June 2011

Wow!  A lot has happened since the last blog update.  Jessica Ann was born on April 15th, and life has been a whirlwind ever since! 

My girls!

The week she was born, and the two weeks after, saw record rainfall here in Louisville.  Our basement flooded continuously the entire time (as it has since we bought it), but this time things started to mold.  We spent the first week of Jessica's life at home with my mom here.  After my mom went home, we went to my in-laws for a week so they could help me with the girls.  The night we came home we discovered we had another mouse infestation, and severe mold problems in the basement.  We shipped off back to the in-laws the next day and spent 4 weeks there.  In the mean time, Jason and I completely tore out the basement.  The basement was mostly finished.  The walls were drywall with insulation behind them, and fully trimmed including baseboards.  The ceiling was also drywall.  We tore it all out.  We tore out all the drywall and insulation in the walls and the ceiling.  We tore out any studs that didn't have electric mounted on them.  We cut the studs with electric up to the electric box, and tore out the entire sill plate that was laying on the floor.  We moved everything that we were storing in the basement out to the garage, except for the washer and dryer.  Then we scrubbed everything with a borax solution to kill the mold.  We put out air mold tests thoughout the house and discovered positive tests in Jamie's bedroom, the living room, and the kitchen.  So, we hired a company to clean our air vents.  We also discovered huge gaps in the ductwork and furnace system in the basement, so Jason re-taped all the gaps.  While the company was cleaning the vents, they discovered asbestos tape on some of the ducts in the basement, so we had to pay for them to remediate the asbestos.  Then, the A-coil pan in our main air conditioner went bad, so we had the A-coil fixed, which required cutting the air conditoner open and replacing some of the duct work.

In order to fix the mold and mouse problems throughout the house, we took everything fabric down off the walls, windows, floors, and closets, and had it cleaned.  Jason and I spent 10 hours in a laundromat one day washing everything that didn't have to be dry cleaned.  Then I scrubbed down all the hard surfaces.  Then we bought air purifiers for each of the bedrooms.  We finally got a (mostly) clean air mold test in the upstairs bedrooms after all of that.

The duct work that ran to the upstairs bedrooms is part of the original furnace system that was installed when the house was built in 1925.  While the downstairs ductwork was updated sometime in the 1970's, the upstairs ductwork was never updated.  What that means is that in the summer time, the second floor of our house is swealtering.  Jason installed window air-conditioner units in the three main bedrooms that we use, and our entire house is now cool and comfortable!

Tree on our garage!

A few days after we moved back into the house, a bad storm hit, and we lost 4 trees in the yard right around the house.  One huge, 100-year old tree fell on the garage.  Jason and Mr. John Rouse had been working on cutting down some of the old, dead trees around the house anyway, but we weren't prepared for the tree to fall down!  Jason and Mr. Rouse had already cut down the big, old tree in the back of the house by the pergola.  They then cut up the second big tree (the one that fell on the garage), which used to stand by the driveway.  Thankfully there wasn't any damage to anything!  We lost half of the younger pear tree that stood next to the big tree in the driveway, and a small catalpa tree and a small locust tree in the back yard as well.  Mr. Rouse is already contracted out to cut down two more large trees in the front yard by the road and another one along the fence line in the front yard.

In order to get the flooding under control, we hired a company to install perimeter drains in the basement.  Today they started the work.  Here are some photos.

In addition to all of that, we've been doing minor things around the house.  We finished putting up shelves and pictures in the upstairs bathroom, we hung up the remaining closet doors and put on the door hardware, and hung up some pictures in Jamie's room.  I have almost finished re-hanging all the curtains that we had to take down to wash.

Closet doors are hung up!

While my mom was here around the time of Jessica's birth, she tore out the rotted lattice and vines on the back pergola.

We also managed to finish pruning all the bushes and cleaning out most of the fencelines.

In addition, we bought new ceiling fans for the bedrooms, and a new light fixture for the upstairs hallway.  We also bought the tile for the kitchen countertops.

We've actually installed the hallway light fixture but I don't have photos of it yet.  :)