There now…let’s take a breath! With the demo of the second floor and bump out, it was time to do some clean up. The demo was exciting, don’t get me wrong, but after the crane truck left and the contractors went home, we were looking at a HUGE mess! So today the crew from Gehrke Inc. out of Eldora, IA was here to clean up the mess. They are a local tiling and excavating company. They also showed up with…
Happy New Year! I hope everyone had time to relax and unwind during the Christmas break. We enjoyed time in Nebraska with my parents and were thankful for good traveling weather both ways. Speaking of great weather…we have really lucked out with some nice weather this past month. It’s enabled us to do some tree demo work to get ready for this spring when the second floor will be coming down. Ok, we won’t be doing any of the demo…
As we had left off of the last post, we had taken a long shot approach and found a local farmer that was willing to take down the machine shed. After more than a year of cleaning out and cleaning out and cleaning out…we actually get to do some demo work! We cannot begin to explain how excited we were to see something done other than shoveling raccoon infested trash into a dump trailer. After a bit of logistics, the…
Last week we shared how we painstakingly took down one of the shelves in the back on the machine shed. If you haven’t read about it, check out this post. One of the top goals of this year is getting down the machine shed before winter. In order to do that, we felt that we needed to have it totally clear of all the stuff inside. Time was running out. We still had a lot of work to do. Once…
Pulling. Wire. Pulling. Wire. Next up on the list of oh-so-dreaded tasks was pulling wire. Remember the previous tasks: Cleaning out all the junk on the first floor Vacuuming the first floor Basement clean-up Basement vacuuming As we’ve worked on those 4 projects, we’ve also been trying to tame the machine shed and the mess that is outside. It seems like these tasks take us right up to exhaustion just as we finish the task. But forge ahead we must!…
Here at A Walk in the Weeds, we’ve been in hibernation mode lately. The fall brought great progress on our house remodel, but as the season turned to winter and the holidays arrived, time spent working on the house was nonexistent. I mean, bake cookies in my warm house or pull wire in sub-zero temps. Uumm, the cookies won. Now that a January thaw has brought some life back into us, it’s time to come out of hibernation. Just a…
Last weekend was Thanksgiving and we have a lot to be thankful for. I wanted to take time to remind myself that there are things about this project to be thankful for: the raccoon poop did not harbor a life-threatening parasite no one has been injured during this remodel (let’s just say that our last remodel project involved my father-in-law, a hole in the floor, and a week in a hospital bed) we got the first floor cleaned up much…
The weather has started to cool down and the days are getting shorter. I thought it would be a good time to talk a little about the basement and the grossness that awaits us down there. First off, the basement has zero windows. Yes, you read that right, ZERO. No egress windows, no small windows…3,000 square feet in the basement and no windows! It’s pretty creepy when you look down the steps and there is no light AT ALL. Luckily,…
Today we moved our efforts back inside to the first floor. Now that we’ve gotten most of the first floor cleared, it was time to make it look good. It was time to vacuum! There are so many little crevices. Every tiny nook and cranny has dust in it! But unlike when I clean at home, this will stay clean for longer than 10 minutes! (at least until we start the remodel process) Let the vacuuming begin! I started on…
We’re back at work in the machine shed. We know that this project is not a sprint…it’s more like a marathon. One weekend we work in the machine shed, the next weekend might be inside work or even outside work. It helps to break up the overwhelmingness (I know, that’s not a word!) of working on one section of this project for too long. Coming back to work on the machine shed felt better this time around. We were definitely…