Very, very itchy

It was another productive week at the money pit. One of the contractors has been working on waterproofing the basement and should be finished soon. He’s been great and has hauled away all of our debris to this point. The electricians have been working and have replaced all the old, painted outlets and light switches. We also now have a full ceiling in the master bedroom (the previous owner had cut a nice square hole in the ceiling before she left). The tree guy was able to take down three big trees on Friday.

My parents came down for the weekend to help us insulate the attic. Saturday morning we headed to the house early and Mom and I started removing the old, loose insulation while the guys went to the store to pick up new rolls. It took three stores but they finally purchased enough to insulate three quarters of the attic.



The insulation removal was quite tedious work and once the guys started re-insulating it took them no time at all to catch up to us. At the end of Saturday we had insulated most of the one side of attic. Then the fun began…

The weather forecasters had been calling for a bad winter storm for a week. It started out that we were expecting a few inches and on Friday they expected 10 – 20 inches. While we were all working hard in the attic, the clouds dumped 20 inches of snow on the roads. The house that we purchased is on a dead end road – a dead end on one side and a cul-de-sac on the other. This means that it is one of the last roads in the county to get plowed when there is a storm. So here was our dilemma – Tucker is at home in his crate, no neighbors have access to our condo keys and we can’t drive away from the house because the roads are so covered (although we did try this). The only logical thing to do was to walk home…six miles in 20 inches of snow.

I’ll say for the record that the last thing you want to do after insulating an attic all day is to walk six miles in the snow. Once we were out of our neighborhood we walked home on the main roads that had been plowed (but still had about 4 inches of snow on them). We saw several vehicles (mostly plows) and two tractor-trailers stuck on the road. It took two hours to walk home and we were all beyond exhausted when we arrived. Below are some of the snowy pictures of Chris’ car and the house in the morning.





Sunday it took awhile to get moving since there were 23 inches of snow on Chris’ car. We drove most of the way to the house until we came to an unplowed road (we didn’t want to get all three vehicles stuck there). We walked about a half mile to the house to begin the rest of the insulation work. The work was much faster because we had already removed all of the scrap wood the day before. When the day was finished we had a lot of old insulation bagged up, all new insulation in the one side of the attic, insulated pipes, and a big pile of scrap wood. Below are some pictures of the insulation work.





We got another taste of what a great neighborhood we’re moving into. Jim from across the road brought us chocolates and a holiday tea towel and pot holder and Jeff next door brought us delicious cookies and brownies. We could really get used to treatment like this!