The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

We had another successful working weekend at the Lake House. Yep, we're appropriately calling it the Lake House from now on. Saturday we ate dinner there for the 1st time. We got Subway and ate in the living room looking out at the ducks on the lake. Travis said it's the kind of place you'd vacation to, and we are blessed to get to live there.

THE GOOD: The carpet is all removed! Amelia and I had it all pulled up before Travis even got off work on Saturday. Admittedly, I think I did more work than she did though. The load he took to the dump from last week was over 4,000lbs. That's a lot of carpet and brick!! Also Saturday, I pulled staples in the bedrooms while Amelia napped. Fun times, I tell you what! Sunday Pat and the girls came over and we finished removing the glued under-layer in the dining room/office while Travis and Grandpa Don worked on the electrical stuff some more. Most of the floor is down to something we can work with now.

Thanks to Pat, we have a scale drawing of the Lake House, both as it is now, and how we want it to be when we're done. Travis and I are looking it over this week and making sure we like how it will be laid out. It's so amazing to see it as it will be. This is going to be one terrific house!

The well works! Sunday afternoon we turned on the well to see where it comes into the house which leads me to the bad...

THE BAD: The water only kind of comes into the house. It starts bubbling out of the ground in a hole outside the kitchen wall, and we're not exactly sure where it should be coming into the house at. The second place it enters is a sawed off pipe at ground level in the crawl space of the bathroom. After some discussion it was decided that we'll just redo the well connection and start in with fresh plumbing. Since we were going to replace it all anyway, it's just an added step, albeit a very time consuming one.

THE UGLY: Amelia's room seems to have a bit of a mold problem. There were some old cemented (because glued doesn't even begin to describe how well these were attached to the floor) laminate tiles under the carpet on the north wall. Pat and I tried to ply them up, but were getting nowhere fast so Travis set to work to just cut out what we thought would be a relatively small section. As soon as he started to pry up the top subfloor layer you could smell it. There is another subfloor layer that is completely rotten and moldy. The previous owners had just laid a new layer over the one that was falling apart. There are several spots where you could easily fall into the crawl space if you stand on them. We pried back a few more piece to see how extensive it was, and well, Amelia will be getting a new subfloor. I think we're going to work on getting it all removed next week so the braces can air out. We did check the other rooms, and the kitchen is much the same way, which we kind of expected, and the hallway will need to be ripped up to, but the other rooms look ok. It's a little more plywood that we thought we would need at first glance, but in retrospect, it's lucky the tiles didn't come up or we might not have known that was all under there until it would have been much more of an inconvenience.

The major demolition is probably about 90% done now. We have a little more flooring to remove, and some sheetrock. Then it will be mostly building back up. That is great, but it means that the progress, although steady (hopefully) will feel slower from here on out.