Molassas Station

It may seem as though we're moving pretty slowly lately - but I can assure you that Jesse has been working his little bottom off with ten hour plus days and no rest for the weekends.

He talked about our little indoor plumbing fiasco a bit in the last blog - who needs a main water line anyway?
Well, to give you an idea of the rusted-out-ness that we were dealing with, here's the sink aerator from our bathroom.
This is after we had replaced ALL the pipes in the house with the exception of the runs from the crawlspace to the bathroom (maybe five feet of old pipes left at the most.) So this buildup is from FIVE FEET of yucky old pipes that all of the sudden had a TON of water running to them because of the un-blocked-ness of the new pipes that fed them.

Five feet and actual water pressure created this:
Yuck.

So as I was saying, Jesse worked his bottom off for about two weeks replacing all of our indoor plumbing and running new lines to our WASHER/DRYER and the new kitchen. Yes, folks, we have a WASHER DRYER!
Oops - I forgot to take a picture of it.

Later. During that week and a half of working in the tiny crawlspace beneath the house with the spiders, Jesse developed a nasty upper respiratory infection and was coughing up golf ball sized hunks of yuckiness into his breathing mask - AND STILL WORKING NON-STOP.
I tried to get him to take a day off, but he didn't think that was an option considering we didn't have indoor plumbing.

I know how to pick 'em.

Plumbing finished, we (and by we I mean Jesse) moved on to the electrical. Here's one of our junction boxes. Looking at it now, I'm re-thinking having a professional electrition come in...
He did a great job, though. And we'll be having a city inspector come in to verify this for safety!

Most people put baseboard over the existing wall. Not whoever built our house! When we took the baseboard off to run electic for new outlets, we found that it just butted up against the bottom of the drywall...

Most homes today have at minimum a 200 amp service. Here's our 60 amp service with its four (yes, four) circuits. Ha.

Here's a nice picture of our kitchen looking into the living room. This is where the sink, eating bar area, and two lazy susans will be.

Here's the fantastic framing and electrical job Jesse did on the part of our kitchen that will house our oven, OTR microwave and refridgerator.

Check out our sweet new paddle switches. I was against them at first but Jesse convinced me. You may need to tip your monitor over to view them properly.
Below you can see (from left to right) our living room (three-way) light paddle, the living room fan control, and our dimmable pendant lights that will go over the bar eating area paddle!
I've somehow convinced Jesse to grow a renovation mustache.

Cheeba is still doing quite well through the whole process and Jesse has managed to not let her out into the wilderness or hit her with a tool! In fact, he's become quite fond of her.

Our second bedroom has morphed into an office/storage area/cheeba bathroom. I believe the boxes are full of kitchen supplies so we should be ready for guests again in August. Speaking of being ready, we created a revised calendar of kitchen renovations, which we posted on the wall there in the left of the picture. The whole "re-plumbing the enitre house" thing got us a bit off track. We now expect to be done done done by July 31st - including a trip back east to NY in July of time off.

Keep your eyes on the prize.
Here's the kitchen looking at it from the dining room. We haven't settled on colors for anything. We know we're going to have shaker style doors for the cabinets (not whatever these are) and that's about it. The countertop, backspash and paint colors are still all up in the air.
So vote now!


Lastly, this is what happens when Jesse works twelve-hour days...