From Hallie on Saturday, Nov. 1:
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| See the holes beneath the door? Bricks staged for the mason. |
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| Pile of debris in driveway |
This morning, I got up and
immediately started work demo-ing the rest of the room in the basement that I
started working on last week.Then, while Nick worked on some touch-up painting, I took the rest of the back stairs down. He started taking them down yesterday, which ended in a painful slip and fall onto the concrete below.
See those holes beneath the old door? I think I know how water was getting into the basement. I can't wait for all of this to be fixed! We'll have a new door and a new window where the slider currently is, but new stairs and a deck probably won't be on the horizon until late spring/early summer. It will be our door to nowhere.
After taking down the stairs, I staged bricks for the mason who will start next week. The bricks on the left were staged by Nick--we bought those from someone in Portland. The center pile was purchased at the beginning of the summer. The bricks are from a 1927 house in Seattle (ours in 1929). The bricks on the right are probably from our house. Those are the ones I discovered while weeding and dug up. The 1927 bricks have slightly deeper grooves than our bricks, but are otherwise a pretty good match. The Portland bricks are a little too orange and some of the grooves are spaced too far apart, I think. We'll come pretty close to what we need with the two piles on the right and the PDX bricks will just sprinkle in if needed. I'm going to get what I called a "chiseler" so that I can knock mortar off some of the bricks we got from the 1927 house. Nick laughed at me and said, "A chissler? Is that like a Twisler? It's just a chisel."
We rented a dump truck and cleaned up this pile of debris in the driveway and a good lot of what was in the garage between 4:30 and dark. We have a little more room in there, but may need to do two trips tomorrow. We didn't get any of the drywall debris from the basement room loaded.
There should be some really fun updates forthcoming as we start putting things back together. :) ~HWJ~
[I'm sorry this post is poorly formatted. The photo downloads seem to want to stay wherever they land. KW]
9 comments:
Love, love the update! You two are inspiring. I hope Nick is feeling okay after his fall.
Apparently Hallie can't comment on our blogs by means of her iPhone. That's why we only hear from her sporadically. By email, she conveyed that Nick is fine. He's athletic, agile -- and young.
Glad to hear that! And it's true that being young helps... I signed up at a gym yesterday--the NordicTrack is getting old. We'll see. (And yes, I do know that it won't make me any younger! LOL)
Oh shush! You are setting the bar so high! I have been under pressure here to follow your example. No, it won't make you young, but according to present opinion, it will make you good.
Ha ha to good!! My biggest problem will be getting in the car and going. I'm such a hermit!! But I realized I needed some variety, so I hope that'll get me there.
The new iPhone update fixed the blog comment problem (yay!). If I were retired, I think I would set a gym schedule to go at 8 ar 9am. It's hard to go once you are deep into the day. Plus, when you get it done in the morning, you can feel good about yourself the rest of the day without the guilt of asking, "will I make it to the gym today?"
Hallie -- So good to hear that problem is fixed. I do prefer to exercise early in the day. I don't really enjoy it -- it's something I have to do -- and I like to get it out of the way. However, Mike points out that for vigorous exercise, it makes sense to do it closer to the time one is going to shower.
These are great "before" pictures. I'm looking forward to the "after" ones as I'm sure you are too.
Shower in the morning. Problem solved!
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