Nightmare on Elm St.

The journey of turning the nightmare we bought on Elm St. into our dream home...

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Monday, March 27, 2006

Grunt work has arrived...

You may remember my recent dismay at our lack of progress on the basement. Greg very kindly pointed out that we simply needed to order a case of his amazing grunt work, and all of our problems would be solved. Greg does need to add a disclaimer, though- grunt work can be a very dangerous consumer of time and energy. Those seem to be crucial ingredients to its success.

Friday night we continued to clean up the shop, and fixed a few previous issues with some of the systems that I won't get into here. It's sufficient to say that we were up until 2 am working on the basement. Finally we ran out of supplies and energy, and decided to call it a night.

Saturday we hauled 600 lbs of trash to the dump! Apparently everyone else had the same though, though, b/c we waited in line 30 minutes to exit the dump. I think that there should be a separate entrance and exit for the big contractors and junk removal companies who clog up the exit scale. Just a suggestion. Then we made another trip to Home Depot and started acquiring stuff to do all of the telephone, sattelite and speaker wire stuff. We're not sure that we will keep the TV in it's old location- we may end up flipping the seating arrangement in the room and putting the TV where the couch used to be. But, we're not sure, so we're just going to run cable, phone, and speaker wire to both sides so that we have the flexibilty to change it later. This will occupy us most of this week. Fortunately, installing the low voltage wires is quiet because we just need the staple gun, so we won't disturb our neighbors working on it after work. I'll put up a separate post about this when it's completed. Just an aside, why do the orange low voltage boxes cost, like $2, and the blue regular boxes cost like $0.20? We couldn't figure it out, so we just bought the cheaper ones. It seems like if it's good enough for electricity, it's good enough for phone line! We will write low voltage on them somewhere just so that no one is ever confused. We continued working on the issues that we were addressing on Friday until about 10 pm on Saturday. I was beat! That grunt work will really take it out of you.

In other news, Saturday night a bunch of teenagers went around the neighborhood smashing side mirrors off of cars. Apparently all of our good karma from the Devil Queen folks is working, b/c they didn't touch my car, and they just bent in Aaron's mirror. One of our neighbors with a Honda Accord got their mirror knocked completely off. And in Maryland, a car is inoperable without a side mirror, so they have to get it towed in to be fixed. They really need to establish some sort of entertainment for the bored youth in our town. Last summer, my friend's convertible got egged twice. You haven't lived until you've tried to help someone clean out dried egg from their speaker covers in 95 degree heat with a toothpick. I hope that all of this vandalism is revisited on these kids tenfold when they grow up and get their own property.

Sunday we slept in a little, and I had book club, so you might think that less was accomplished. Oh no, not with grunt work around! Aaron started to tackle some of the plumbing in the basement bathroom while I was gone. I finished tuck pointing the wall down there when I got back (I had one small section that I just hadn't gotten to- it feels great to have that done now!). When I finished the tuckpointing, I helped by cleaning and cutting pipes, and he sweated joints, and before we knew it, it was 1 am again. (NO LEAKS though! Woo hoo!) We made the unfortunate decision to go to Taco Bell, and then went to bed. One thing we both didn't fully grasp was that I had to be up at 5 am this morning to catch a plane to Atlanta for a business trip. Of course, we both slept through our alarms. Aaron was a sweetheart and took me to the airport (all the way to Baltimore, and then he had to drive back north of DC for work- he rocks!), which saved me time for parking, and I just barely made it to my plane. Whew! We've learned our lesson though- no starting plumbing jobs in the afternoon. This is the second time we've been up half the night trying to get the water back on so that we can shower in the morning. That grunt work is scary stuff!

Aaron plans to finish up the rest of the water lines tonight. He just has to run the last little pieces to the tub, toilet, and sink.