House report 21 - Plumbing! PLUMBING!!

Saturday, 6 May

I haven't posted in a couple of weeks. We've been doing mouldings, mouldings, and more mouldings so there has not been much to report. We had a giant pile of mouldings in the front room - enough baseboards and door casings for the whole house - which Jeff has whittled down slowly until it is nearly gone. Mouldings are time intensive - paint, measure, cut, nail, caulk, sand, paint, repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. We now have mouldings everywhere that they should be but we are still caulking, sanding, and touching up. Hopefully that will finish this week and we can move on to door knobs.

Saturday was a good day! It was plumbing day!! It has been an interesting experience spending hours and hours on a Saturday in a place with no bathrooms. A few weeks ago I was feeling the need to leave on a bathroom run so I decided to round up any kids who wanted to go drive to a bathroom. I asked Nicholas if he needed to go and he said 'No! I just went!' Just went? I was a little shocked. I asked him where he had just gone and he looked at me like I had grown two heads and said 'In the place!' So Nicholas at least had designated a place for use as a temporary bathroom... I decided that I was not going to ask any more questions at that point! But we have three functioning toilets again and that is a truly wonderful thing.

The plumber also built out the kitchen sink, put fixtures in the new shower that Jeff has built over the last couple of weeks, and changed out the handles in the other shower. We only have to choose a vanity for the downstairs bathroom and get taps in there and we're done on plumbing.

We also tackled the path on Saturday. At some point in the past there was a concrete path (or some kind of path) leading to the front door. I don't know when or how it disappeared, but it did. You made your way to the front door over a path of plywood boards - which have been there so long that they're almost rotted through. They really were an eyesore. We aren't tackling the front landscaping yet - there's just too much to do - but we knew we needed to do something about the path. So on Saturday Jeff and I unloaded 1000 pounds of gravel to make a temporary path. And then I went and got the kids and they unloaded another 1000 pounds of gravel and spread it and raked it and made an awesome path.

Ellie and Adam even lined it with the river rocks that we pulled out of the old concrete flower bed borders. It looks so good! Or at least better than what was there before. I was really impressed with the kids though - we gave them a couple of shovels and buckets and told them to have at it, and they worked their way through 1000 pounds of rocks with no help at all. It was awesome!

And in other news, the bean bag is finally out of the car!