So long painted wood!

Hey Friends! I made a "How To" blog post! 

One of the first things I noticed in the house, which turned into a list containing at least one million "oh that's not right" or "that needs to be changed" things, was I could see brush strokes on the paneling in the dinning room. The wood just looked sort of gross. To glossy, dinghy and dark.  The picture below, you can see to the upper left some of the brush strokes. 

Instead of plain paint or shockingly much more expensive wallpaper, I'm going old school and using fabric to line the paneled walls that are not wood. I'll have another post up soon with all the choices so you can help vote for which is the best. So now that the wood is actually much lighter, this changes the game a little for which fabric we like.  

But for now.... I figured I would show you guys a quick little demo of how easy it is to remove paint from wood, with out using harsh chemicals! I always cringe and usually blurt out something along the lines at resale shops, "yuckkkk! That would have been an awesome dresser, that could have made them more money if they didn't paint it!" If you have a nice piece of furniture but it's beat up, DO NOT PAINT IT! Please. In a weekend or less you can refinish it back into the beautiful piece of art it originally was. 

But some times we fall in love with a piece that is some ghastly purple color, buy it for ten bucks and add it to the grave yard of other, "I'll get to it" projects. Not, that I speak from experience of anything....

What You Need.

- A Heat Gun

 - A Putty Knife

You can find these near the paint or drywall 

department. Don't get too wide of one, three inches 

max. Also buy the one step up from cheapest, you'll 

drive yourself a little crazy using too thin and flimsy

 of a knife. Remember to keep it clean and free of 

bends and dents

 - Something to lay your heat gun on and tools

The heat gun stays hot for quite sometime,

 so make sure you don't leave it laying around 

on something that could catch on fire. Also,

 your other tools likely will have sticky hot 

paint on them.

 - A Mask that blocks out vapors and odors. 

Spend the $6.00 for the one mask, don't be cheap

 and get the five pack of"dust masks" for a buck. 

  -  Wire brushes 

 I like brass for cleaning out the

 grain and nylon as a cleanup

 after cooled brush.

I have a big ol' respirator to use as my mask. 

If you do a lot of projects, it's worth the 30-60 bucks

 to not constantly be buying new masks. 

Please don't burn you're house down! Be aware of everything you do! 

Lay down a crappy towel or newspapers below your work space, the paint is gooey when hot. Turn on your heat gun, not a blow dryer, to medium, maybe high, don't be antsy, start low and move up in heat, you don't want to burn your wood. At first it takes a little while to warm up the paint, but once you see it start to bubble you're ready to go! ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS scrape with the grain! Did you get that? Always scrape, scrub, brush, wax, oil, whatever with the grain of the wood. If you don't do this, just give up and pay someone to do projects for you.  You need very little pressure to scrape the paint off. Once you get through to the wood it is really easy to get the feel of how hard you scrape. Then go to town, scraping along the grain!  I like to use a wire brush to help get the gunk out of the grain, I use a brass wire brush gently and once the wood has cooled I use a nylon brush to dust off any left over paint globs. 

And, Now! The time lapse uncovering of the beautiful 

quarter sawn white oak that lines our dinning room walls.

Once I have the wood all clear of paint, I might go back through with super fine steel wool and a chemical remover. But I don't think I will need to do that here unless there are a few nasty spots that are being fussy.  Then I will move on to the next steps of cleaning, feeding and finishing the wood! 

Enjoy and be Careful! 

The Kitchen, Part Two

Welcome back friends!

So, along with fun discoveries of wallpaper we found a few other surprises.

I found this looking for more pictures, this was part of the wallpaper finds, this was behind the cute teapot style paper. So cute!

Part of our discovery that the ceilings had been dropped came with a mighty big surprise.

The mudroom, the room that is immediately left after you enter the house from the side door, also our laundry room, which then merges with the actual kitchen. The mudroom's ceiling was not as fast or easy to pull down as the kitchen. Right above it is the remodeled handicap assessable bathroom, the largest bathroom in the house. When who ever remodeled it, they thought it was just fine to shove all the debris from it under the floor, on top of the ceiling for the mudroom. 

