Yes, we do know what we don’t know.

So sledge hammers and strong men have done their thing, and now we have as close to a blank canvas as it is possible to have in a home that feels 100 years old!   It is really only about 65 years old technically speaking, but to this city girl it might as well have been 100 years old.  Enough whining though, time to get down to business.  I have to start my new job on the 4th of August, and I was bound and determined to be in my own home by then.  Given the “availability” of some materials, we were going to need to be strategic…. very strategic.

So strategy move number one was get everything ordered as soon as possible.  Since it was going to be at least a week to get anything, we needed to make decisions fast.   First purchase was at Sears – no not the department store!, the catalogue store! (who shops from a catalogue???) to pick out a nice new riding lawn mower – hello, no more bugs please!! Eureka!  It may be a catalogue store, but it did have some items there that you could purchase!!! Zippity do dah! We’ll take the bright red one – big enough for 3-4 acres – good enough! That’s 43 acres backwards right?

Next we headed off to the woodstove store. (Yes a whole store devoted to woodstoves!).  How hard can this be?  I want the pretty one…..  Oh good heavens, the next hour was filled with discussions on the merits of the different kinds of stoves, straight firebox vs airtight, catalytic or non-catalytic    ( cata what??? ), wood or pellet.  From there we get into what size stove we need, where will it be located, what kind of chimney would this be using, is it suitable for a woodstove….. sheesh, can’t anything be simple.  Frankly, we are listening and nodding, but on the inside we are freaking out! And don’t get me started on what these things cost….!  Absolutely stunning… and that didn’t include the installation of the damn thing…. almost the same price!   In the end, I did get the pretty one (honey, it’s our forever home, we want it to look nice….. ) and the sales guy was great about helping us out with some reputable folks to install it, who would also have a look at our chimney to make sure that we don’t burn the place down. (Ya gotta know that is not likely to go well given the vintage of the house!) They have time to look at it since… the unit won’t be in till next week.

Once I stopped hyperventilating, we went over to the local hardware store to order our kitchen cabinets and counter top. This went smoothly pretty much.  Thank you very much for your order, it will be on the truck and here next week.  Three things ticked off the list.  OK, things are getting rolling.

Back to the house to review and think about next steps.  We review the kitchen window, because I said it has to go…. it didn’t open!  What is the point of a kitchen window if it doesn’t open??  The idea of changing the window is a bit scary though.  It means cutting into the outside of the building – since it really needed to be bigger (in my perfect forever home!) and none of us had ever replaced a window.  Now if we are going to replace that window, then we really should replace the ones in the bedrooms too because, yuck! They were truly in bad shape.  In for a penny, in for a pound!  We make the decision to replace them all – and the boys learn a new skill! Oh, and we also discover the way to tell the difference between windows that open horizontally and ones that open vertically…. apparently it’s kinda important!  Of course we didn’t know this when we went to buy them and accidentally bought a horizontal window when we needed a vertical one.  But it doesn’t count as a mistake because we ended up using the horizontal one in the bathroom!  Score one for us, we have this mastered now!

Next up are our chimney/woodstove folks to have a look at the chimney and where we want to install the woodstove.  If you called it that the chimney had to go… you were right on the money. Out come the sledge hammers again and poof… the chimney is gone.   Also, there is a portion of wall that has to come out in order to put the woodstove where we want it, and the flooring has to be completed as well before the stove can be installed.  They will be back next week.

Move a wall…. ya OK.  Guess we need to fix the hole in the floor where the chimney was too?? We can do this right? And get the floor down. One day to lay it, 48 hours to dry, one day to grout it, 12 hours for it to dry….. and that is after moving the wall.  I won’t go into the discussion on new subfloor vs no new subfloor – just to painful still. But we keep moving forward! We are nothing if not persistent!

We all put our heads together and made the decisions on the wall.  Chuck and Darren get to work tearing down what we don’t need, moving some electrical switches, and creating a new doorway for the second bedroom.  They filled in the hole in the floor and checked it for creaks and soft spots that needed to be screwed down.  Unfortunately at this point, Chuck and I had to go out of town for a couple days, so Darren got busy on the floor gaining new tile laying skills along the way.

Because it needs to be ready for next week.