I’ll be honest with you, the majority of these posts are just fluff while I wait until I can actually do something productive to the house, other than keeping the snow at bay. With the water damage, I’ve been held back on working on things until the insurance adjuster makes his final call on things. For the most part, that day was today. As I type this, I’m waiting for a plumber to show up to clear out our main drainage line (something must have washed into the basement drain clogging it up a bit). While he is here, is going to make the final call on our water heater, which I expect will be replaced. I feel so dirty having contractors coming in doing this work that I am perfectly capable of, but I can justify it as it isn’t coming out of my wallet.

So I apologize about not stripping (wood that is — there, that obligatory houseblog joke is fulfilled), not replacing the glass in the windows and reglazing them, not flipping the stairs yet, or not ripping out the upstairs kitchen yet. I’m just as excited to get my hands dirty as you are. The water damage totally threw our plans in a loop. Some good, some bad. We were planning on sanding down the textured walls in our living/dining room and repainting. Now, with it all falling off, someone else can have that delightful job. They will also be fixing any cracks in the plaster. That is a good thing. The bad thing is the first item on our to-do list was to rip out the upstairs kitchen. Being that it is now our only functioning kitchen, it is put off for a couple months.

Any suggestions on what to do? I get lots of people reading these, but not a single comment other than one from Casey.

Here is things we want to do in no specific order:

• Strip woodwork
• Fix cracked windows
• Hang an antique light
• Remove paint from hardware
• Fix some broken parts on our dining room chairs
• Set up a home network
• Gut the upstairs kitchen (on hold)
• Flip the stairs (on hold)
• Remove that huge chunk of ice from the side of the house
• Install some new lights on the front of the garage (keep the bad guys at bay)

Ugh, I was supposed to get pictures of the second floor tonight, wasn’t I? Sorry, I still feel like a semi hit me and I would rather sit here and type than run upstairs and take pictures. What a lousy house blogger…

Our house tends to quickly disorientate people when all they have to look at are pictures of the inside. There are quite a few doors for the size of the house, and some configurations that don’t make a whole lot of sense. So I bring you rough floor plans. Here is the main floor:

Here is the upstairs currently:

If you look closely, you can see that the stairs going up start out by the porch. Early on in this house’s history, the owners must have split up the house into two living areas. The house was built in 1928, but all the modifications are using pretty old building materials. It is all lathe and plaster.

As I had mentioned in our we’re back post, we plan to flip the stairs around 180 degrees to go back to “original.” We know that the stairs used to be flipped because when we worked on some plumbing in the upstairs kitchen, we could see the old stair lines in the paint under the floor. Not to mention this current layout makes no sense. This will also get rid of one of the doors in the porch which will be nice. Once our water damaged kitchen on the main floor is fixed, we’ll be gutting out the upstairs kitchen as that will then be the top of the stairs with a small sitting area.

And yes, I still plan on taking pictures of the upstairs tonight . I’ve come down with a cold that makes programming difficult, so I needed this reprieve for a bit.