shrubbery!

so i've (elizabeth) been painting the front porch for the last two weekends, while the weather's nice-ish. someday we'd like to have thick spindley columns and ornament all victorian like, but for now we will spend extra cash on the more urgent needs like a furnace and insulation and whatnot....the front shrubs were a bit of a concession though...a little bit of beauty in the middle of a great deal of chaos (productive chaos) does the heart good. plus shrubs and trees are 50% off at the local nursery these days. we got 5 stewartsonian azeleas that will hopefully grow into one big ole hedgy shrub and turn bright orangy red with spring flowers around march/april. the two topiaries are lilacs.

sam is framing a new door for our downstairs bathroom as i type and putting up framing to cover the current two doors we are walling over. i'm glad he knows about all that stuff, cuz i certianly don't. Infact, I'm not even sure I have the terminology right. refer to photos below if you are confused. nathan is standing with sam in our bathroom, chatting about renovation woes and joys. he and his wife becca just bought a house within spitting distance from us. (not that we plan to or even wish to spit on them)

alright, all you lovely people. tell us what you think. should we open up the ceiling? it would help us get all the spray-foam in the cracks and tighten up the room, but beyond that, it would be a purely aesthetic decision.

really, tell us what you think.

in the kitchen with sam and elizabeth...

oh, kitchen, we hardly knew ye.

so, we discovered that the kitchen walls / ceiling have no insulation. zero. the kitchen consists of a 12x13 room with three exterior walls. not a good place for zero insulation. also, the ugerly plastic tiles had to go one way or another. so, we did what any overkill-prone people would do. down came the walls. plaster, lath, and all. we'll look in to closed-cell sprayed-in insulation, since we only have 4" of stud bay clearance (fiberglass = R12, closed cell = R24). I'll cut an access panel for the attic space and lay out some blankets of R32 fiberglass or something.

i also discovered a moderate case of dry rot in one corner, which may have come from an upstairs bathroom or malfunctioning roof flashing. i have yet to formulate a plan for this. anyway, enjoy the pictures.

wallpaper be gone!

and it was so....or...it will be so. I (Elizabeth) started the process. The beginning was actually pretty cathartic, like a good sunburn after it stops hurting and is ready for some OCD focused pealing. Then it got decidedly harder. All the parts that didn't detach the first try gave us grief for sure. But Sam devised a plan involving steam and goo and special tools too secret to mention and violia, down like Jerrico. (before that, we tried an different kind of goo in sam's compressor sprayer and i think it may have poisoned us. we didn't die.)

you remember betsy boo, don't you???

just wanted to show you the result of some disgusting work.

around 40 bags full of .... well, let's not dwell on what they're full of.