Our New Old House

I enlisted Brandon’s help this weekend in mixing plaster for me while I put it on the walls. Eventually he started putting it on the walls himself, so that part got boring, but together we finished patching all the cracks, holes, and corners in the front bedroom.

Pictures!

My first corner!

Kind of blotchy after wet sanding.

See how bad our corners are? This one has fiber tape over it.

Gosh, is that how my hair looks from the back?

I’m not particularly proud of how this corner came out. I’ll sand it down a bit and add another smoother layer.

Ok, enough about the plaster. Let’s talk about the weather! It’s been cold here! So cold I can’t think up a colorful simile with which to describe how cold it’s been. (Leave me a comment if you’ve got a good one.) Anyway, it was a great opportunity to show just what a difference plastic sheeting can make when you’ve got leaky windows and worthless storms.

Here we see a window with plastic sheeting intact. Notice: NO FROST! That means no warm, moist air is leaking out into the frigid outdoors, and no frigid outdoor air is leaking inside.

Now let’s look at a window on which the integrity of the plastic sheeting has been compromised by the claw of a scheming cat.

And in other news…

I FOUND MY SCRAPER!!!

See if you can spot it in this photo:

How about now?

Yes, folks, the scraper was INSIDE Brandon’s bicycle. How it got there I’ll never know. But I’ll tell you, the only way I found it was by buying three new scrapers of the exact same kind that very morning. (Still sale priced at Menard’s, btw.) After I’d safely tucked them away in my tool box where they belong, the prodigal scraper glinted at me from inside the bicycle and we were tearfully reunited.

If I can stop hiding things from myself, this house may actually get done someday!

Brandon and I did a few things to winterize the house today.

First, we filled some gaps in the basement that were letting cold air into the house.

By the way, maybe I’m a dork for this, but I think insulating foam is one of the most fun and entertaining substances ever created. Not only does it make an awesome gurgling sound when it comes out of the tube, but it also looks like whipped cream when it comes out. Plus, watching it expand and bubble out of the cracks is really fun. The coolest thing though, is that you can let loose a little glob of it on your brick basement wall and it will slowly roll down the wall like those slimy toys we used to get from Nickelodeon when we were kids. Anyway, I had fun. Here are some pictures:

One big hole was around the exhaust pipe for the gas furnace. There was a half an inch of open space around the pipe. I filled it with foam.

Here it is before foaming:

Here it is mid-foam:

Fully foamed:

One basement window was really drafty so I filled all the gaps around it with foam.

Here’s the window before:

And the foaming process:

The coal chute was letting in a lot of cold air. So guess what I did. You got it! FOOOOAAAMMMM!!!!

And for good measure, I also got a few gaps that opened up as the foundation settled.

Next we put up some plastic sheeting over our drafty windows. Brandon is a master plastic sheet putter-upper. I mostly just assisted but he let me do the fun part of shrinking the plastic with a hair dryer! (I love him so much!)

Now we just need to get some wood for the stove and we’ll be all ready for winter! Ooh wait, I need some more fall first. Winter can wait!

P.S. I also got on a very high ladder today and cleaned out the gutters on the other side of the house today. Phew! I’m exhausted!