Extension!

Day 14.

Last Day of The Dumpster!

Just kidding! We paid $40.00 to keep it another four more days. AMEN! I'm sure we could have really scrambled and called in some emergancy backups lured to help with kosher hotdogs and frozen pizzas.... but we decided to take the more realistic, and less exhausting route to finish up this dumpster.

I told Rick that this dumpster had given me mixed feelings. (You know it's bad when a dumpster makes you have feelings.) One, I have felt overwhelmingly stressed about it. It's so big, it's so tall, we only have two weeks, how are we going to get all this plaster out of the third floor, yada, yada, yada. Joined with this feeling was this strange sense of... "Ahhh...." a blissful sort of "ah". Out of the last fourteen days I spent almost four of those days doing NOTHING involving the dumpster. I just sort of said, no, nuh-huh, no way, not today. So I had these two distinct strange feelings which mixed together to an uncertain sort of feeling. In the past we've been able to fill up a dumpster in under a week, and then had a week to fart around filling it up with random junk. Not this time! So much dumpster, so much junk, so little time! As of right this minute, we're about 85% full. Almost ready to close the back gate of the dumpster and figuring out how to fill up every last inch of this 8+ foot tall dumpster.

                                     

My friend Nora came to help out  a couple of the dumpster days, she thought it was a blast. I remember when I thought dumpster days were a blast too. Now I find myself spending every night in bed filing my battered nails into a normal shape, digging dirt out of from under them, and sticking around ten bandaids to myself. As I sit here and do this, I try to give myself pep talks that there will be an end, this is all worth it, I am not dying and no, everything can't hurt this bad when I get old. 

Then I pass out for the night.

I enjoy taking various post-dumpster/renovating "selfies". I feel pretty stupid as I do them, but eventually I find myself having a few pictures that help me really remember how I feel/felt at that exact moment in time.  I posted this picture to this on our Instagram, I captioned it....

"Tiny scratches along my bottom eye lids, gritty sand between my teeth, filling my bra and covering the floor when I unbutton my shorts to pee. A wanna be tan line that disappears after a real good scrubbing. Too many bruises to count, more scraped than my first year on a bike, parts of fingernails missing, banged up knuckles that just won't heal. Pieces of plaster and sand fall from my hair as I let out a few gnarly hacking coughs trying to rid my lungs of inevitable dust. Bandaged wounds, dried out skin, stinging eyes, yellow and purple bruises, shredded finger tips and lots of tiny hives are all that are left every night after a long shower. At least we're one day closer to finishing our dream house."

I don't have to read that caption, when I look at this, I know exactly how I am feeling.  

        

One of the days that Nora came over, she helped me with my crazy tube idea. I had constructed a PVC pipe ladder like structure to help keep this tube in place, and lend as a backbone to keep the junk going down from bouncing on the tile roof and to keep it stiff and straight. We then sewed and stapled a thick plastic tarp to it to create the tube, the chute.

Renting one of those huge garbage chutes you see on the side of big buildings is ridiculously priced, not to mention gigantic and difficult to put together. The only thing we had to worry about getting from the third floor down near the dumpster was all the broken plaster we smashed off of the wooden lathed walls. I completely refused to carry  hundreds of buckets filled with plaster up and down from the third floor to the dumpster. So I had to be innovative. The tarp chute eventually tore and trying to patch it was pretty much impossible.  So chute number two came into fruition.

                     

Four or so hours of working on chute number two I had built one hell of a plaster chute! This time I chose canvas. It was more resistant to tears, it is patchable if it does get a tear, it's washable if needed and it's way easier to sew. I had a few other top secret things for it too to make it such a success. But if you want to know what those are, you're just going to have to give me some money and i'll tell you how to build this bad boy and for it to last and be reused and built to the exact needs you have. :)

(If you're some kind of investor who would like to invest in my idea and sell it to the average house renovator shopping at Lowes or Home Depot, I'll let you buy my design ( a much nicer constructed one than my first product) for the low price of paying off our three mortgages and my student loans. Then you can keep all of the rest of the profits. Serious.)

