch-surfers with two elderly, querulous cats in tow.

Our contractor said he’d get it sorted out “with a politician friend.” Well, that politician friend was out of town for the week. We called our HUD 203k FHA inspector. He said it was out of his realm – if the city inspector says you gotta do it, you gotta do it.

So Ben got in touch with our Alderman. Who happens to be a big fan and supporter of the theatre company of which Ben is a long-time company member. Dropped a few names. Told him our sad story. Chicago business as usual. Asked if there’s anyway we could request a second inspection. Our contractor would be happy to pull down any particular piece of drywall for spot checks, to prove what was underneath is plaster and that the drywall is cosmetic, not a cover-up job. A very kind staffer from the Alderman’s office got back to us at 10:30pm that same night. Said he’d make some calls to the city Building Office and to call him the next day.

Meanwhile we met the contractor at the house on Tuesday morning to talk through the problem, and to walk through a few other things. The weather finally got up above freezing so they’d started the roof replacement. Which actually means chopping the old roof into a little bits and throwing it in to a nasty sooty heap in the back yard. (Good thing we hadn’t started landscaping). And they’d pulled the front steps off the porch, only to discover that the rest of the porch was rotten too and were in the process of disassembling the entire thing.

Our contractor had said he “didn’t really need a permit” just to swap out the porch stairs. But now that he was rebuilding the whole porch structure, he conceded that we probably needed a building permit. Or rather, now that we’d invited the Alderman to pay attention to our little project, a building permit might not be a bad idea. So he yelled at his guys to stop work. They piled all the lumber in the living room.

The Alderman’s office called and they managed to arrange for the same inspector to come back out. Appointment to be scheduled at his whim and with very little advance notice sometime in the next few days.

We met at the house again on Wednesday morning (jobs? what jobs? of course we can just swing by the house any day, any time. **Moment of gratitude for our flexible employers**) to sign permit application for the porch. Oh, and a dummy contract that I had to throw together because the building permit required a contract covering the porch even though it’s getting rolled in with the rest of the bigger project.

Ben was called back to the house Wednesday afternoon to look at some mortar work that was needed. The first row bricks under the parapet tiles on the roof were loose and needed to be re, um, whatever you do to bricks to glue them down to other bricks. (When they don’t come with lego bumps, that is). Another $650. Whoosh! The sound of money zipping out of our savings account.

We both left town on Thursday morning – me to a conference in Texas, Ben to visit his sister for her birthday in Washington. All week we waffled on whether to change or cancel our trips. I really wanted to be present when the electrical inspector came back. But there was no way I could back out of this panel presentation I was on in Texas Thursday afternoon. So we left the re-inspection in our contractor’s hands. Which ended up taking place early Thursday morning, JUST as we were boarding our planes.

The end result is that we still have to do about half of what was originally spec’d. Another $8k in electrical work. We no longer have to replace all the conduit or tear out the drywall, but he got nitpicky about a whole lot of little things. Number and location of outlets. Technical details of the grounding. Some old fabric wiring that was lurking in a few places means they’ll pulling new wire. A 3rd “common area” electrical panel in the basement. Some of it, like the 3rd panel, is frustrating because it’s meeting an arbitrary code rather than addressing our particular situation or safety. And some of it is necessary. I don’t want old frayed fabric wiring in our house any more than the electrical inspector wants fire hazards in old homes. And it’s frustrating that we’re re-doing some work, and it’s costing more and taking longer because we did things in the wrong order.

We can point fingers and ask why two different housing inspectors didn’t find the fabric-covered wiring. Or why the electricians working on it didn’t point it out sooner. Or why we didn’t just open up a few light switches and look behind them ourselves. The electrical inspector said we were idiots for not having cut open walls before buying to determine the extent of the electrical work needed, but when you’re buying a house as-is from the bank, you don’t get that option. In the end it won’t really do any good to assign blame, so we just have to write the check and keep moving forward, and frankly, be glad that we will be poor but safe in our new home when all of this is done. And keep our fingers crossed that this house will appraise sky-high when we’re done with everything.

So the question of whether the house could get any uglier? The answer is yes. We’re still looking for that bottom. We’re also still looking for the control wires for the furnace that I broke.

Some photos to wrap up this week’s post:

This is why we’re spending another $8k on electrical work. In the end, I feel okay about it:

New porch (what color should we paint it? votes?)

First we were walled in by snow, now we’re walled in by roof debris. The depth is about the same:

They dug up the front yard looking for the water main shutoff valve. And still haven’t found it:

Which means that the water still isn’t on. I find it’s better not to ask questions about this: