The Last of the Horsey Wallpaper

Neigh! This is the final reminder of some bad wallpaper boarder choices (and the paint colour, 'Pepto Chic', isn't too far behind.)

The Banned Building

See that hulking bunch of timber and shingles in the mist? Well it's been red-flagged by the city we live in because the previous owners built it without a permit.

It's built of odds and ends (including tree stumps holding up one side). No wonder it's been marked as a big no-no with the city.

We have until the end of May to take it down and dispose of it. There are a few options available to us for the removal, and I'm rooting for the one that costs us the least money and time.

The mud room

This is where we're currently at with the mud room. Thanks to the well-placed wood stove we had to re-frame (okay, Trevor did the framing, I'm moral support) the corner of the wall that went on a lovely diagonal.

We also had to replace all of the subfloor in this room because the dirty old owners kept three washers and two dryers in it -- and they leaked like mad. Oh, the was also a rat superhighway behind those machines as well between that floor and the basement.

Let's relive that moment when we first moved in and had this visual spectacle of laundry-o-rama:

Ew.

But look on the bright side, at least the brass boob light is gone (boob lights...they follow me everywhere):

For your viewing pleasure, the new (clean and smelling like wood, not anything else) subfloors:

And look! A CORNER! (Clouds open up, beam of light shines down.)

Goodbye chimney!

The badly placed chimney that ran it's way on a angle through the old laundry room and family room (and really was in a hallway, you know, somewhere where everyone can comfortably snuggle up around it), went straight down into the basement, and straight up through the master bedroom. It's gone for good, and all we have to remember it by is the hole.

Where things are at

Things have been a little jumbled lately and my lack of blog posts stems mostly from a busy October with days stretching into weekends with my regular studio work. Trevor had more than a few lonely weekends working on the house with me stuck in front of a computer meeting deadlines. I think I needed a break from the regular blog posts as it meant I would be sitting in front of computer (again!). Here's hoping I'm back to some regularly scheduled programming!

Welcome to some photos of the inside of the house:

This is the view from the front door heading upstairs (oh, and that lovely blue tarp is the entrance to our only working bathroom). Insulation is the enemy here, especially blown-in attic insulation that has been plagued by a rat/mouse city development. Nothing gives me the heebie-jeebies more than thinking we have uninvited guests skipping above us using our insulation as their personal toilet. And nothing was worse than having to take it down and clean it up. (There was a point where I wondered if we'd ever reclaim the house -- the rodent poop outnumbered us 100000 to 1.)

The view into the kitchen. There's still some insulation in the walls to be taken out.

This will eventually be where the kitchen island will sit, and beyond that a closed-in mudroom. The chimney is being taken down as well.

Looking into the family room.

And lastly, looking up to the master bedroom. You can see how ridiculous it was to design a chimney to come up through the house, chopping room away from the mudroom storage and the bedroom.

Kitchen of horrors

Remember the last shot of the kitchen? Yes, lets hope you haven't eaten anything within 30 minutes of seeing this picture again:

You're lucky this photo isn't scratch-n-sniff. Take it from me, I've been there, and it's bad -- in a dry heave-y way.

Onwards and upwards, right?

Another beauty shot of the kitchen showing off it's fly tape and impeccable organization. Everything a modern family could possibly want. HA.

We decided to put on our big boy and big girl pants and bring the kitchen down (note to self: buy bigger big pants):

There was a noticeable decrease in the number of winged friends buzzing in drunken dirty kitchen swarms once we started to take the cupboards down.

(Small pause here: The two older guys who were frolicking through our yard-o-crap took these cupboards. I hope they took them far, far away. Crazy old guys nonetheless.)

Once the cast iron sink was taken out (and our spines readjusted) we discovered the mouse hotel under the lower cabinets and up into the wall.

EVICTION NOTICE! Well, not quite as dramatic as that, but we were glad to see that no one was home at the time. The mouse hotel was engineered using insulation and plastic bread bags.

Excuse me for a moment while I get a little sidetracked:

THESE PEOPLE CLEARLY WERE NEVER ON THE ATKINS DIET. The sheer volume of bread, tortillas, wraps, pitas, buns, flatbread that we're discovering must have cost a small fortune. We have 3 FULL SIZE freezers left behind, and every single one of them is full of bread. Two of them are outside, and one is down in the basement. When you wander around the yard you stumble across plastic bread bags and those plastic ties used to close them. I mowed the lawn (whole other story there, if I go off on another tangent this post will never end) and mowed up 3 bread bags hidden in tall grass and weeds. It makes the mower sound like a category 3 hurricane.

Sidetracking over (for now, you're lucky).

To add to the mouse hotel, we noticed an ant inn (trying to make a theme work here):

And I now know where the inspiration for Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' came from. The resemblance is uncanny:

I think my face did the exact same thing at that moment.

Then we noticed the shoddy electrical work:

Yup, that's duck tape. Doubt THAT meets code. Good thing we had already decided to bring down all of the drywall in the house anyways.

So that leaves us with a parting shot of the scene we're uncovering. Another ant party was found in the far corner, but we couldn't find any ant inns around there. That might mean there's another problem on the second level. Hopefully not, but if there is, we'll deal with it -- and I'm going to buy a 36-ton pack of caulk and cover the exterior of the house in it.