Shackadoo: First Roadblock

Welcome!

My adventure began in January when I first considered buying a home in the sleepy lakeshore town I recently moved to for my job. The process went really quickly at first: findhouseonline/viewhouse/bidonhouse/winbid/

figureoutfinancing/callcredituniondaily/sendmillionsofdocumentstoba

nktoproveproofofjobandsanity/openbigloans. From there it went really slowly: wait : wait : wait : wait : wait. But I'm finally through the drudgery and can begin to make this nest my own. Soft (and bright) turquoise and muted, warm chocolate brown are colors I'm drawn to for this beachy shack I've acquired ... but I love all of the lakeshore inspired colors too ... sea glass bathroom tile, light blue pillows, lots of white painted furniture. So we'll see what my budget allows. This blog will showcase a very reduce, reuse, recycle attitude, and part of that homage to my inner environmentalist, but another large part of it is driven by my budget. I'm drawn to the idea of painting and cleaning and improving things to make them better after, but possibly this affinity for change and revision is simply founded in a lifestyle that has always cherished thrift. Regardless, I'm sure you'll see me bragging about a good steal here or there!

Feedback is welcomed dahlings! Thanks for lookin'!

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

First Roadblock - Day 5

We've been lucky up to this morning and haven't had any major roadblocks. However, that changed when we ripped the existing tub out -- so after many trips to HD and redigging out the crawl space (GROSS!), we managed to re-plumb the tub and put it into place. Today was also the first day I had to wear a face mask. Bought the tub, toilet, and tile and plan on putting that in tomorrow. Dad and Jack came out in the afternoon to help and we also went to pick up the washer and dryer. It's the stackable kind, but it seems a bit strange -- I think we'll bolt it to the wall just to be sure it doesn't wiggle around.

Rainy and stormy here all day, which prevented me from doing any further painting -- so that's my first project in the AM. My arm feels like it is going to fall off from swinging a hammer all afternoon (pounding down stubborn nails and staples in the kitchen subfloor) and I'm looking forward to painting tomorrow instead of nail duty!

Very tired now and plan on going to bed early after long days and late nights. I need to catch up on sleep!

Relaxing in the tub early morning... :) (Like 6 AM early morning. Blah.)

Work space is getting crowded! Especially today because we couldn't take anything outside.

The hole in the ceiling actually got fixed today, but I forgot to take a picture of it. (The plaster that you can see is original to the house -- meaning it's 110 years old!)

Fitting subfloor into the bathroom -- but this had to come up again when we put the new tub in. Mike spent 15 minutes in the crawl space putting all of the plumbing together. I was using the table saw on my own during this time. No big deal. (shoulder shrug)

I should've taken a picture of this before I was tossing it out the window (into the dumpster) because the pile was 3 times as high: bricks, cinder blocks, baby bottles, wire hangers, newspaper, broken glass jars, gloves... all covered in dust and insulation that was making us gag.