Day 2

 And so day two has come and gone and it is amazing what happens when you're not there watching. For instance...

The dumpster that was supposed to be here on day one showed up today. I was impressed that there was already so much junk inside of it when I got here at 6.

The soffit above the kitchen is no more! You can see the high attention to detail paid by the workers from UDC when they built this house in this photo, the wire you see hanging down in the foreground was simply laying on the dry wall. Trust me when I tell you that that is not how you are supposed to do it. Oh well, it will be fixed now.

Now Laura and I had removed the cabinet facing and the shelves inside the pantry, but this is what I found after only two days of work! Wonderful! Laura joked that we could just leave it this way so we had a second door to the office, you know "open floor plan" as it were. Alas, the refrigerator must go someplace...

In the hall bathroom the evil space alien has finally left! For those of you that never saw the alien it was a face in the cultured marble of the bathroom wall. I saw it the very first moment I walked into the house back in 1983 while construction was still ongoing. It was one of those things that once you saw it you could never un-see it. Personally, I'm glad it's gone.

With all of the cabinetry gone and you may have noticed the doors as well, we think that it has been a very productive couple of days for the crew here. They will not agree with us as they are having an issue with the tile flooring.

Do any of you recall Dad's problems with the grout on his original floor? Well the company that came out to clean his grout screwed it up so badly that in the end they agreed to pay to have a new tile floor installed instead of face Dad in court. The old floor came up so easily you could remove whole tiles without damaging them by just sliding a screwdriver under the edge. The company that set the new floor was told not to make any mistakes.

The result is that the crew here now is using electric jackhammers to remove the tile and it is not coming up. Next week they are bringing in a super-duper-sand-N-vac machine to grind the tiles off. I'll bet that will be nice and quiet.

Another thing about dear old UDC, you might notice in the left side of this picture that the nine foot mirror in this bath room is gone but the wall is incredibly clean. Think about this, a 9'x3'x3/8" glass mirror held on to the wall by TWO screws. Not one drop of mirror mastic behind any of them! When we pulled it off the wall, Yeah we did that, we nearly fainted. Go to YouTube and look up how to remove a mirror like this. We were ready for a fight! Damn thing practically came off in our hands. 

The work to remove the wallpaper in the living room continues now that our newest toy/tool has been delivered. It was always clear that working from ladders was not going to be fun, but once Laura tried it the answer became a definite no. 

So we began to search for something we could rent. There are lots and lots of equipment rental companies in town, but on average for three weeks the price was going to be more than $1k IF they had the equipment when we were going to need it.

The answer to this conundrum then was simple, either build our own out of Lego bricks or buy our own. So of course we went with the Lego option only to discover that we would need approximately $12k in Lego in order to construct a 12 foot scaffold and that it would not support the weight of our cat Tybalt let alone one of us. So we bought one instead for just over $600 and we can use it for the duration if needs be. What's more if I happen to spill paint on it I won't have to pay some one an "Environmental Fee" to clean it off.

So now we are the proud owners of our very own scaffolding and Laura is happy as Larry! Plus now we can reach all of those difficult to reach spots. WooHoo!