I hate meeces to pieces!

Am I ever behind.  So much so, that I'm going to try to post every this week to get caught up.  We'll see how that works out for me! 

So...back to April.....

Well first of all...Dave announced to everyone last year, that we were having Easter dinner this year at our house.  So by golly we're having Easter dinner at our house!

We decided to have it in our big room upstairs. We dug out tables from the pole barn and a couple hidden under 'stuff' in the house.  Some even had to be put together!

And Dave worked really hard installing a temporary toilet and some doors in the bathroom on the main level.  

 

I can't remember if I told you this story or not, but the door that leads from the master bathroom, into the bathroom, was small.  We agonized over re-doing the doorway to make it bigger.  We said all along that we were going to make everything in this house wheelchair/handicap accessible, or have the possibility of making it that way, in case we ever needed it.  We never want to move again!  So, after thinking about it for a couple of days, Dave took the header off, put up a new one, and widened the doorway.  But because of the studs, and the placement of the shower, we could only get a couple of inches.  Oh well, better than nothing.  It changed the doorway from a 30" to a 32", which also looks a lot better.

So, the last thing we needed for Easter dinner was heat.  As you know, we've been living in one room in this house in the basement for over two years now.  We have electric baseboard heat in that room.  But we will have natural gas heat for the house, when it is finished.  And in the long run, we'll probably heat with wood to save even more money, since we have about 25 acres of trees, that always seem to be falling over! We have also been using an electric water heater.  Gas is much cheaper than electric in our part of the world.   And if we needed to heat the upstairs for Easter, we needed to get the gas turned on.  So we made an appointment with the gas company to come out here.

The gas company got here and checked our water heater and furnace for leaks.  Nothing leaked! 
But the water heater would not run at all.   We could not figure it why it would not work.  Dave read and re-read the instruction manual, and called the company that makes the equipment.  And...ummmm....he knew more than the people at the other end of the phone when he called!  Not bragging, just fact.  Come to find out, the water heater had a wrong part on it from the factory!  

And the furnace...even the gas company was perplexed. The only thing they could figure out with the furnace was that maybe the company, or Dave, dropped a nut or bolt into the heater motor while working on it because when they turned it on there was a small noise that sounded kind of like a quarter tumbling in the dryer, when you don't empty the pockets first!  The furnace would turn on, but it would not stay on.  So the gas company could not turn on the gas.

After much talking I said, "Show me what you are talking about instead of telling me.  You never know, sometimes you show me stuff and it's the simplest thing that has been overlooked."
So we went in the "maintenance room" and he proceeded to explain stuff to me.
Like, did you know that you can only have so many "points" when you are venting a gas water heater or gas furnace.  And points are calculated by the length of the PVC pipe, and the bends in the PVC pipe.  So this bend coming out of the furnace is worth "X" amount of points.

And you can only have "X" amount of feet of pipe.  I'm using "X" because I can't remember the exact amounts.

  

Then we went outside to this little alcove between the house and the garage.

 

This alcove is where all of our "maintenance" type stuff was supposed to come out of the house.

As we were standing there talking I looked down at my feet, and there was a "nest" of some sort by my foot!  It was a perfect cylinder shape, like it came out of one of those pipes to the left (that are now capped off)

Dave said, "Oh my gosh, I bet we blew that birds nest out of the PVC pipe when we turned on the heater!"

I said, "That is not a birds nest, that is a mouse nest, and I bet you don't have a nut or a bolt in the heater motor, I bet you have a dead mouse!"

So, he took the motor apart on the furnace, and it wasn't a dropped nut or bolt, but mouse skulls bouncing around in the motor!  Not one, but three!  Not only that, but the mice chewed some of the fan blades in the furnace motor, which made it off balance, loud, and not able to vent properly.  So, we tried to order a new fan.  No Can Do.  We had to order an entire new motor which cost over $200.00.  This is for a furnace that has NEVER been used!

 He decided to inspect the heater some more, and found six more dead mice in the secondary heat exchanger!  Apparently, they got into the furnace and couldn't get back out!

And the thing is, he put screen in the pipe leading outside that goes into the water heater,

but has no idea why he didn't put it in the pipe for the furnace.  Probably got interrupted.

We were trying to figure out how mice could jump two feet high and get into the pipe anyway!

Someone Dave works with said they probably walked on the snow and got in there!  Whodathunkit?

After much deliberation, he decided to play it safe and re-run the PVC pipe from the water heater so that it would have less "points" in it.

So he took out the old, which is why it's capped off in the photo above,

and re-routed it straight through the maintenance wall,

 into and through the pantry,

and outside the house

here.

 

 And after thinking some more, he re-routed the furnace as well.

(and people wonder what is taking us so long!)

Building a house requires A LOT of thinking!

 And both pipes have screen in them.

 They now come out of the back of the house on the right side of the porch.  This porch has been a huge pain through this whole process. It's not big enough to use for anything, and it blocks any of the venting that could have been brought out of the house.

 Hence, drier vents on the porch.  Oh well, I doubt we sit back here much.

So anyway, that's the mouse story....we did get the gas turned on....and we did have Easter at our house!

