Winter just doesn’t want to let go of North Dakota. We enjoyed near 60 degree weather on Saturday. A trip to the park for the little guy to go down every last slide, as well as breaking out the grill and making some steaks, cheesy potatoes, and corn on the cob.

Sunday, it rained. It was cold. It snowed.  Yes, those white flakes that fall from the sky fell once again. When I started to see them fall, I decided to go to sleep early in hopes it would all be gone by the time I woke up, making it appear to just be a bad nightmare. It almost worked. My car had a little bit left on the rear window.

In a way, I was greatful for the change from rain to snow. While it was raining consistently, I started hearing a water drop every couple of seconds. This house just loves water incase you haven’t noticed yet. The leak I had hoped to have fixed a month or so ago in the roof isn’t fixed. I have no idea where it is coming from. So when the rain turned to snow, the leak stopped. Tonight I’ll be climbing back on the roof with more roof caulk stuff in hopes to find the issue and put it to rest. This time I hopefully won’t drop the tube of roof caulk stuff off of the roof. Yes, I dropped the roof caulk stuff off of the roof the last time. Rookie.

You remember the flooring contractor who was supposed to be here almost two weeks ago? Fired.

Round two starts tonight with a new contractor looking at it at 5pm. If this guy can keep his word, which I find half of these guys can’t do, he will be here Thursday to patch the floors if we give him the go ahead.

That is all I have. Just enough for three sentences and not even a single picture.

Hope you all are having a great Monday!

It has been quite a while since I posted last and I have a lot talk about, but I don’t have a lot of time right now. So I’m only going to focus on a few of the smaller details!

The first one is all of our heat registers and vents. They have been painted several times over the years so we decided we were going to try boiling them to get down to the metal. I managed to get one done and it was such a pain. Because they wouldn’t fit in a stock pot I put it in the sink and dumped boiling water in the sink.  I worked on this register for over two hours and then eventually quit.  I was able to get down to the very first and original layer of white, enamel paint. As you can probably imagine I was overwhelmed and frustrated with how I was going to get all of these cleaned up! Well I mentioned what I was doing to our main contractor and he suggested taking them in and having them sandblasted. Brilliant idea! However, I didn’t want to put out a ton of money on this at the moment. Fast forward a couple of weeks and our contractor offered to take them with him on his vacation to his in-laws and clean them up. In the process of him working on all of these we communicated via email. He ended up putting a ton of work into these as they weren’t coming clean with the sandblasting. There was over 7 layers of paint on them so stripper also had to be used as well as a wheel grinder and then sand blasted! I’m sure glad I sent them with him instead of continuing to use the sink method! Anyways, in the end I went with the contractor’s idea of painting them a pipe black in glossy to make the registers look like the old cast iron. They turned out amazing and I couldn’t be happier!

Second subject is light fixtures. Insurance covered the lights so I was able to have a little fun! I purchased a unique brass chandelier on ebay  and a wedding cake chandelier from our local antique dealer. Now here is my dilemma; I’m not sure where to put what light. One has to go in the back entry and the other in the living room. My worry with putting the brass chandelier in the living room is it’ll clash with what we have in the dining room. Any opinions would be great!

Last subject is kitchen hardware. Can any one recommend a place to purchase good quality hardware? I’ve looked at Lowes and Menards and they don’t have what I want. I’m after bin pulls, knobs, and latches. I did place an order from Van Dykes and while the style was what I wanted, the quality was not the best so I sent it back. I’m also debating between two styles of bin pulls so again, comments would be much appreciated!

We’re burnt out. We are ready to use the upstairs to sleep, the main floor to play. We are ready to eat at a normal table, rather than one of us standing, the other sitting on a stool. We are ready to take our dirty dishes, and place them into a mechanical device that spits them out clean. We are ready to watch a movie on the TV, rather than a computer monitor. We are ready to sit on a couch to relax, rather than the floor.

We are ready to be done.

Counter tops are still not in. They better be in next week.

The contractor that was supposed to patch the floor starting Wednesday or yesterday is still not here. If he doesn’t show up on Monday he is getting fired.

The wood for our trim is finally here, but has yet to be cut, yet alone installed.

Our nice contractor is still nice, but hasn’t been showing up nearly as frequently as he used to. This is slowing us down tremendously. So much so that I took one of the side jobs I was going to give him into my own hands. That window we removed from the kitchen left an area on the exterior of the house without siding. I stopped by the lumber yard on my birthday a few days ago and picked up the cedar lap siding. Two days ago I put some tar paper over the plywood that covered the old window location and sealed it up. From there, I put up about half of the siding. I called it a night as to not keep the neighbors up with my pounding.

Getting the siding to look decent has turned out to be a significant challenge. The new lap siding is 1/16″ to 1/8″ thinner than the old stuff (and much less dense). This resulted in the first board sitting in too deep. From that one, I’ve been placing a nail under it when nailing it in to keep it at the same distance as the old material. This will require significant caulking under the lip of the board to seal them.

Overall, the siding project hasn’t turned out as well as I’d like so I’m going to save taking pictures until it is painted as I think it’ll not look as bad once the boards are at least the same color.

Tonight I’m going to finish the siding, find a camping chair from the garage porch, and enjoy a nice drink in the most comfortable chair we have access to at the moment. It’ll be good.

We’ve waited a long time for this. More than four months coming. Our kitchen is finally starting to look like one. While we are still a couple weeks away from actually using it, it sure feels good to see cabinets going up.

And with our appliances put in front of their respective locations:

Later this week, there is (yet another) contractor coming over to do some work we weren’t sure was going to be done or not. He is going to be doing some patching and replacing of maple flooring on the main floor. There are a couple spots where someone had put outlets mounted on the floor. While the one that is an inch away from the wall wasn’t that bad, the one that was right in the middle of the floor had been driving us crazy. So those two spots are going to go away. Then there is another location that had a cold air return in the past, and it was “patched” up by just placing 4 maple floor boards in the rectangular opening. While the floor is a good match, it isn’t blended at all, so it sticks out like a sore thumb. That’ll be fixed.

One of the worst flooring areas is where there used to be room dividers between the living room and dining room (ugh at whoever tore those out!). This area was patched in quite poorly with cut marks into neighboring floor boards. And after the burst pipes, they became quite bouncy and loose. I’m excited to see how this is going to turn out.

Onto the main floor bedroom, there is another cold air return that was patched again. This time with one solid board (at least 6″ wide by at least 2′ long). If the other one sticks out like a sore thumb, this sticks out like a monster truck at a Mini Cooper convention.  As Brendan would say: buh-bye. The other spots in this room aren’t quite as bad. There are a couple <1″ holes drilled in near the trim that will go. And in the middle of the room, there must have been a bad squeak, as someone put in around two dozen bright, wide, silver nails into the floor boards. This area will be cut out and patched.

Seriously, what are the odds? We buy a house 4 months ago. Two days before moving in, we get burst pipes. NOW, hours after getting a fully functional upstairs bathroom, the dike over by the old Lincoln Drive neighborhood broke loose!! We had to leave the house a couple hours ago due to the water making its way up our street. From what the radio is saying, our neighborhood has a few feet of water in it.

I think we are going to give up the dream of ever owning a home.

Here is a picture that the paper in town here has on its website:

Our house is about 10 blocks to the left of this picture. We’ll keep you up to date.  Sounds like FEMA will be bringing in trailers for people whose houses are under water to live in.

Happy April Fool’s Day!