Lots of snow

Today, outside our house, there was a HUGE snowblower:

Big Huge Snowblower

Quite the impressive piece of machinery, to be sure!

Normally State Park roads would not be plowed at this time of year because of current budget cuts, but the department of transportation was training a new driver, and they needed a bunch of snowy roads with little traffic. The park was perfect for this, since most of it hadn't been plowed since it closed on Columbus day, and so they were happy to let the DOT in to plow!

The movies give the best perspective of just how powerful this machine is. WOW.

We interrupt our home-improvement...

... to bring you a wedding! Here are some slideshows from our photographer:

the BASEMENT

One of the most truly frightening projects of ours was the basement. It's a very small basement, because it's below only the addition that was added to the house in the 70's. (The house was built in the 50's or 60's.) The original house has a crawlspace beneath it. Anyway! When we got here, it looked like this:

Note the giant pile of wood next to the shelves. There was also wood lining one of the walls completely, because the previous tenent used the wood stove instead of the fuel-oil furnace, because they had to pay their utilities. (You can see the ancient oil tank in the back of the lowest photo.) The place was beyond filthy, and the wood made it smell musty more than I can explain. When we began cleaning, we actually used a SHOVEL to get a lot of the debris out, and we filled a full-size pickup bed twice with trash.

First order of business: get rid of the wood. We burned many fires in our fireplace the first winter, and had several bonfires in the fire circle in our back yard. It helped. When the wood was gone, we ripped out some of the "built-in" shelving (that was on its last legs and very poorly constructed).

After that, I recruited my mom, the cleaning guru of the Southern Tier (the woman LOVES to throw things away and is an expert cleaner-outer!), to help clean it. We bartered with her by offering to move some extremely heavy furniture for her. Mom and I spent the day with shovels, work gloves, a shop-vac, and many other cleaning supplies. The end result?


The black shelves is where the old oil tank was. We were able to get rid of that mid-winter, because our house started smelling like a truckstop, and so our furnace got replaced with a shiny new propane one. (Those tanks are outside the house.)

Our next step in the basement is to paint the walls with Dri-Lock and seal the floor with an epoxy floor kit. We've also added a dehumidifier, which runs constantly to keep the humidity down there below 50%. Hopefully the Dri-Lock will help. We also hope to get rid of the wood stove, if we can get authorization to dispose of it. But for now, the smell of our entire house has improved thanks to a cleaner basement, AND it looks so much better. We've also not had any more mice since we got rid of the wood.

The hall

Our next major project was to tackle the dark, dreary, and disgusting hallway. It's a small space, but it was amazingly dark. The real catalyst for it, however, was when we noticed cute little spots of mold on the ceiling because of our poorly-ventilated bathroom:They're kind of hard to see in the photo, but anything that looks kind of like a spot of dirt is really MOLD. Ew.
We also had only a single recessed light in the space, and it was not very... light-giving. It was also filled with bugs and other disgusting objects. Turns out that the previous tenets, in their infinite wisdom, had put a 100-watt incandescent bulb in the light, when it was rated up to 75 watts, AND it was right next to some styrofoam sheeting in the attic, which had begun to melt.








Our first step was to rip out a bunch of the dark, old, moldy wood. (Isn't Joe gorgeous? :) )







































After we demolished, we put in cans for recessed lighting - TWO OF THEM. Plus, we moved the insulation around so that lightbulbs and stuff would not be potential fire hazards.










































Mounting and taping and spackling the sheetrock...




































A few coats of paint and some trim later, and we were done. Sadly, the colors of the paint don't show up here. The walls are actually a pale khaki color and the ceiling is white. Plus we've stained the trim much darker to match the existing stuff. But this is the best picture we have of the end result. Much cleaner and brighter!

so we begin

...and so we began with the ceilings, because I found them to be the most unacceptable part of our home. To put things in perspective, the ceilings were originally stained plywood juxtaposed against wood-paneled walls and hardwood floors. I'm a fan of wood in its natural, beautiful state, but this was just TOO much, and the house was way too dark. So we painted.

Here's a sample of what the ceilings looked like before we started the project. We did enjoy finding pictures in the wood-grain as we lay in bed at night, but it got old. Now I enjoy looking at the beautiful, creamy white ceiling with the pretty molding that maintained its wood finish.










Painting, of course, was a terribly back-breaking proposition. This is one of the three times I am grateful for Scotch painter's tape, because after almost 1000 square feet of painting at the angle you see here, Joe and I got quite sore. Plus, those 1000 square feet required 2 coats of primer and 2 coats of paint... so... 4000 square feet like that. It took about a week, and we were SORE.









The end result, though, was beautiful. Brighter, cheerier, and CLEANER-looking. Wouldn't you agree?

getting started

Welcome! Since we moved into our house, we have begun a plethora of home-improvement projects that we deem necessary to make the house fantastic. I'm learning a lot, and Joe is teaching a lot. Things have vastly improved, and our house now feels homey and sweet instead of a damp, musty cabin previously inhabited by people with poor housekeeping habits. Here are our chronicles.