New Look

Some of you may notice a new background for the blog. It's official, we feel like, "The Money Pitt."

The Lawn Part I

Last year we took the plunge and installed a geothermal heating and cooling system into our house. They tore up our entire yard (heck just take a look at the header of this blog), left us with a gravel pitt and we knew that down the road we would have to invest in grass. We let the geo settle for a year, and now it's time to plant the grass.

But nothing is as easy as throwing down some grass seed. We had to bring in the dozer again to re level the entire back yard, grade away from the house, bury some gutters and the list goes on. Today was the first day of work, and half way through the day, they were rained out. We chose Todd's Services to do the work for us. They came out and did our driveway last year, and Tom has been great in listening to what we need and putting it into action. Although seeing all the heavy machinery out there again is scary, I know that they'll do a great job.

Gary on the Dozer

The backyard before the dozer and post geo

The left side of the house where there used to be an entrance.

This is what a train of dirt looks like,we've got  more coming.

Gary dug up some other houses foundation (or so we think)

The mud mound in the yard.

Dryer Vent

What? You don't vent your dryer through your open garage door?

Garage Door Entrance

When I came back from China about a week ago, the garage door entrance into my house was now in a different location.  The entrance used to be all the way on the right hand corner and entered directly into the house. We decided to move the entrance into the laundry/mud room. The old entrance will become my new pantry. (As huge as this house is, there is no pantry!)

You can still see the entrance door all the way to the right. That is now my pantry door. Where the framing ends on the left is where the new entrance is going to go.

 

The picture above shows the walls up and the new door. For the first couple of days, I kept trying to use the pantry door to get into the garage. But now it all seems pretty normal.

Garage Door Opener

What? You don't hold two wires together to open your garage door?

Shitastic!

Fart jokes and poop jokes are just always funny. I can't help myself but start laughing. So when the drain pipe incident came up, the whole situation was just ridiculously hilarious. As we were taking out the toilet from the drive through bathroom, dad realized that the drain pipe that's supposed to rinse away the poop, well it wasn't doing it's job correctly and we had a few years worth of shit hanging out in there.

It took careful planning to remove the pipe in such a way that any residual poop would drain into our A2 garbage bin (the only container we felt big enough to hold all the shit). It included me tilting the pipe in a certain way, Bob positioning the garbage can and dad trying to seal up the shit as it came out. This would have all worked out perfectly had I been able to stop laughing for even a moment. You see, the A2 garbage can, when opened, smelled like the most foul poop in the world. So Bob was holding it up, gagging, awaiting the river of shit to flow into it, and I was laughing and dad was looking disapprovingly upon us. Well it wasn't working out, so Bob got a smaller bucket and we let the pipe loose. It was pretty anti-climactic, only a small bit of brown pee like substance came out. Apparently, the poop had been in there for quite some time and had caked on.

The pipe I had to tilt

Bob sealing off any potential leak points

Dad sealing it up

The A2 garbage can in defeat

Taqwa's Room

We've also decided to take the renovation bedroom by bedroom. We have to redo all the drywall tape and fix the ceilings, so Taqwa's room (Taqwa spelled out in glow in the dark stars above the window), was the first to undergo a transformation. We don't have a linen closet, so we decided to take of part of this bedroom and convert it to a linen closet.

Too bad you can't see the glow in the dark stars.

In the picture below you can see where we started to rough in the new closet and the linen closet. On the right hand side to the left of the door, is where the linen closet is going to go. Next to that is the actual bedroom closet

The closets

And here you can see the linen closet and new doorway from the hallway.

And the walls drywalled in and the closet sort of finished.

Pink Panties

Between, Orlando, Vegas, DC, VA, Houston, Toronto and China, we've been busy traveling this first quarter. Our busy schedule has also included some major home improvement projects. Whereas 2010 was the year of outsourcing at the Pitt, in 2011 my dad is back in full force and that means that we are too. It seems like we don't have a spare moment in life, but well the renovation is back in full swing.


Some of you may remember our "drive through bathroom" (original pictures visible here all the way at the bottom), that was built on the part of the garage, that was always cold and where the pipes burst, that had a drive through window above the toilet - a very intimate place to do your business. Well we decided to redo this whole half of the house, which means tearing out all the walls and bathroom and re-designing the whole space.

Leave it to the Pitt to present us with surprises. As we tore down the walls, we found this within the walls:

Pink Panties

And we found this when we took up the carpeting:

Flintstones Doodles

All very exciting and exactly what we would expect from this place. As the walls came down and the floors came up the garbage just piled higher and higher so we've spent the majority of our time cleaning up the mess.

The bathtub is still in tact.

A view from inside the bathroom, sink still intact.

Pile of trash

Everything cleared out.

The lonesome toilet before we tore it out.