Today, Liz and I decided to brave some basement demo on our own. We talked a bit over the last week, in terms of us trying to take on more tasks ourselves. Even though we love Bob’s help, we found ourselves wanting to try to do more by ourselves.
View of the backyard, currently. Despite attempts to clear out a bit by the house, the backyard is pretty much doing its own thing. We’re not really able to devote much time to this area, as we’re concentrating on the interior of the house. Still amazes me how quickly the backyard can grow, if left on its own.
A few days ago, we got a knock on our door and a surprise. It was one of our next door neighbors, Dawn, who had with her a gift of some home-made cookies. Since we haven’t had any kind of oven or stove for some time now, receiving baked goods was a special treat.
I first got to thinking about the fairy tale East of the Sun (West of the Moon) a few weeks ago, when I wore through my first pair of gloves. In the story, the heroine had to travel a great distance, arriving at her destination only after she had worn through seven pairs of iron shoes.
For now, we’re in good shape with a lot of the area cleared away from the main waste pipe for the plumber to investigate. We’ll be looking to see if we can relocate this pipe closer to the wall, giving us a lot more walking room between the main basement and the back area.
Over the weekend, Bob and I opened up a part of the basement walls to take a look at the studs there. We’re planning on putting in an injector pump behind this large waste pipe. And if all goes well… we might even end up routing the waste pipe so that it’s not smack dab in the middle of the walkway here.
Well, I guess there’s some bit of symmetry to this: it took us less than a day to clear out the front yard, and it took less than a day before someone trampled all over our flowers.
On Sunday, Julie and Bob were at our place to help work on the house. It was an all-plants weekend for Julie, as she shifted from running her annual plant sale just yesterday, to helping us tame the out-of-control front yard.
Today, Bob stopped by after work to discuss the next plans/phase of the kitchen work. Liz is primarily running the show here, but a lot of conversation was had trying to figure out where things will end up going, outlets, that sort of thing.
She started to clear out some of the plants near the back of the house. She also discovered that there’s a really large amount of brick that seems to be buried in the ground. Underneath the concrete we have (which seems like a very thin layer), there’s a base of brick.
While we were planning, Liz had suited up in her work clothes and was tackling cleaning the basement area (below where we and been working all week, on the kitchen). It was a mess down there, but she really cleared the space up well!
You can’t see it in this picture, but Bob, Liz, and I are all smiling like crazy watching the dogs on Jake’s bike. We heard some great stories about how other people (pedestrians, other bicyclists, and even cars) reacted when seeing these guys go down the street.
In her wandering around the yard, Liz happened across a flower that made her really happy. But me, on seeing the Lily of the Valley… I couldn’t help but think of Breaking Bad.
On Saturday, Bob came over to help us move out the very last, remaining item out of the kitchen: the sink. Right now, about 40% of the floor is torn up, with a bit of plywood down. And we needed to get this sink moved, before we continued with any more work.
I’ve lost track of how many layers this kitchen has. Liz tore through a layer or so of plywood already, and we had another layer of tile to get through. Today, we were going to be removing everything – going all the way down to the joists.