We did manage to get a clog somehow, right around the time Rick started putting stuff down it. :) The whole thing ripped itself off the window sill and plunged to the ground. Another hour of repairs and it was back up and running again better than ever.

Along with everything in my body hurting, I've reached a point of not caring about anything but the dumpster. I broke a few laws of Allie this week, like never going out in public/ letting people see me with out my basic go to makeup.  :( Also, I gave up on trying to be a perfect little hostess and cleaning the guest room and bathroom, and the entire house. Thanks dad, Michelle and Cory for understanding and being so cool with such a horrible, horrible mess the house is in. I started to do laundry two weeks ago. Some of it is done and still sitting in the baskets, some of it has been washed a few times already just to be worn again to be covered in dust, dirt, and plaster, and a lot is still sitting behind me in it's organized piles waiting to be washed. 

This is a pretty decent example of how the house looks all over the place.  This is higher up on the dusty scale because these are our third floor stairs, where most of the major wreckage is happening. But the whole house, is haunted house dusty.

These pictures below are a few days old. We have taken out even more from the third floor. 

As you go down the three pictures, I am just slowly moving my camera to the left from the corner I am standing in. Where you see wood 2x4s on the ceiling and floors, is where a wall used to be. 

This picture is opposite the pictures above. Now you're looking at the corner  I was taking picture from.

In other news, my canna lilies are starting to pop out of the ground! I'm so excited! I planted almost 300 bulbs! And Henry now has a soccer ball and basketball, both of which he as managed to pop, but still loves to play with them and run around with them in his mouth. 

AND! May 29th is my HALF BIRTHDAY! YAYAYAYAY!

I LOVE HALF BIRTHDAYS!

Once the dumpster is gone and the house is sort of tidied up a bit, I am going to make a youTube video of the whole house, so you can get a better sense of what the hell is going on in the house!

Bring Home My Plants

Hola!

I'm writing this from my kindle in Nebraska. I really don't like my kindle HD fire for much more than reading. It really sucks at typing, be ready for typos.

I'm here visiting my folks with Henry, telling my mom how much I love her and stuffing my face with cookies from the cookie jar.

Rick is back home with Cosmo and the dumpster. As I left for Nebraska Rick had plastic wrapped a section of our first floor side door entry room. He was busy knocking out more walls and getting his frustration out.

This morning I went out to water my plants to discover some asshole(s)  came up on our porch and stole two of my big palm tree plants. They were in big pots. They had to have weighed in the 60-70 pound range. It really posses me off because they were the longest and biggest living plants I had ever had.  I guess this is common on mother's day weekend. I've added a reminder to my phone for next year. I plan on baiting my bottom porch with plants and wait with a paintball gun all night to nail all of those assholes. If you drove by my house.today you probably saw my big signs I painted demanding my plants back and that mom loves hugs, not stolen plants.

Let's see... we had two drunk ads dudes bug us last night to help us load our dumpster. One of them yelled from my drive way to down the block that I was a mean person as I yelled back "wait till I get my mean dogs"

I watched some slimy white dude dump a likely stolen bike on the corner. I hope someone find  my posts for it on Craig's list and Facebook.

I got a request in to the cops for increases patrol around our house while we have the.dumpster.

I think I'm gonna go check out paint ball guns and crossbows at Cabella's tomorrow.


My dad and I hung out in a car wash for two hours today to protect my dear, dear baby, my Mini Cooper from wind and hail. I hate thunderstorms. I was ready to puke, pee or cry the whole time, especially when the sirens went off. I certainly do not miss frequent tornado warnings as I live in kansas city now. I am extra thankful for a solid brick and concrete home.

When I get back to kansas city, put some time into wrecking the house I will post all kinds of pictures. I just can't / don't know how to on my kindle.

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Seek and Destroy!

Hola my friends!

'tis the season for DUMPSTERS!

The season for really, REALLY big dumpsters!
For $50.00 more Rick bought the next size up dumpster from the normal size we get. HOLY CRAP. That extra $50.00 got us a lot of dumpster. Maybe too much dumpster. Nah! We are currently having to strategically plan how and what we put in the dumpster so when we have to close the door and start putting stuff over the top we don't kill ourselves trying. 