Just some of what fell out of the ceiling as we ripped it down. I will forever love the memory of Rick and I teetering on our ladders, crow bars in tow, when suddenly I hear a huge crack and whoosh. The whole room instantly became a murky grey, I couldn't even see my hand in front of me. I stood on my ladder yelling, "HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT! Rick are you okay?!" "Yeah, are you?" "Yeah! That was nuts!" By now the dust began to settle and Rick and I were able to see each other, maybe eight feet away from each other on our ladders. It was hard to tell each others reactions because we were geared up and prepared for the worst. Rick had explained he managed to get a full sheet of dry wall to come off at one time, so about 24 square feet of junk came crashing down at once. "I think we need to take a break outside" Rick said, I couldn't have agreed more, or laugh in disbelief more. 

Luckily we were prepared. We had peeked into the ceiling before we pulled it down. "It's totally full of shit!" I remember Rick shouting to me with his head stuck in the two foot gap. He popped his head out with a copper pipe and part of a tile in his hand. We knew we were going to be rained on by broken tiles. Silly as we look wearing our motorcycle helmets in the house, it was a good thing we did. 

Of all that fell out of the ceiling, I collected some of the things I found interesting.

I didn't find Henry up there, I'm sure he would have had a blast exploring up there before we pulled it down. There's a few more wall paper samples too.

I had mentioned earlier we discovered the missing servant staircase. They had removed it and turned the top two stairs into a closet upstairs. Once the ceiling was gone we found ourselves in the closet! 

Evil Kneivle Helga, checking out how far she can explore. 

You can also see towards the top right, the old bell used to call the servants. We had also found a little button in the floor of the dinning room, where the head of the table sat, where they could tap it with their foot to call help into the room. What a hard life. ha. 

Another neat discovery was finding this little nook.

This nook has not only left Suzy curious, but us and some neighbors as well. It's a little tall to be a seat. It certainly isn't an icebox. This room was used for when you came inside off of the carriage. The floors are oak, so more than just the help would use this room. I'm rather certain that sadly someone may have really gutted this room. I bet there were nice built in cabinets/ pantry across from this spot. This, like the servant staircase, has gone through many different stages of what we want to do with it. It will be covered up with cabinets, but hopefully if we have the time, I want to strip the paint off the windows and replace the board that acts like a counter to match the rest of the oak in the house and make our own secret nook there. 

Eventually the whole kitchen was gutted. At this point, you don't get to just slap up dry wall and start building a kitchen. Remodeling a kitchen especially a really old house kitchen requires tons of work that no one will ever see, perfectly, strategically hidden behind the walls. We had one of four, maybe five, now that I think about it, circuit/fuse boxes in the kitchen. We moved that a whopping ten feet down into the basement were the other boxes are. Again, not as easy as it sounds. We had to remove 100's of feet of wires and pipes. Years of out of date, unused, used, exposed, ready to start a fire wires, old gas pipes, pipes for radiators, plus an outrageous amount of strange configurations of pipes put in more recently to add more bathrooms on the second floor. Also, while we had everything open, we updated as many wires and pipes as we could that ran through the walls to different rooms. 

This is what the mudroom looks like right now. Well we pulled up the HVAC tubes again to get some heat upstairs. This is another task we have to deal with. We need to update, and redirect and conceal the feeder tubes for the second floor HVAC. They go right up the middle of the master bathroom. This has bit a bit of a nightmare planning how to redirect them.

Mudroom as of lately. You can see the side back door we use. Now that I look at this, I realized Rick and I had made plans to open up the door/wall more.  Ah, just another thing to add to the to-do list.

We also gutted the side hallway. This is our side door we use most it's next to the driveway. Here was the first place we discovered the ceilings had been lowered. Gutting the wall also gave us full access to the library's pocket door hardware, giving us a chance to tune it up before it's hidden away for another hundred years. 

I'm pretty sure Rick's ipad has more pictures of the kitchen while we lived in it over the year, and all the different times we rearranged our card tables and other makeshift tables. For now, this is the best picture I have of what we came to accept as our kitchen for months. Rick worked at the electric and plumbing, I had spent more time outside working in the yard than inside the house, and then we couldn't move any further because the next step was the expensive step that we needed to save up a big chunk of money for. Plus, everything in the household came to a screeching holt for a little while when I suddenly got a job, that threw me into working 50-70 hour work weeks. 

