This week we finally faced head on the water damage in our bathrooms. The repairs have begun! The problem was a little more limited than we thought. And a little more extensive… look at me being the grumpy pessimist. It’s kind of a scary job though.
First we had to rip up the floor in the master bathroom. After that we had to take out some of the wall next to the tub. Then we had to saw apart the plastic plumbing connected to the bathtub. Daniel and I moved the tub out of the way into our bedroom. (Thanks to Daniel for pointing out that the tub could be pushed through a hidden service door. Before that I had been unsuccessfully trying to lift it out of the bathroom over a toilet and sink.) Then we had to cut up the flooring and then the subflooring in the guest bathroom. By Saturday afternoon all the decayed wood was cut away. You could stand in the center of a 4′ x 6′ hole that connected both bathrooms and went down to the dirt underneath the house. As far as we know we are not being invaded by too many bugs and critters, though we do have a bathtub sitting smack dab in the center of our bedroom. It really quite romantic, and we may suggest it to contractors in the future.
We finished the day Saturday by putting some boards down for subflooring. It is super-strong, thankfully. The house was built really solidly everywhere else and we didn’t want to make it any weaker in our patches. There’s still a lot of work to do this week before we can use our shower again! It’s our only shower, unfortunately. We have borrowed the showers at Jeff and Lauren’s and at Tara and Larry’s already this weekend. I especially needed it after climbing out of the crawl space with dirt and sawdust and fiberglass insulation all over my clothes and body. Family has been super helpful this project, from the showers to truck errands, to my Gramma Sophie buying Chad a yard stick, it has been really nice.
I was so proud of Elisa on our last hardware store run. We needed to find plywood subflooring that was exactly 15/16″ thick. Nobody sold the right size. Then Elisa figured out that the previous owners must have stacked two pieces that were 15/32″ thick.
We’ve had a really busy week. Elisa and I took a nap this afternoon and we were out cold for several hours.
Nick Adamson came to visit this week. He works for Ameriprise in Dallas. We got to have dinner with him on Tuesday and Wednesday night and catch up a little.
On Wednesday night I was in charge of Scouts so we started the Space Exploration merit badge. We made spaghetti rockets. You take a bunch of dried spaghetti and you glue it to a model rocket engine. Then you add fins and decorations made of paper or cardboard. Nick and Elisa each made one too. It was a blast. You would never have guessed that I was never a Boy Scout. Mine was pretty pathetic. It made it halfway off the launch pad and then got stuck without ever getting airborne. Nick and Elisa both got some good distance out of theirs.
On Thursday night we had a campout for the Scouts. (They were off school on Friday). We did the car camping thing. We also launched the boys’ rockets off at the campout. It’s a fun activity. The boys also had fun playing with starting the fire and stuff. They were always a little afraid and waited for an adult to say it was OK before they tried anything. We also played murder in the dark until midnight.
There was a harvest festival on Saturday where they had prize pumpkins on display. The winner was 1,010 pounds. Daniel grows a big pumpkin himself so we thought it would be fun to go with him and Tara. He didn’t think his pumpkin would be able to compete though.
On Saturday evening I got really brave. I ripped up the linoleum in our master bathroom. Elisa and I extracted the toilet. We are going to cut away a big section of the floor that has water damage. I think I know how to get it all put together now. The damage was a lot more contained than we had thought. It doesn’t extend into the kitchen and barely extends into the guest bathroom. We are going to be able to do repairs without moving any plumbing in the guest bathroom, thankfully. The bad news is there are a billion bugs and spiders coming into the house, which Chad blames on the colder weather but which I know is really due to the hole in our floor.
Well, we have no idea what happened the first half of the week besides the normal. But I suppose the remainder of the week makes up for that.
I finally got the materials for my student development course I need to finish before I can start real classes again for my major. I did two of the nine lessons on Thursday and Friday. It feels good to get them done.
On Saturday we went to an exhibit called the Dead Sea Scrolls. There were a billion million people there which made it a bit slow to go through the exhibit. It also made the exhibit seem more boring than it probably really was. We got to see the actual Dead Sea Scrolls. Well, parts of them anyway. It was especially exciting to see the scrolls from the creation in genesis and the burning bush part of Moses where Jehovah says “I AM THAT I AM.†The number “2000 years†seems really big when you are talking about something that people wrote down. I thought it was hard to fathom. They pretty much all looked like pieces of beef jerky though. I had been reading up a lot on the Scrolls, especially last year. I think in the end I had more fun reading the transcriptions on the Internet than seeing the original manuscripts. They were really small and dark.
Our garden is starting to go to sleep for the winter. We are picking some of the last of our dahlias, moping over all the tomatoes we can’t possibly keep up with, and joyfully harvesting the few other surviving vegetables. We managed to keep three bell peppers alive, though they are a bit scrawny, and we pulled up a bunch of carrots last night. Lots of tiny ones and one big one.
There’s this thing up in Issaquah called Salmon Days. October is when the salmon come back to spawn and there is a big salmon hatchery in Issaquah. It’s like a mini-fair. Except it’s not so “mini.†There were tons of people there. You could tell that it was in Issaquah and not Seattle because there was only one booth with hemp products. Every fair in Seattle is required to have half of the booths devoted to hemp it looks like. Anyway, we got some fair food and a salmon bake. There were salmon swimming upstream through the middle of the fair area and you could go watch them jump. My mom used to take us there when we were all little. It was fun to finally get to go again. (It usually falls on conference weekend.)