I'm on a mission to make this short and sweet. I need to bandage up todays war wounds, read a little about ancient Egypt and fall in to a deep, deep sore body slumber.

Rick and I have decided to start from the top down in the house this go around. Sort of. Today we spent most of the day ripping out walls and lots of plaster and lath on the third floor. We can't really tell if the third floor floor plan is original. In the 1940's sometime the house went through it's first major remodel and at that time they still did plaster and lath, which to our joy (not) is the whole third floor, and the whole house!  Plaster and lath if you don't know is pre-drywall; big sheets of plaster wall that make, making walls in a room super easy and fast. Before then, they would hand hammer in one inch wide sticks, about as thick as a wood yard stick all the way up the wall. They would leave a little bit of a gap between each one, then cover the sticks, laths, with mortar (sand, cement, and horse hair). Then they would go over that with plaster and have a really smooth finish. When I rip it out, I know all the men who helped build this house must be rolling in their graves because they put SO much great time and work into these walls. But 100 plus years hasn't been kind to them. Many of them have gotten wet, warped or already have holes in them. To make life easy on us, ha, we rip out all of that plaster and lath so we can move pipes and wires around, along with updating them super easily. 

So our third floor looks a little post dino killing astroid right now. 

We have this funny little room on the third floor that has no windows. For a long time we used it as a giant walk in closet. (Rick's giant walk in closet). But, it always looked weird, and a room without windows is just creepy. So we decided to get rid of it. 

And we did.

Here is Before, entering the windowless room.

Here is a sort of before, inside view of the windowless room.

Hi Rick!

This is a mostly before picture of the third floor when you reach the top of the stairs. The door you see to the right is the windowless room doorway. The door with the orange in the back, leads to a bathroom, another living space and bedroom.

Another, mostly before picture. 

Sorry it's kind of a dark picture.

This is a view looking at the stairs where I just was taking the picture above. The staircase and railings are covered with a tarp in the picture to try and keep as much projectile destruction on the third floor only. To the left is the door to the window less room. The door in the middle is an exit to the fire escape.  Oh and that's the pain in the ass attic fan cover that Rick and I kept dancing around, until I had the A-ha moment that we should just move it for right now. : )

Tah-Dah! No more windowless room! 

I can't believe I only took this one picture. Well, no I can. At this point I had, had enough plaster flung at me and pulled out too many laths nailed to the bottom of my shoes to want to do much more than lay in the grass with the dogs. (I'll get more pictures soon)

I don't know why we haven't taken out that one single 2x4, just hanging out there in the middle. Getting rid of the walls for the creepy room opened up the whole third floor SO MUCH! It's AMAZING! Now we have to figure out how to get or make a chute to get all that plaster down into the dumpster.

All that junk, only needs to go this far to make it to the dumpster, also avoiding the little roof that covers our side door entry way :)

Ps. The lawn you see now, it's pretty sad and dead. I killed off all the weeds, resulting in a fully dead lawn. You can also see the outlines of my garden beds I started. We just got our 10% "congrats on moving" coupon from the USPS  to Lowes in the mail today, and our credit card right now has 5% cash back at Lowes.... So that makes my little bricks I'm using 15% off which is the cheapest I can find them anywhere. Which was enough effort and savings to make Rick agree to let me buy all the blocks I need to finish. Hopefully post dumpster it will be all done!

Even though we have this MASSIVE dumpster for not too much money, we still are trying our best to be frugal with the space. So we set out all the old real 2x4s and various other wood things that can still be used. Win, win,  recycle and reused and save us a lot of space in the dumpster.

Well, some dude came and took it ALL. Talk about easy.

Oh!

I TOLD YOU SO RICK!

I told you people would come get our wood. 

I'm not crazy for saving and setting it aside. 

<3 :-D <3

At the same time this guy started hauling away the wood, two of our neighbors down the street stopped by. Usually it's no big surprise, I'm always meeting folks from around the neighborhood. But this time they knew me! From my blog! And a mutual friend, Hannah! Hi Hannah!

