Craft Room Phase II!

The craft room has always been a odd room in our house. It was the dumping grounds for things that never got unpacked. It was a makeshift craft room for awhile (that's now in my dining room which looks absolutely fabulous let me assure you...). MacGyver and I want to make that space into two rooms. So on Friday night MacGyver and I cleaned out the rest of the stuff and jammed it into other parts of the house. Then MacGyver began demolition about 6pm Saturday afternoon! (It was a lazy day and took awhile to get motivated!) I would like to say that I helped, but I would be lying. I did a lot of "supervising" and cleaning and fetching of this or that. I made the coffee runs and Subway runs! :)


Here is a picture before we started after everything was cleared out! Its almost hard to remember there used to be a wall there!

We started by removing the old Berber carpet (ick!).




Then we removed all the moldings around the base of the room, and all those stupid tack strips from the carpet. I've added those to my top ten least favorite things to do under chopping raw chicken, de-veining raw shrimps, and knocking out lath and plaster.



When MacGyver was removing this board, we discovered writing on the back. There was a lot of dust in the air and the light is not good, but it reads "north west room". Kind of fun!



After all that was removed we started again with the plaster - the bane of my existence. Am I being dramatic enough about the plaster. Am I making myself clear enough about how much it totally sucks to take that out? Good, I was just checking.

There aren't many pictures of the actual demo of the plaster. I was working for awhile and then the dust got to me and I couldn't be in there anymore. Here are some "after" photos though!


(that is where the chimney used to be)


(notice how hazy it is in there? I didn't realize how dusty it really was until I saw these pictures!)

We did make an interesting discovery in the bathroom though! I wont go into the story that led up to us taking off the mirror because MacGyver will probably scream if he hears it again. When we removed the mirror in the bathroom we found this!

It's a built in medicine cabinet! The only problem is that when we remove the lath from the wall behind it there will be a gaping hole in the bathroom wall. That ought to be rather interesting! We'll need to put that mirror back up and I imagine we'll start with drywalling that wall first! :)

MacGyver shoveled all of the plaster down into the basement again. It's even worse than last time! I have a video of the room all demo-ed that I will upload soon. And I will take a picture of the basement to post as well.



Now all the plaster is down off of the walls and the ceiling. MacGyver was able to pull off about 25% of the lath off the walls and hopes to finish that next weekend. Dad came out on Sunday and brought a huge load of 2x4's and a roll of insulation!! THANKS DADDY!

I can't tell you how strange (and a little stressful) it is to see that room totally gutted! What's even worse is the though that the rest of the house will look like that too! Yikes!!

I hope to keep more on top of the blog now that it's all caught up! I will post more next weekend!

Long time no bloggie...

Yes, yes, I know I've been slacking; however, I am very excited to announce that very soon we will be picking things back up and starting in again! In the mean time, enjoy some pictures of my first real Christmas Tree!!




My Twinkly tree!!!!

(I know it's sideways...I can't figure out how to fix it. Any suggestions would be appreciated!)



That's Ross' Mazda Protege sitting underneath our 8.5' Christmas Tree! We got the tree the same weekend it monsooned and Tillamook almost floated out into the ocean. Here are some pictures of the flood.


The steeple blew off the roof of the Bay City Church. The "wind-mometer" out at Cape Meares broke at 120-something mph.


The Nehalem River flooded a lot of dairy pastures.


This was the road to Oceanside from Tillamook. They were without power for nearly 2 weeks.



This is pretty self explanatory!

A mud slide in Bay City onto Hwy 101.\



Here is the view of Hwy 101 through Tillamook. In the background you can see a Red semi up to its doors in water. The cell towers were down and the long distance was broken. All raods leading out of Tillamook county were either flooded or blocked by mudslides. The radio stations had to be boated in (quite literally) and were then stuck in the station until the waters receded. It was quite an adventure! Thankfully, Ross and I live on "the island" - otherwise known as the only section on Tillamook that doesn't flood!

Craft Room Phase I!

MacGyver and I were sitting around this weekend trying to decide what to do. Suddenly he said, lets go knock out that wall in the craft room. As soon as I realized he wasn't kidding, up we went! We moved some of the stuff around but weren't able to get it all out of the room. Now, for any of you who has never had to remove lath and plaster walls before, I do not recommend it (unless of course you're into that sort of masochistic thing in which case knock yourself out). There simply is not easy way to do it. It's messy. Very, very messy. I've decided that removing it ranks right behind cutting up raw chickens, de-veining shrimps, and hauling baskets of laundry up and down the stairs in my top ten least favorite activities!

Remember my Skittles Colored craft Room!? Well here is a picture of the wall from that side before anything was torn apart.



Say goodbye to this wall!



A light switch used to be where this hole now is. Notice the friendly sign to Robyn where not to hit-we both tried to remember whether we knew CPR.



I got to help!! MacGyver said I did a good job but I am s-l-o-w so he let me whack at it for awhile and then told me to beat it. I think it is appropriate to take a moment to explain what exactly it is that we are doing. You see, we live in a hamster cage. Our house is built of cedar, metal and plaster. I like to equate the plaster to that frosting/glue Mom used to make for gingerbread houses - the hard-as-a-rock-break-your-teeth icing? It doesn't come off easily. It's extremely messy. And a giant pain in the patooty! But I digress...So MacGyver told me to scram and let the "real men" work. Notice the difference in fervor between my picture and his!! In the amount of time it took me to take down this small section he had half the rest of the wall already down. Sigh... I guess this is why we leave this stuff to the pros!




Here's what the wall looked like after all the plaster was removed! I can't imagine building houses like this! It must have taken forever to build!

