November 2nd

Not much has happened in the last month, but in the last week or so we've finally started getting some things done again!  I am now 17 weeks pregnant, and the morning sickness has FINALLY passed.  Poor Jamie has also been fighting a double ear infection for the last month or so, and Jason and I have both been really busy with work.  Otherwise, on the house, we've mostly been dealing with functional issues.  We've had the plumbers out twice to fix a clog in our main sewer pipe.  The clog turned out to be a chunk of tile morter.  Oops.  We had a chimney guy come out to evaluate our chimneys and fireplaces only to learn our chimney doesn't have any morter in it and a strong wind could blow it over.  This renders our fireplace unusable for now.  Our wood burning furnace has a cracked and broken lining, so we can't use that this winter either.  We are left with using our propane furnace and space heaters. 

Vent cleaners came on Saturday and tried to rip us off, so we decided to "clean" the vents ourselves.  We had four original floor registers left in the house (two of which were in the wrong sized holes).  The rest of the registers had been removed and the floor had been patched with plywood and 2x4s, and smaller registers had been put over them.  The smaller registers were all at least 25 years old, broken, dented, and paint splattered.  Last weekend we measured the openings for all the registers we were missing and went downtown to an architectural salvage company.  We were able to find five more registers that matched our style and were the size we needed!  They were all in pretty rough shape.  We brought them home, Jason washed them up, cleaned them with a rust remover, and we spray painted all of the registers a flat black paint.  Then we removed all of the patches in the floor, used our vacuum cleaner to clean out the holes and ducts, and put the new regisers in.  Here are some pictures of how they came out.

Downstairs bathroom.

Living room

Upstairs bathroom.  Yay!  No more hole in the floor!

Jamie's room

Master bedroom

We are still missing six registers to complete the house, but most of the visible ones have been replaced.

We also have been continuing to "beautify" the house, putting down rugs and hanging up more pictures.  I never knew it would take this long to simply unpack and hang things up, but we're finally almost finished!  I unpacked the last two boxes in the sunroom this week, so there are no more boxes on the first floor!  I also bought sheers/curtains for many of the windows, although we haven't put them up yet.  Alot of this is in preparation for winter.

Master bedroom

Kitchen window.  The bottles are from about the same time as our house

Downstairs bathroom

A few weeks ago Jason also tackled some work outside of the house.  We cut down three bushes and two small trees in the front yard, repaired a portion of the front fence, scraped it, and painted it.  It needs a second coat, but looks much better than it did!

Looking out the sunroom towards the road.  There used to be a bush and a small tree in front of the fountain.

From the front porch

My flower picture in the front window. :)

There used to be two other bushes in the foreground.



Last, but not least, I have finally started working on preping the walls in the stairwell and upstairs bathroom.  The goal is to have the last three rooms (upstairs bathroom, upstairs hallway and baby's room) done before the baby arrives in April.  I have only worked on it one day so far.  Here are photos of my progress.

Stairwell.  The wallpaper is mostly gone, but that ugly yellow stuff is leftover glue.  Water and a sponge scrub it off fairly easily.

Upstiars bathroom.  We originally though the yellow stuff was wallpaper backing glued to unfinished drywall.  We were going to re-mud over it before we painted.  Then I tried wetting it with a wet sponge (just water), and low and behold, it started coming off!  This is how much I got done in about 15 minutes.

Above the toilet in the upstairs bathroom.

I guess that's it for now!