We did get a decent snow storm on Wednesday evening so we got a couple hours off work on Wednesday afternoon and a few off Thursday morning. Unfortunately, this was only enough time to shovel 8 inches of heavy, wet snow off of the sidewalk and driveway. It did make a very beautiful winter wonderland though!
On Saturday morning, I continued to work on the stripping of the bedroom furniture – I’m definitely not as ambitious as I was when I started! Once Chris made it downstairs, we decided to start the demolition of some of the framing that has been getting in the way. The one particular area that was bothersome was the wall at the bottom of the stairs. It left only about a 3 foot gap for the landing – definitely not enough when we need to move things around!
The previous owner used this area as an illegal day care, an apartment, and a mold farm (or at least it seemed that way). Although we had the basement treated to contain the mold spores, we still didn’t feel comfortable having all that in the house (plus we plan on moving the walls when we finish the basement anyway). Now we have some wide open space so that we can use it for some of our bigger projects and tool storage.
After removing the walls, we started cleaning up our mess of a house. Diane and Steve lost power and asked if they could hang out and possibly spend the night. We spent a few hours to remove the clutter and sweep up all the dust and Tucker hair. Now that it’s all nice and clean, we’ll see how long it stays this way! (It turns out that they got their power back after a few hours and didn’t make it over here – there was a squirrel in their transformer)
We went out to a nice dinner on Saturday evening and were going to finish up the night with a movie but we were too tired. Instead, on Sunday afternoon we saw a matinee for True Grit – it was a very good movie!
Sunday afternoon was spent working outside for awhile. Our flowering dogwood tree is one of the nicer ones on the property. With the heavy snow, one of the large branches got too heavy and split near the base. We decided to try to save it so we put up a brace, cut off much of the big branch to remove a lot of weight, and bolted the split halves together. We’ll see if it works!
One task that we’ve both been dreading is cleaning out the space under the back porch. This was where Chris saw the wolf spider the size of a softball and we also assumed that there were snakes and rodents living there too. That is why we’ve been waiting until the weather is nice and cold to make sure that everything is good and dead.
I was quite intimidated when I started pulling everything out. The entire volume was filled with a bunch of boxes and bags of branches and pine cones. The pile outside was pretty big when I was finished – and I found a few bones under there too (I’m hoping they are from an animal!).
Hopefully we’ll have more energy after work this week!
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