Did I mention it is a messy job? Chunks of plaster all mixed in with pieces of lath (which of course are full of sharp, tetanus-laden nails). I'll let you enjoy the next few play-by-play without commentary :)





So now that all that business was over (and a GIHUGIC mess had been made) we needed to remove the framing posts.



Oh! Look who has the sawzall!! Yes, that's me (admittedly I had to be coerced to use the stupid thing, but I'm all better now!)! Now that the wall is out the chimney must come out as well.


MacGyver started chipping away at the plaster covering the chimney. This chimney had long since been out of commission. It runs down through the house, through the kitchen and into the basement. We think it was once used to cook with or to heat the house from the basement.



We started knocking bricks off one by one and chucking them down the chimney into the basement (which was pretty entertaining actually!).







MacGyver went down in the basement and stuck his head into the chimney ;)



Our basement looked prett scary after we were all done with that! These are all the bricks from the chimney and the plaster from the wall spilling out of the chimney. I'm not looking forward to the day when all of that has to come out of the basement!

And finally, after a long weekend of hard work, it's all done!!

Today's lesson: How to install a dishwasher and garbage disposal!

MacGyver bought me a dishwasher! We've both been thinking about it for a while, but you can imagine my surprise when MacGyver said "let's go buy a dishwasher!" God bless Tillamook too, the saleman delivered it in his personal pickup truck for free. When you view the picture of the dishwasher, think of violins and a choir in the background, maybe a dramatic spotlight casting a warm glow over the stainless steel finish... That's what I hear every time I walk into my kitchen.

So, in our cabinatry there has always been a space for a dishwasher; however there has been no such appliance occupying that space in a very long time, if ever.

More recently, that space has been re-zoned as a sort of bunker for Linus to hide from Nasty Puppy. We also lack one garbage disposal (which apparently is not called a "disposAL" at all, instead they are all called "disposERs". Whatever.) Therfore today's lesson will focus on how to install a dishwasher and a garbage disposER!

Step 1: Take all appliances out of their respective boxes and do a happy dance around them in the middle of the kitchen floor. (But you have to leave the stickers on because it keeps it new and shiny!) And, no, you do not get to see a picture of my happy dance. Too bad for you.

Step 2: Make two trips to the hardware store to get the right breaker for the fuse box. Check to make sure your girlfriend knows CPR. Kill the power to the house (and discover that your house indeed DOES have a main breaker after all! Fancy that!). Fiddle around in the breaker box for awhile, swear a little, send your girlfriend to the store to get her out of your way, and install a new circuit breaker.

Step 3: Redo the outlet in the wall so you have a switch to turn the disposER on and off. Ours started out with one outlet and one switch. The new fixture has two switches and an outlet. I wanted it to go the other way around, but I was told to get over it...

Step 4: Spend the better part of the morning trying to fish the wires from the electrical box on the bump out/back porch thing down under the house (ewe!) into the basement and back up through the wall, only to discover that the cabinets are sitting on top of the hole that the wires come through in the basement which is why we couldn't get the damn things up there to begin with.

Step 5: Cut another hole in the wall. Bend the sawzall blade trying to cut through the wall. (NOTE: our walls are made of a plaster and horsehair cement-like compund. It's strong stuff. Strong enough to break the sawzall blade apparently.) Bend the blade back into place. Repeat the bending process three or four times, and give up. Bust out the hand saw and hack that sucker out of there.

Step 7: Chop another hole in the wall for the dishwasher wiring. Please refer to the steps taken in the post detailing how to fix a bathroom door steps 4 through 8 to best describe how to properly pound, saw, bang on, and otherwise force something into place. Install the box and slide that dishwasher into its new home! Screw it into place so it doens't come flying out the first time it's run.

Step 8: Stand back and admire how pretty it looks in the kitchen (listen for the music again...).

The DispoSER went in without incident. I actually took pictures of the box where it claims "EASY INSTALLATION!" all over, fully anticipating the opportunity to prove them wrong. At the end of the day MacGyver and I were proud new owners of a shiny new dishwasher and an InSinkErator!

Hauser von Schnauzer!

Meet Mojo! He turned seven weeks old today and we were able to finally bring him home!



While some of the following pictures may depict images in which Linus appears to be happy about the new puppy, sadly, this is not the case. It appears he was not expecting this outcome from his little rendezvous last fall! Linus has become quite the drama queen in the past few days and I think is convinced MacGyver and I have lost our minds. He, for lack of a better way to say it, utterly and completely despises little Mojito. Hopefully this will not last!



Mojo with one of his brothers before he came home.



While they look like they are making nice...believe me looks are deceiving.



Mojo invited himself into Linus' kennel (without Linus permission, of course). This picture was taking moments before Linus ran for the hills.



I put Mojo in his kennel to see how it would go. I think the only thing missing from this picture is a tin can to clank against the bars. What a sad little puppy we have!



Mojo modeled his new shirt compliments of MacGyver's sister. (It says "I'm naked under my shirt!)

One passed out puppy!




And now I must excuse myself, I have to go fish Linus out from under the bed where he has been pouting all evening.

Long time no bloggie...

My apologies for slacking on the blogging. MacGyver got a job! This is great...except that this means he doesn't have as much time to work on the house, which means projects will be slower in completion, which in turn means fewer blogs. But that's okay! He actually did this a few weeks ago, but I'm just getting around to posting it now (oops!) He took an old door from my parent's house and turned it into a handy little table for my craft room! True to MacGyver fashion, he screwed it into the floor so that sucker isn't going anywhere! :)