Building Our House

Sorry to keep you up in the air, Stephanie! It’s been a wee bit crazy around here. We have no home land line phone and thus no DSL or other home internet access for at least another week, and work has actually been needing me to, you know, work, so opportunities for electronic updating have been limited.

New house closed as previously noted, and moving went ahead as scheduled on August 25th. Closing for the old house happened on the 30th but with the long-distance stuff (they live two states away) and things having to get overnighted back and forth, it wasn’t supposed to be officially recorded until September 1. No confirmation that this actually happened, but I’m figuring somebody would have called… Money was to be electronically deposited to our account, it’s not there yet but I would expect it to take a day and of course today is not really a day (Labor Day) despite the fact that I personally am at work.

New house joys:

• Cleaning of downstairs air handler of mold and sealing of duct work in crawl space have been completed; somewhat reduced musty smell.
• Cleanup of mold in crawl space is ongoing - old insulation is out, beams and subfloor have been cleaned and treated, most of the vapor barrier put down. To be finished tomorrow, installing clean insulation and finishing sealing the vapor barrier.
• Old flooring has been removed from living room, dining room, and downstairs hallway, and part of the master bedroom. New wood flooring is in a big stack in the dining room, acclimating to the environment. Master bedroom and den to be finished removing old flooring tomorrow, lay new floor and sand it Wednesday, apply polyurethane Thursday-Saturday. This is assuming 1) the subfloor moisture has come down to an acceptible level, between the work in the crawl space and being exposed to air above, and 2) the additional termite damage (and live termites!) discovered by the front door have been dealt with.
• Termite company that treated house about 5.5 weeks ago (soil treatment should have killed them all in 3-4 weeks) will be back tomorrow.
• Handyman dude will hopefully be out tomorrow or Wednesday morning to reenforce the damaged joists and install new subfloor, assuming he ever calls back like he said he would.
• I still need to find someplace for us to stay (including cats) for Thursday-Saturday nights. We’re using low-odor polyurethane but still, between being pregnant and having to leap from the front porch to the stairs in order to access the upstairs bedroom and bathroom… not to mention the bad scene if a cat escaped the bedroom prison and made a run for it towards newly finished floors…

After all that is done, there’s the painting of walls, windows that ought to be replaced, figuring out if there’s some way to adjust what is apparently a thermostatically controlled attic fan that runs until the attic is below 70 degrees (doesn’t happen often in summer when the low temp outside is 72 overnight!), Jeff wants to replace the carpet, still need a frame for the new bed, we’ll need area rugs to put on the new hardwood floors…

Meeting with the architect regarding ideas for kitchen renovation and studio addition on Friday…

Fortunately, the new bed is quite comfortable, as you can see we need our rest!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 4th, 2006 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Idling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.