Independence Day

Yeahhhhh! I am back. Happy Independence Day! This week, freedom day has more meaning to me than usual. I have been under-staffed at work since February, and our new employee just started this week. This is good news. Doing two jobs has been very taxing. I look forward to turning in my 50+ hour work week for something more manageable. Tracy has NOT BEEN HAPPY with my schedule. My new job was supposed to provide some life balance for me. Uuughhh! So with fingers crossed and new staff on board, I will hopefully have a renewed interest in blogging. I hope to also get my Facebook page up and running.

So here is a progress report on our home-improvement project. We have lots underway, but progress is very slow. Anyone who has ever tried restoring a 90+ year home knows that once you touch one thing, another thing falls apart.

One of the first projects we did was replacing the knob & tube electric on the second floor. We also had some recessed lighting installed in the stairway. But when the lights were going in, Tracy noticed that the plaster ceiling was sagging... which caused cracking over time. So Tracy proceeded to repair the ceiling by anchoring it and reinforcing the supports in the attic.

Another project in the works is restoring our old windows. After much research, we decided to restore rather than replace. We removed all the windows on the second floor. We started stripping the windows by hand. Yuck. Check out the bubbled up 10-layers of paint after applying the stripper!

Once the window is stripped of paint, it needs to be repaired. Most are warped or have deteriorated in some areas. Tracy loved using his wooden-boat-repair epoxy skills for this project.

So the manual stripping was a huge pain in the butt, so we stacked up the windows and brought them to the Furniture Spa (lucky windows!) in Seattle and had them dipped in stripper. A little more money, but much easier. We just picked them up yesterday. They look very relaxed. I will take a photo of them and post it in a later post. Here they are as "before spa" windows.

Because all the walls and ceilings in the house are plaster, the previous owners have always used wallpaper to cover up the cracking. We are not big fans of wallpaper. I have been removing wallpaper for months. But I am finally done! A wallpaper steamer is a great tool. THE PROBLEM though.... a lot of cracks in the plaster under the wallpaper. Tracy has been grinding out the cracks in the walls and repairing them. He also is continuing to anchor all the second-floor ceilings to the attic floor.

Well, I don't want to get too long with this post. I will upload some photos of Tracy's current, outdoor project on Sunday. It is looking very nice.

Hint: roof and gutter repair.

Happy Fourth of July!