Lookin' real stoked. Ha!

Here are a few pictures I took about a month ago. I decided to quit worrying about showing the world the mess we live in. We're not perfect people, I doubt we will ever have an always amazing sparkling perfect clean house. Hell, it takes days to dust the entire place. So, sorry for the mess, we did the best we could as our entire first floor has been turned upside down and wildly shaken like a squeaky toy meeting it's final squeaks in the jaws of Cosmo.

Looking East, towards the doorway into the dinning room.

Looking West. Basement door to the left, mudroom to the left, back kitchen door.

Looking southwest. Turning into the mudroom, which you saw above.

oh, we also had to replace some support beams that had been hacked into and were beginning to sag.  No one cared about the next person to own this house. We're doing our best not to continue that habit.

So now, I leave you with only a hint of the next step of our kitchen.

When Rick and Allie go to Ikea....

Check back soon!

The Kitchen, Part One

The holidays took a heck of a lot more time than I thought it would, back tracking me on writing a blog. Sorry! I'm planning to write a bunch of shorter blogs about the happenings in the kitchen. If I did just one, you'd be reading for days! Ha! So here we go!

It all started when this died, one year ago, today.

Then I fell in love with this....

The big range. 

Oh, and Cosmo 2.0, I think by now he had started to melt my heart. 

So, we were rocking a little bit of a torn up, but totally functional kitchen.

I miss that tall faucet so much.

Then, we didn't need these any more, and thank God, they were not that great.

Check, out those blonde cabinets! The kitchen was built to to serve the 12-25 disabled folks that lived here. The city didn't care if it matched the rest of the house, they needed cheap and functional. Puke. Puke. Puke. But, a year later, I miss those ugly things.

We posted the double oven on craigslist and a few days later, the entire kitchen was gone. A church came and paid up $500 and took the double ovens and all of the cabinets and counter tops, even the sink. 

So, this was our kitchen suddenly.

We had already begun ripping out the many layers of flooring, now that the cabinets were gone it make it easy to pull the rest up. That board in front of the range, that's totally preventing anyone from falling into a pretty decent sized hole. Luckily we had another tiny kitchen up on the third floor so Rick managed to drag the sink and cabinets down. This made me feel better since at this point we only had on bath tub/shower and I didn't want to do the dishes in it. And I couldn't justify eating off paper and plastic for however long (I was thinking maybe three months) until we had a kitchen again. You can see to the upper right we started exploring what all the walls had to tell about the past of this kitchen. 

The wall we started to knock out divided the kitchen, we called it the kitchen nook room. It once held a servant staircase that we took a long time deciding if we should rebuild it. The staircase shared the room with what would have been a butler's pantry as it was adjacent to the dinning room, and a nearly hidden door in the entry way to hurry out the answer the door for guest.

Hell with the wall and the kitchen nook and staircase. Sometimes bringing things back to original isn't worth it. But adding another 100-square feet to the kitchen, in a house built in a time that all kitchens were tiny, hell yeah.

  

So long kitchen nook! 

Near the time of expanding the kitchen we had also discovered a bonus of 2 feet more of ceilings! 10 Foot ceilings! Holy moly, what a total change it made to the entire room, once the ceilings were back to normal.

At this time we were able to took into the kitchen nook ceiling from here. That is when we learned more about how the room at actually been set up! 

With the walls coming down, we found some really beauiful wall paper. We figure the first major remodel of the house was in the 1930's/1940's then ~1973, then again early 90's. A few other smaller remodel projects happened through out the house at different times too. The kitchen could tell a story as we peeled it apart. Each time change happened they just covered up the old, or updated right next to the old. We had layers of floors, layers of walls, and you can see each new generation of electrical wires lined up side by side.

 This one above was found in the butler's pantry. We are 98% certain that it is original to the house. With out a doubt this was the most beautiful I had found through out the house. It was paper and ink. Nothing too fancy like silk, but nice enough incase the guests saw into the room as butler's went in and out of the dinning room.

