Toilet time

It was great to have Joe come by last night to help saw some big boards for us. 

 Here's the "before" in the main bathroom. Yeah, I know it's not too pretty, but this is actually after the junkiest parts were stripped away. 

 Doug did an amazing job of shoring up the toilet area with boards in the crawl space. Then he put some cement around the area on top to strengthen it as well. 

 The board is all cut and ready to install.

 Ta-da! A perfect fit. 

My main contribution today was to clean the toilet. Literally. And now it's sparkling and ready for business! 

What's missing in this photo? The unsightly lime/calcium crusty-chunks in the bottom of this thing! How so, you ask?

 Well, this Miracle Tool did the trick: an Exacto knife! The previous owners had gotten most of the crusty mineral chunks out but the rest was hard to get to. The bowl has been sitting in a room for the last couple of weeks, so was nice and dry. All I had to do was slide the Miracle Tool under the edge of the crust and it started to crumble and soon was just a memory (albeit a weird one). 

I know this doesn't make sense, but since we started working on the house my fingernails have gotten really long, maybe longer than ever before. I do wear either rubber gloves or work gloves all the time, so that has surely preserved them. But I just haven't had a lot of time to trim them, and in fact, haven't even performed my signature cuticle-picking bad habit, so maybe I'll sign up to be a hand model or something...

To wrap up this post, I've got another Crawl Space Treasure for your viewing pleasure (did you catch the clever rhyming sequence there?)

Here you see the Wiesenberger Self-Tutor Trial Examination Answer Sheet from about 1963 (looked it up). It was for those training to become securities salesmen. I love the instructions to moisten their pencil eraser or else have a wet Q-Tip handy to touch to the paper causing the spot to turn either green or red as an aid in determining if their answer is right or wrong. So high tech!

Progress in the form of this 'n' that

Yeah, people, this-here thang is the definition of the word "shiny"! I finally got around to really giving it both barrels. In vain for now what with all of the cleaning buckets in and out in a day, but hey, at least I know this is what can be coaxed out of it.

Yesterday we rented ourselves a big truck and got ourselves a cool driver and took 1,040 pounds of rubbish to the junkyard. Hooray - gone forever! 

As a result of the above, at last Doug and I got to experience an enjoyable dinner sitting at our (sanitized!) picnic table under our covered patio. It's really very nice out there in the shade with a cool breeze fluffing your hair, so just the first of many, many good times in the backyard.

Since the wood putty I had filled the door hardware holes with wasn't dry enough to drill last night, my gallant Doug offered to stay there overnight and keep an eye on the place since we couldn't lock any of the outer doors. He didn't get eaten by bears or anything, so that was promising!

Today Doug worked on some bathroom issues, including filling in the toilet-paper dispenser hole in the wall, cutting out and replacing the disintegrated drywall next to the tub, and sawing out a thrashed section of the hardware flooring on the other side of the wall. 

As for me, I brilliantly finished up the outer door hardware replacement. Some things I learned were how to switch out the handles so the key hole is on the outside and how to use a drill rasp to carve out a bit more room in the cavity as needed for the latch mechanism. I do love learning new things!

Just when you think the basement has revealed all of its treasures, another one pops up. In this case an Army pouch from WWII. It's in pretty bad shape, but interesting just the same. 

We're collecting quotes for new windows and the electrical upgrades and hopefully can get those going soon.

Bathroom sale: everything must go!

Doug provided the post title, so hope you love it. First on the agenda today was the bathtub removal. Nate's help was incredible today, and we were so grateful he could come!

With the bathtub out, the dreadful condition of the bathroom floor was revealed including a fair amount of wood that had been weakened from water damage. It was a good day to wear protective eyewear and noise-reduction safety earmuffs while they used special power tools to remove the remnants of the damaged layers. 

At last down to the last layer, which must be repaired and covered with another one.

What do you think? Should we add some structure support around the toilet area???

After that task wound down, Nate removed the carpet tack strips as well as wall trim from throughout the house for us! Lots of wood with nails lying around, so current tetanus shots were in order. 

I got to remove the leftover nails as well as more carpet pad staples. Only one more room left and I'll have it! FYI my new best friend and favorite tool is called the Five-in-One. No clue what the manufacturers consider the five uses, but my main ones are lifting up the pad staples with the pointy tip, using it to remove wallpaper, scraping dried paint from edges where the trim used to be, and smoothing spackled spots on the walls. 

 These two are my other best friends though I've not clue what their real names are: pointy-bent pliers that easily grasp broken-off staple pieces, and pinchy pliers that also do a good job of grasping staples and nails, especially the 2" variety. 

Doug took a break to check out the Basement Treasures before mowing the lawn and wrapping things up for the day. Fun sectioned plates and matching cups, plus a little container that we're not sure of its purpose but it's cute anyway. 

These plus the green woven basket were made by Burlington Basket. So now we're obviously super-cool!

So our plans evolved a bit today since the bathroom project needed extra attention, and besides, Home Depot didn't have a truck available for rental to pick up our new tub set until it was too late, so we'll get back to it next and things will still work out. 

Doorknob!

Our children have some childhood joke about the word "doorknob" so thought it would be clever to lead with that.

Here's a photo of what the back door knob looked like before I started switching it out for our cool, new levered one:

And here's a photo of what it looked like after I was done with it today:

At least I got some good practice in the art of how to take apart and put together a door knob assembly, but unfortunately, the new kit components didn't quite match with the existing screw holes so I had to just put it back together as it was. Will have to try again tomorrow. Or Monday. Or thereabouts. 

Just some miscellaneous work done today as we prepare to bring in the new bathtub kit hopefully tomorrow. With any luck we'll also be able to get a big load taken over to the junkyard as well. 

More treasures!

So Doug came up from the crawl space today and announced that Michael Jackson used to live here. He then held up a white glove. Right. He then produced a bucket of more exciting treasures he had scoured from the crawl space, including the items in the photos below. 

First of all, there were a bunch of what looked to me like Cracker Jack prizes from the 1950s plus a couple of game pieces and a practice picture using a woodburning kit. 

Since everyone should know what a fuse looks like, which is the forerunner to the modern circuit breaker, here you go. Hence the phrase, "Don't blow a fuse!" as they were prone to overheating which led to a shut down of electrical items in your house.  

The next two items are film cartridges. The larger 35mm one for Kodak Instamatic cameras was popular in the late 1960s/early 1970s. You just took the whole cartridge to the photo store for developing and thus didn't risk ruining the pictures when you removed the film from your camera. 

The smaller one, called a "110," came out just before I left for my mission. It used tiny 16mm film in a tiny camera, but actually took pretty good photos. 

He also brought up a miniature cleaver that was fresh and shiny. Weird. Probably came from a little girl's kitchen set. 

 My personal favorite: an oil can that would especially delight the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz!  

As far as other work done at the house, I filled a few more holes in the walls and Doug tinkered with/hammered on the bathroom pipes to help prep them for switching out the bathtub. 

 The toilet and vanity are now boldly displayed in the master bedroom until further notice. 

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity

Today Doug pulled out the main bathroom vanity. 

He then tore out the half-bath vanity, and replaced it with the main one for now. 

 My meager offering for the day was to wash down the walls and ceiling in Office 1 and removing about 200 carpet pad staples from the hall.

Doug and I both made two trips to the water shut-off valve in the crawl space today as he needed it off during his vanity transplant procedure and one pipe wasn't cooperating about shutting off entirely. 

On his first trip down, Doug ran across this beauty. As you can see, it's a vintage wooden and woven picnic basket in perfect condition, complete with dishes. It's not just anywhere you can find this cool stuff nowadays!