Hi Scott and Bill! You made my day today!

One more shout out! Gail! Thanks for your, "turn a window into a marker board." idea! I turned an old storm window into a beautiful hot pink no trespassing sign. Too bad we had to bitch two drunk ass guys off our property today. Hopefully the signs detour some of the morons.

That's it for the sort of short blog! More to come for sure! Two weeks for the dumpster. Two weeks to rip out tons of stuff. Two weeks to get even more inspired and love struck with our house! 

Oh, and until my plan is finished... If anyone in the KCMO area has real red building bricks they don't want I'll take them! I can't afford to buy enough for building the path I have planned. I can come get them or you can drop them off. If you're lucky I might even bake you something yummy! Spread the word friends! I need bricks!

A little bit of everything.

I was about to post a whiney Facebook status about my love/hate relationship with owning a fixer-upper house. Then I realized, I don't want to be a whiner on Facebook. I'm sure I do sometimes, sorry, so I decided it was time to blog.

So, Hola!

I really hate the beginning of the month. Every month. Everything seems to fall apart, majority of the folks who rent from us wait until the very last minute to pay the much needed rent, for us to pay the mortgages, and Rick does the bills. That last one, that's the one that really sucks. I know I am down right spoiled and do my best to to rake in all the "thank you, Karma," acts I can do. Inevitably, I always get in trouble. I actually said to Rick recently, "I feel like I'm always in trouble." "You usually are," was his reply, with a laugh. (thank god) 

Here comes the whine... Rick took my pent up excitement, copper hoarding enthusiasm (collecting to sell it like a homeless man looking for soda cans), laid it gently down on the table and guillotined it's head right off. "Allie, it just isn't a good idea to go to Florida with Michelle and Corey."  I had one of those face drops that turn white moments. Hogwarts, wizards, sea shells, and shark teeth, Shark Teeth, SHARK TEETH! had been whizzing through my head the last two months. I gotta admit, he did a good job at breaking the news to me, prepared with an ultimatum. Florida or no money for another year to make much needed repairs to my house that we rent. I've been dying to repair, replace falling off siding and paint the whole house a new color, along with a few other updates. It looks pretty sad right now.  So, I took the, "I hate being an adult," bargain to add some equity to my house. I admit, I know Rick isn't all to blame for this stab in the excited heart. It's just easier to say it's all his fault. 

Love you, Richard.

Owning a major fixer-upper can really suck sometimes. Like how you're always broke, covered in some sort of grime and fight over where a light switch needs to be. But, it also teaches you to be thirfty, frugal and patient.

As many of you know we are currently remodeling our kitchen. That is a whole blog on it's own, I won't go into much detail of that right now. But, right now the walls are totally bare. Bare as in just the studs, and lots and lots of wires and pipes. Over the last 108 years the house has gone through about three major remodels, and some parts more. Like the kitchen. The amount of wires, and pipes hidden through out every nook and cranny is unbelievable. All of that tangled, dangerous wire mess and hundreds of unnecessary pipes needs to be sorted, redirected, removed and safe. Rick has spent the last month and a half cutting out pipes and fishing wires through walls. The pile of wire we have could probably make a suitable nest for a pterodactyl. Knock on wood, Rick has only gotten one decent shock. Which leads me to this...

This thing is AMAZING. It's about the size of a fat Sharpie marker it changes colors and beeps when you find live wires. You can poke it in an outlet, touch a light switch, and wave it past the old pipes that held wires back in the day. This little guy has probably, literally saved our lives many times over. 

Along with ripping the kitchen apart we've been able to find some killer wallpaper. This one above is my favorite. It's way to cute. I wish I could find more, but years of other wallpaper on top of it seems to have it glued to the back of another forever. Seriously! Look! The carrot one! You can see a yellow pant leg and shoe, and a hoe. I wanna see that person so bad! 