 

However, there is still something wrong with the darn furnace!  AUGH!

Cindy

Basement kitchen, concrete patio, cabinet, and doors

Sorry it's been so long. With Easter, and spring weather, and yards, and bees, I haven't had time to blog much. But we have been working on our house. This is the outside walk-out basement area.

We're going to have a cement patio poured and we want it colored.

We're thinking terra cotta.

From the bottom right of the above chart, go over one, and up one. You'll see a little pencil mark by it. That's the color we're thinking of. What do you think?


And I don't know if you remember this cabinet, but my friend and I found it a few months ago. It was sitting by the road for 75.00, but when Dave went to look at it, the guy was mowing his yard and gave it to him. It's real wood.

So Dave did some reinforcing, and took it apart,

and prepped it for paint.

Then I painted it white.

We put the original hardware back on it because the newer hardware in stores don't fit the holes in this older stuff.

We brought home a few laminate tops to see which one would look best witht he floor.

I went with the lighter colored one. There isn't much counter top left after we cut the sink out anyway.

A farm sink like I have now.


And there you go. It looks done...it isn't. There's plumbing to do.

And this next project....I cannot tell you what a rotten horrible mood I was in doing it! You see, we ORDERED olde mustard simulated milk paint and the bargain price of $19.00 a quart. We thought it might be nice to have some color on the closet doors. Never having used "milk" paint before, be it simulated or not, I started on the inside closet door. Pretty nice. I like it. Kinda looks like stain.

But, by the time I got to the second door, I noticed the paint started getting darker by the bottom of the door. And if it weren't for Dave watching me shake and stir that paint, you would have thought I never stirred it.

This is the front of the closet door, and it's the other side to the first door picture. Quite a HUGE difference. I was NOT HAPPY AT ALL. Splotchy, and crappy brown.

And as you can see, by the time I got to the fourth door, I was livid and didn't care anymore. I slopped the paint on, went home and told Dave it looks like shit! Literally! As a matter of fact, I got a phone call during painting and I did not hold back. (Sorry Anh!)

Then the next day, we went back to the house to check on the doors and look how this paint dried.

GORGEOUS!


I had to touch up from my 'bad attitude' paint job, so you can see a few wet spots, but these doors turned out exactly as we hoped they would. We love them.

Cindy

PS - Patti B...give me a call...you can come out and see the floor now.

Losing it! plus Windows and Doors - now

I have to say, in all of the books we've read on building a house, we haven't seen a chapter on "how to stay sane!" I thought yesterday was going to be the breaking point for us. Not with our marriage, but with the busy-ness and stress. It started Saturday. Dave worked this weekend and I was with my friend and cousin on Saturday. We decided to go to some craft shows and open houses. While we sat down to lunch, my phone rang. "Cindy, this is Mike, (Mike is the framer - I don't know the tar paper man's name so we'll call him TPM for tar paper man) TPM can't put the synthetic tar paper up because you need plastic caps, and the instructions say you can't staple it." Oh jeez...now what should I do. Dave is at work, so I beeped him and he called me back. "Try to staple it anyway." OK " Called Mike back...have him try to staple it anyway." Riiinnngggg "Cindy, he can't staple it. He said it will leak and it's just not the way you put it up." Me, "well what if I go get the plastic caps." Mike, "TPM said it will take him a week to put the synthetic up and it will only take him about three hours to do the 30 pound." Me, "let me call Dave." I call Dave, Dave calls Mike, Mike calls me back, Dave calls me back. TPM put up the 30 pound paper and now I get to return the synthetic. Six rather large rolls of over $500 dollars worth of tar paper. That was a lunch hour that I spent on the phone the entire time. Sorry Vickie and Teresa.

Then yesterday I was trying to get my sugar patties made for my bees, I needed to go to the house site and pick up the tar paper so I could return it today, had lunch plans with family, needed to sweep the floor in the house because the leaves and sawdust are holding water, I have a harvest celebration for the Community Garden on Wednesday, that I am in charge of putting together, I have to get my bees ready for winter while it's warm out (the next three days), we needed to make a list of the lumber we are having returned, I needed to meet Dave to take some pics of small problems with the windows that we want fixed....and all I really want to do is craft! I was so inspired on Saturday. And Dave is going to try to take a couple of days off of work, or at least half days, because he needs to seal the garage floor while it's warm, and we need to get some stuff put away and ready for winter.

After lunch Sunday, my niece and I negotiated a deal. She'd help me for one dollar and five quarters (just think of the gumballs/toys in the machine at the grocery store with five quarters!) She's the least expensive help I've hired so far, and she did a good job! I gave her the job of moving the wood out of the house so I could sweep.

And you thought Tyvek was only used to wrap a house!

And, we have windows!!! and doors!!!

The kitchen windows

Downstairs is a tv/reading room, upstairs is a bedroom

family room

Walk out basement view

Inside family room looking out

Looking out the upstairs slider window in one of the bedrooms

Looking out the upstairs bedroom

When my niece saw the upstairs bedroom she said, "wow, my room has a balcony!" It's so funny, my nieces think they have a room in everyone's house. They did the same thing when my parents moved.

Gotta get busy

Cindy