But then there was this one. This one just makes my old fashion heart explode. There were apples,  plates, and clocks. Under this was another close in style of wall paper, but a bit older, that depicted more farm life, like a little person in a big hat turning the ground for turnips.

We also found  A LOT of wall paper like this. This is also a nice date marker for when they had lowered the ceilings. You can probably see it in some of the picture. 

So, this is starting to get long. So for now you wait! I have nothing else better to do right now, well, i have about a million trillion things I should be doing right now, but I rather do this. So, I'll set up an auto post for Part- Two to be posted tomorrow morning. 

SO CHECK BACK! This time I'm 100% for real, there will be another blog tomorrow!

Long time no see...

Hola! It's  been quite a while since we've last seen each other! It has been one hell of a whirlwind since I last remember even writing a post! I started a list of posts I want to write, so, check back often as I'm getting back into the groove of playing show and tell, the hell and joy of owning a massive fixer up.

Since, we last spoke...

I started gardening like it was my full time job and my second job on top of that! At this point of early summer I had already reached maximum, "whoa!!!" of how big my tomato plants were growing. I was constantly coming up with a crazy web of wire, rope, and poles to build a taller and taller cage/trellis to try and keep up with their growth. By the end of the season,  They had reached epic proportions. If I had the time to keep daily pruning on them before I got a real job, I'm sure I wouldn't have let them get so crazy. They doubled in size from this picture. They reached the 2nd floor porch!

Then I got a job working here. At a vineyard!

First I was just working helping get caught up on pruning. I loved it. Even the days I thought I was going to puke from the heat. It fed my need for sun, hard work, and being with plants.

Then, I started to learn what to do with the grapes to make them into wine. I had amazingly, accidentally, fallen into practically my dream job. Or, so I had thought. I had been onboarded to learn how to do everything from vine to you buying a bottle of our wine. HOLY AMAZING! No college degree to do this, but my own smarts learning as fast as I could with help from a wine consultant from Santa Rosa. 

Then, I got to learn a few semesters of wine chemistry in a few weeks. This was SO COOL! I had all kinds of gnarly science glassware and equipment to test so many different things in the wine. I had no clue how much went into making wine. One of the best things I took away from this job was discovering how much I loved chemistry. I'm set on getting a chemistry degree for my undergrad now. As far as after that I'm still not to sure if I want to go down the road of research or engineering. 

But, the longer I worked at this winery, the more and more I started to realize this was not a good place for me. The winery was in the process of changing from a hobby to a real, sell to the public winery. So everyday I watched workers doing all kinds of things on the MASSIVE new building being built just for the winery. This massive building was going to be mine! I had an office as big if not bigger than our dinning room, and that's huge! I was blinding with excitement. Days went on, more and more problems continued to arrise with building the building, and more and more grapes were being harvested and expected to be turned into wine every day. Work days turned into all day, days. I had worked 2 months working an average of just a little over 60 hours a week trying to keep up. I even scored an assistant. Without her, I would have probably crawled into a ball and cried and brought a cot to live at work. The whole time, I worked out of a big garage meant to store a tractor. I knew it would never be like this next year, but I began to see and learn more and more there, that I just didn't want to be a part of. 

We had so much to do all of the time. Harvest is the worst part of the year. I understand that. But, our winery had over 60 different grape varieties. Most wineries have about 4. I had batches of wine that would make 100's of gallons to some that would only make one bottle. The garage would get so packed and we had no where to go but up. If the buckets were just grapes, they would weigh about 50-90 pounds. If the buckets were pressed grapes, they would weight close to, if not more than 200 pounds. I'm a tough little Polock, but all of that took it's toll on me. Rick would come help me, just so he could see me more than me coming home and going straight to bed. Then he started coming because my back began to hurt, it hurt to even breath. 

