Monday, November 22, 2010

Animal Hospital and Neighborhood Party

This week was quite crazy. It started with us finishing what we thought would be the last coat of polyurethane in the hall. Unfortunately, there were a couple large missed areas so we’ll have to put on one more coat. To do this “whole hall” coat, we had to camp out in the living room for the night. We took our showers, packed our clothes for work, pulled out our sleeping bags, and went to the bathroom for the last time before we could start polyurethaning. It wasn’t the most ideal situation but it worked.


Last weekend I had changed out the foyer light. The original one was very rusty and hung down so low that it made the space feel much smaller. Now it’s bright and open.


We did quite a bit of painting this week. Part of the kitchen has been neglected because there was nothing forcing us to fix it – there were no cabinets going on that wall. There used to be a big bulkhead in this area and it was removed a long time ago (last December). We finally decided to prime it. We still haven’t picked a color for the kitchen walls but this at least makes it look much cleaner.


Chris spent a lot of Wednesday and Thursday nights installing trim and baseboards in the hallway and foyer. This was his first time using our new compound miter saw. The doors in the hallway were all installed crooked or so it was difficult to get the trim to line up properly. I installed the newly painted doors and doorknobs. Between all these things (and the new rug we bought at Ollie’s), we think the foyer and hallway look much better than when we bought the house!



One of the last tasks in each room is installing the radiator covers. To get ready to install the covers, the radiators themselves need some prep work. The fins of the radiator work best when they are straight and clean. The fins we’re dealing with are neither of these things. We have perfected the cleaning step – one of us uses the small shop-vac to blow out the dirt and the other one uses the larger shop-vac to suck up everything.

When we do this, we’re always disgusted by how much dirt, dust, and hair in between the fins. The large dust bunnies fly out of the radiator fins and look like some type of jumping slug. Against my better judgment I took some pictures of these – they are really gross!



Friday night and Saturday morning were incredibly busy. We had sent out invitations to our neighbors for an open house on Saturday afternoon so that they could see the progress we’ve made on the house interior. To get ready for this we had a ton of cleaning to do and a lot of food to make. Thursday night I spent de-cluttering the house and Friday night was spent cleaning and baking cookies. Here are some before and after pictures of some rooms (you can see we were living like complete slobs this week).



On Saturday morning, we still had a long list of things we needed to do – make food, mop floors, clean the bathroom, etc., etc. Unfortunately, Tucker had other plans. We noticed a bump and some swelling on the left side of his face Friday night. Saturday morning he woke up with the whole half of his face swelled up. We called the vet and got an emergency appointment.


During the appointment, the vet said that they weren’t sure what the cause was but they needed to open it up to see what was going on. They told us to leave him and call back in a couple hours. When we called back, the vet said that they had to drain the abscess and “a bunch of yucky stuff” came out. We now have to give him an antibiotic, clean and flush the wound, put medicine on it and monitor the discharge every day. Now poor Tucker has to walk around with a swollen face and a red sock on his head.


After that excitement, we didn’t get to finish everything we had hoped but we still managed to have a very successful party. We had a nice spread of food, got to meet great neighbors, and ended up with a very clean house (at least parts of it!).


Sunday was spent relaxing, doing some reconnaissance for Black Friday sales (there are some stools for sale at JC Penney’s that we need for our kitchen), spending some time with the neighbors we met down the street, and collecting some of the leaves on the lawn.

After the week we’ve had, we can’t wait for Thanksgiving!

No comments:

Post a Comment