OK, so there was a little water damage after all

After looking at the kitchen the next day, we found that there was some damage from the pipes freezing. One of the cabinets has some noticeable damage, and the ceiling in the laundry room has a little bit of water damage, too. But, things could have been so much worse. The water somehow leaked into the cabinet without ruining any of the cook books on the upper shelf and then collected into the casserole dishes stored on the lower shelf:


The rest of the water ran down the wall below the cabinet. We just set out some bowls to collect the rest of the water, turned on a fan, and let it finish drying out.


In happier news, the windows and door were installed. They're not completely finished yet; there's still some molding or framing or something else to do before we can tackle that last wall in the bedroom.


One small setback - the glass was cracked in one of the windows when it was delivered. And that's why there's blue tape all over the window. There's also a new window on the third floor in our old bedroom.


And the new door:


And just for comparison's sake, here's what the old door looked like:


I guess the new door is an improvement. I kind of liked the crappy stained glass and bad paint job (which seemed to be the theme throughout the house). And the duct tape was a nice touch. Honestly, how lazy do you have to be that you can't even bother to try to keep paint off of the glass? IT'S NOT THAT HARD. If you're going to the trouble of painting the windows in the first place, then at least try to be careful. There's this stuff called painter's tape. It works, and it's inexpensive. Use it. I don't expect things to be perfect, especially in a house like ours where it's so old that perfection is just out of the question for a lot of things. But don't just slap some paint on and then leave it all over the glass. I guess it's fortunate that most of these doors and windows are getting replaced anyway, because that's one less thing to give me an aneurysm.

Frozen pipes

That's right - some pipes froze. And fortunately Michael caught it before things got worse, only because his sister's pipes froze, which prompted Michael to run over to our house during his niece's birthday party to check on things. The culprit is the old bathroom on the second floor; here you can see where the pipes froze, thawed, and broke apart.


There was no heat whatsoever going on in this room. There is now. We've got some leakage downstairs in the kitchen and laundry room, but nothing was damaged. Just some water to clean up.




This recent occurrence reminds me of the last time we had a leak in the house, and I'm surprised I haven't written about it yet. It was rather traumatic. It was August 26, 2007. I remember this well because it happened on my birthday. The day before, I officially moved to Richmond. I'd been back and forth for a few weeks, but that day involved the big truck and moving all the heavy stuff into the house - and it was the last day I was in my apartment. There was no turning back. So, because that day was pretty exhausting, I decided that for my birthday, I wanted to do absolutely nothing. We went over to Michael's parents' house that night and then spent my birthday lounging around before my lovely mother-in-law cooked dinner for us. Then we went back to Church Hill. Oh, and we brought the cats back with us.

We'd gotten married three months earlier, and a few weeks before the wedding, I took Kirin down to the in-laws. Between the preparations for the big day and the honeymoon, I was not home for about two and a half weeks, so I thought it was best to have my future in-laws look after her, even though we didn't know at the time where we would be living after the wedding (this was decided two days before the wedding when Michael accepted the offer for his current job). Michael did the same thing with Tanga. So, three months later, we finally took them to our house.

I bring this up because I was already under some stress before seeing what had happened in the house. You see, I kind of freak out any time I have to put at least one of the cats in its carrier. I hate seeing animals caged up, and even though what I'm doing is for their own good, and even though they're not going to remember what happened, I still hate it and stress out and feel guilty. So all I want to do is get home and let the cats out. We get to the house, and I'm the first one in. I heard what sounded like water dripping somewhere. It had started to rain a little, and this was before we had the roof fixed, so it leaked upstairs in one room pretty much every time it rained. Then I realized the water was coming from upstairs into the first floor. I look down and see where Michael had placed a contractor bag in a corner; this turned out to be such stupidly good luck because that bag caught most of the water. So aside from a little of the ceiling in the hallway falling through (which ended up being torn out completely anyway), the first floor suffered little damage.

Let's move upstairs to the old kitchen. Specifically, the ice maker and its water line that ruptured sometime between us leaving the day before and getting home about 24 hours later. The kitchen floor was one big puddle. Again, no major damage since we knew that room was going to get redone; it was just a mess. So I'm freaking out because I want to let the cats out, but not when there's a huge puddle in the kitchen for them to walk through and track water everywhere. So we clean it up as best we can, and the cats are free. Aside from worrying about the cats, I handled the whole thing pretty well. But then something really small set me off into the first of several break downs over the stupid house.

I went up to the third floor to turn on the air conditioners. We're cheap, and since the cats weren't around, we turned off the window units before we left the house to cut back on the power bill. Apparently, Michael had switched which outlets the units were plugged into, or I just forgot which units were OK to run. The house used to be seriously under-amped, and you couldn't run more than one, maybe two things on the same circuit. You couldn't run a hair dryer at the same time as pretty much anything, a lesson that took me a long time to learn. It was very confusing to remember which outlets belonged on the same circuit, since just because two outlets were on the same wall or even in the same room didn't necessarily mean they were on the same circuit. So a few minutes after turning the air conditioners on, the power on the third floor goes out. I lost it. It was my birthday, and here I was in a dump of a house with a big mess downstairs and it's hot and I broke a circuit, again, and now I'm sitting in the dark. And as always after I have these episodes, Michael continues to put up with me and my freak outs over the house - comforting me and trying to make me feel better - reminding me why I married him, along with the stupid house, in the first place.

Yay! Color!

We've got color on most of the walls in the bedroom, and it looks great. No regrets about choosing this particular color. The pictures, once again, don't do it justice; the color looks even better in person.

The mantle and the windows also need some work before a new coat of paint goes on them. Yesterday I took off most of the paint on the top of the mantle, thanks to the heat gun we borrowed from Michael's dad. We hope that sanding down the rest of it will be much easier now. We don't know how much of the paint we'll take off for the rest of the mantle, since we don't want to mess up any of the details in the design, particularly the fluting on the sides.

We've got some cutting in to do on the walls, then painting that last wall after the new windows go in, and then making the mantel and window frames look nicer, and then I think the bedroom will be done. We bought drapes (and yes, they're the purple ones) and the hardware for the bedroom at IKEA on New Year's Day. We were up in Alexandria visiting friends, and since you can't buy IKEA's textiles online, and we were up that way, I wanted to stop and see what they had. I think we'll be making more trips to IKEA as we start decorating.