There was also this one, which we found in what would have been the butlers pantry. I wish this was all over our house. It's so pretty and fancy, and makes me imagine I have butlers and maids running around our grand house as I sip tea in some big hot high collared dress, watching the children play croquet. :)

I can't remember if I posted about Henry, so If I did, sorry. He's too damn cute not to talk about. We have acquired another four legged child. King Henry the Corgi. He's a three year old rescue who has one of the most quirkiest personalities of any dog I've known. He's also a mama's boy, so that melts my heart a little more. What is amazing is how well Cosmo and him get along. Cosmo an 8 year old lab  that we rescued was pretty stoked to be living with us, until we brought home Henry. Then he transformed into the happiest dog ever. I have no idea how these two lived without each other. They play, wrestle, run and sleep together all day. It's a beautiful friendship. 

I've acquired these two beauts. 

I'm a sucker for mid-century, especially double tier lamp shades. It has no home yet, but soon it will. Also, I scored this beautiful, post-civil war dry sink. I call it a vanity. Either way, I'm quite proud of it. When we got it home it was neat looking and sort of dingy. After three days of cleaning, feeding and polishing the wood this piece of furniture came back to life with one hell of a thankful glow. It has marble tops, rosewood veneer and the original-heavy as hell mirror. I really need my friend Michelle to get her butt back to KC, I'm sort of convinced she's my good luck charm for finding things. I also got a Fiestaware, rose, disk pitcher with this buy!!!

I've discovered wallpaper books at Lowes. I have no problem sitting in an aisle of Lowes surrounded by different wallpaper books, hoping Rick finds me soon because, he HAS to see all 50 patterns I love and need in my life. I think I have more pictures of wallpaper, than pictures of my cats on my phone. 

I started digging out a flower bed. The vision I have in my head, if it comes to fruition... is going to need a few pats on the back for it. I planted nearly 300 canna lilies and bee loving wild flowers so far. Our next door neighbor is a bee keeper, so I'm trying to keep the bee's nice and fat this summer. I'm sure my neighbors have raised an eye brow to this project as I have piles of stones I dug up laying all over the place along with red bricks all over the place. I also have planned to lay a red brick sidewalk and stairs that lead across the lawn in front of our carriage house that we rent out. The progress is slow. Rick won't let me buy the ~120 smaller sized paver blocks I need at one time. So I'm praying some one buys some of the crap I'm going to list on craigslist to get some more money to buy more blocks. 

(If any of you readers are in Kansas City, 

feel free to donate as many red building bricks

 to my sidewalk project. I need a lot. )

 The last few days, at the end of the month Rick and I feverishly worked on our carriage house apartment to get it ready for out new tenant, Tuesday! 

Hi, Tuesday! We're so happy to have you and Goose!

After about 48 hours of being in the apartment together, some small "hangery" moments, battles of what would look better and 100's of "motherfucker's" we finished in the knick of time. 

Don't worry, the MF's were not at each other but at all the things we broke, discovered broken and dropped. We're starting to think instead of ghosts, we have a curse on the house.

Oooohhhh! This is my favorite find recently. In our master bedroom we have a fireplace that is covered in red subway tile. Typically, Arts and Craft style homes have green tiles, so I thought maybe these weren't original or maybe painted. Wrong. Dona Boley, who co-wrote, Kansas City's Historic Hyde Park, told me, "these are definitely original and worth some money." They are Rookwood tiles, which if you ever are in the subway in New York, all of those tiles are made by the same company and time as our's were. Okay, cool, original tiles, but why doesn't it look right? DING! I realized ALL of the woodwork in our bedroom had been painted. It was convincingly painted to look like wood too. A little time with the heat gun and scraper I under covered beautiful dark wood that looks right with the red tiles. On the left is the painted color and on the right is the original. It's still needs to go through some serious cleaning, feeding and polishing, but, HELL YEAH! Now the blinds I dropped some rather serious money on last summer don't match. I hope I can get a decent chunk of money for them by selling them. Ugh. I feel like a drug dealer, always pushing something on someone to buy. 

Hope you didn't lose too much money betting on the horses this weekend! 

Happy spring, happy great time of the year for sales at hardware stores and thanks for reading!

P.S. Almost always, Home Depot during Memorial Day weekend, 

has a sale which you receive  a $5.00 rebate for paint. 

What better time to open up your windows 

and freshen up a room with a new color!