A lot of everything was paying it's toll on me and my drive to work through all of the hiccups. Finally my integrity came storming out of me and yelled at me that I was being fucked over, and hard. So, I put in my two weeks and walked away from an enormous dream and possible amazing future career. I won't even begin to list the wrongs. I won't even name the winery, because I truly hope it learns from all their wrongs and learn to turn them around and become a great small business. I just hope no one gets hurt physically, mentally or financially from it. It's been two months now, and it still sort of hurts to think about that job. I really loved what I was doing. But, I had to listen to my integrity. I have a way better future ahead of me once I go through school. Without a doubt, I want a doctorite, I have the brains and drive, that's where my future want to lead me. 

Oh! I also got stung by my first bee while working at the winery. I had no clue if I was allergic, and my fear for them was nearly paralyzing. Then, times that fear by THOUSANDS of bees a day. They LOVE grapes. I survived and even let the now, butt-less bee enjoy some grape before he died. 

A week later, a wasp went down my boot. I think everyone in a square mile heard me screaming.  Holy crap do those things hurt! This was a few days after the sting, it eventually turned into a big bruise and went away. gah. (oh, yeah. I had permanent blackish hands from the wine, for a very long time! ha)

What helped encourage me to leave the winery was the fact that I could make money doing my own thing and stay at home and work on the house. So my best friend Michelle and I bought a big lot of Fiestaware to help fuel our addictions. More about this to come!

Durring all of this, we found our rental house on the Kansas side had been totally trashed and infested with mice. We could not afford to not have this place without renters. The house kicked our butts so bad trying to get everything fixed in a month. Luckily we have renters in there that are clean and understanding of us needing to work on it still. I can't wait till the summer, when their lease is almost over and we can put it on the market. Having three houses sounds awesome. But, it's a nightmare when one gets trashed, one will need some major, but easy over haul to sell, and then the beast we live in which needs help everywhere. ha. 

 The 200+ Canna's I planted in the spring, got dug up for the winter, the day before the first frost.... Looks like I'll be giving away some Canna bulbs for Christmas this year! 

Halloween came and went. Another year of easily over 1000 kids visiting the house. I'm going to start collecting books I find for super cheap at garage sales and thrift stores to give out next year. These kids come to our neighborhood because they think we're rich folks living in these huge houses. A few folks are, but most are like us, living in a huge money pit. These kids don't have costumes because they can't afford them. So, why not hook them up with a book to read and some candy? 

We have two furnaces, one for the first floor and one for the second.  When we turned on the first floor furnace this year, it wouldn't work. I learned how to replace the igniter and heat sensor as that seemed to be what was wrong by all we had read. I put it together, made Rick come watch me turn it on and watch it come to life.... and nothing! Then Rick realized the one fan wasn't spinning. So I took apart the furnace assuming I just needed to get a new motor. I did need a new motor, because a bird had gotten jammed in the exhaust fan. I was not expecting that as I laid the fan in my lap to try and take it apart. sick. This bird took one hell of a journey! The top of our chimney that the furnaces are vented through is about 5 stories in the air, then another 20 or so feet through pipes in the basement he crawled through to get his beak shoved in the fan. 

So I saved Rick and I a few hundred dollars and fixed our furnace!

You read that, right? 

I CAN FIX A FURNACE. 

I don't know why, but this accomplishment in house things seems to be my favorite.

I turned 27.

I've dreaded turning 27 for many years.

If Lindsey Lohan can survive her 27th year of life, I'm sure I can too.

Dad took Rick and I to my first Hockey game back in Omaha. It was pretty great way to start off my 27th year of life.

It's finally starting to look like christmas around here. It's been really hard to decorate this year because the entire first floor looks like a tzamanian devil had a house party. The kitchen is only appliances, with the exception of a card table for the microwave, toaster and coffee maker. The dinning room is now our pantry, tool room,  and kitchen everything storage room.  I can not imagine the dinning room as a nice dinning room. I've tried and can not. I am so used to it being a holding place for things. The library is now our own personal Ikea with stacks of boxes of our kitchen.

The kitchen! It's finally happening. January 5th will mark the one year mark, of when we sold our kitchen to a church and began living like we do now. For now, I make you wait. The kitchen catch up blog is worthy of it's own post. Check back tomorrow or Friday to spy on the horrors of how we currently live. ha! 

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!