Our New Old House

Well, Brandon’s out of town for two weeks and I feel like I’m coming down with something, so I’m afraid the updates may be few and far between for a little while.  But here’s what I’ve got from the past week or so:

 The bathroom lights are finished and they look and work great!  The one in the ceiling has a ventilation fan.

My Grandma gave me a couple pieces of furniture to get us started. The bed is nice and comfy and the vanity is an antique that belonged to my great grandmother who came from Mexico.

Once our bedroom was nice and comfortable, I caught Brandon taking a snooze on the bed.

This is always going to be a problem: Brandon’s too long for the bed.

But he’s just right for me.

We stayed in our new old house on Saturday night. I took Brandon to the airport on Sunday morning, and I slept at the house by myself last night. It’s nice and comfortable with the windows cracked open to let the breeze in. The cats love it too. Oh yeah! I haven’t posted about the cats moving in! That’s coming next. Stay tuned!

While we were scraping things on Saturday, Brandon was up in Clear Lake tending to the maintenance of our other house and picking up the tools we so stupidly forgot in our haste two weekends before. He had a busy day mowing the lawn, checking the basement (torrential rains in northern Iowa meant we had a little bit of water in our basement, but nothing very bad. Good thing we cleaned the gutters when we did!), and taking the jet ski out for a spin. “You have to run it every couple of weeks to make sure the motor stays lubed,” he explained. I didn’t begrudge him a ride, he’d earned it.

After he ate a quesadilla, Brandon got to work taking down the ceiling tile in the kitchen. It’s not exactly like a drop ceiling. We thought the tiles might be stuck directly to the plaster, or that there’d be some sort of frame underneath that they were attached to. Turns out they were stapled to two by fours that were spaced about a foot apart across the whole ceiling. Taking down the tiles was easy. Taking down the boards was going to be very very hard. Too hard. In fact, from the look of how cracked the plaster was in between those boards, we figured they were put there to actually hold the ceiling up as well as provide a framework for the tiles.

Here are pictures:

After taking down all the tile and consulting with our electrician, we’ve decided that the best thing to do is to leave the wood framework up and put drywall over it. It’s very well constructed and is actually doing a great job of holding the cracked plaster ceiling up, so we’ll just deal with it that way.

[tags]ceiling, kitchen[/tags]