About Me

We went to closing last Thursday. For some reason the money didn't all change hands until around 11 am on Friday, so we couldn't enter the house or make changes until then (the woman at the title company is currently on my list of least favorite people, she would do well to never wander into my path). This meant that while we could do stuff to the house Friday evening, the plumbers had to reschedule their day and couldn't come out to mark areas we needed to demolish, and Ethan had half a day of frantic calling to the stupid title company.

We bought a new bath tub and sink, as well as new fixtures for those on Friday night and brought them to the house. On Saturday morning Ethan removed a pile of tires some lovely person had left in our driveway. After that we went to the hardware store and picked up a few more things (dust masks, safety goggles, and new exterior doorknobs). We then descended upon the house with a fury of pickax, crowbar, hammer and Sawzall and succeeded in ripping apart the walls and ceiling for the plumbers to deal with the pipes.

Unfortunately Ethan discovered my fear was a reality and that the basement floor is unbelievably sturdy and thick and a pickax simply wouldn't do the job, unless we had months, not days to break it up. I discovered that the area of the front door and door frame where the hardware goes was about as sturdy as swiss cheese... which is bad when you're in not the best neighborhood and you want to keep people from just shoving the door open.

On Sunday morning we went to the hardware store again and bought a new steel front door (on a side note, they apparently prime steel doors with a horrible shade of yellow; I can't wait for my chance to paint that thing). My dad was able to come to the house and install it with some help from me. That didn't go very smoothly because the original door was not exactly a standard size and so we had to manage to get an 80" door to fit and work in the hole of a 78" door. Long story short the door is in and the new knobs (which are really cool looking if you ask me) are in too.

Yesterday Ethan got to try his hand at a jackhammer against the basement floor and found that a) it took about a minute to do the same amount of damage as it took an hour to do with a pickax and b) the jackhammer was sufficiently loud that he didn't want to use it after 7 pm (I think that's a pretty early cutoff, but maybe that's just me). He's going to hopefully complete the floor destruction this morning and maybe the plumbers will be adding new pipes today instead of just tearing them out.