Progress

We have siding, and it is so nice. I never thought I could be so excited about siding. But now there are no more cracks or crevices for the critters to get in and the place looks less like a shack and more like a home. Go to my first post to see the before pictures. The windows still have to be wrapped (they'll be white and not faded, peeling and let's face it...rotting...yellow), but we have all new ones now too. Even that made such a difference, you can see out of them! Everyone will be happy to know that the bats are gone now too. I originally thought they just migrated and would probably be returning in the spring; however, our neighbor informed us that some have moved to his house. Bad for him, but promising for us. This means that they gave up trying to get in and now that all the holes are covered by the new siding, everyone can come visit with less fear now...and I can sleep with the bedroom door open.



Here's our house, taken from down by the pond, with the house done and the garage still to be done, this was Saturday and Charlie has since sided the whole garage.

By the way for those of you who haven't been here yet, the huge tree between the house and the shed is actually a PEAR tree. It's pretty awesome and apparently, we also have the mother of all elderberry bushes. I am embarrassed to say that I had no idea that it was an elderberry bush or what a priceless treasure elderberries apparently are. Charlie's mom was here and drove away with a laundry basket full. I never did get a pie.

And just because I never post anything. Here's a picture of the whole family too, at Lake Hiram of course.

So if you think about it, Charlie is a maniac and has accomplished so much. We bought the place in January, moved in in February, and already have the dining room completed, two bathrooms, the bedroom and the hallway mostly done. I know I need to keep up on the pictures.

charlie rocks

The dining room is almost done! Charlie has done an amazing job, especially on installing the hardwood floor. Take a look. It's so nice to have a real room!

Pictures of nice things

So now I have to get up extremely early to get to work, which is fine. I am enjoying my coffee and NPR while driving...and I drive a Honda so that gas prices aren't killing me yet. Anyway, the point is, I have seen some amazing sunrises up here early in the morning. So I thought I'd share a picture of one.

I don't really have any good pictures of the "after" condition of the rooms that are complete because although the remodeling in the bedroom and both bathrooms is almost complete they are too messy to take a picture, so instead I will include a picture of the pets.

Chateau Craigmile still stands...

...this is not necessarily a good thing. Since the last post, Lucy has grown tremendously, the snow has melted and we've faced a multitude of ridiculous incidents.

We've drilled a new well, here's the drill rig in our front yard on Easter weekend. I know its sideways, but it takes a long time for me to fix the picture orientation because...

We do not have cable out here. After having dial up internet for about a month (one of the reasons I slacked off on the blog) we have switched to satellite internet. It is not fast, but it is faster than dial up. So now I am one of those people in the country with two satellite dishes on their house, paying a ridiculous amount of money for sub par internet. Ahhh...the country.

Anyway, we also had some septic issues...here is our beautiful view at sunrise with our recently covered septic tank in the middle of yard. To make a long story short the snow seemed to be melting in the middle of the yard, and things were being bypassed. The thing had to be excavated, cleaned out and have some piping replaced. Charlie did most of it himself. I managed to stay away from the lawn during this whole ordeal. If it weren't for Charlie that probably would have been the last straw for me. We are still here and there have been several last straws since then...

Like the bats.

We all knew that there once were some bats in the house. They left mountains of evidence in the crawl space. Well, they came back. For a few days you could here them squeeking and shuffling around over our heads. I actually lay awake in bed one night listening to them, terrified.

So we called the exterminator. Who informed us that we probably had hundreds. I was thinking probably 20 or so. So we stood outside that night and watched them fly out and counted. After about 15 minutes and 135 bats, I stopped counting and the exterminator was called the next day.

So you can't really see what's going on in this video, but I think the audio is enough to make you laugh at us. And you can see a few flying away from the house. This is after the exterminator put screens on the openings in the house. This allows them to crawl out of a very small opening in the screen, but then they cannot come back in. So we were watching them struggle to get out of the screen. Ridiculously creepy. The screaming is because one of them dove straight at my head. Enjoy the video, this will take like 20 minutes to upload, so I hope you watch it. Ok, it won't upload. Damn.

Anyway, this morning our house looked like a horror movie. Bats were literally swarming our house, looking for any way in, flying straight into the eaves and bouncing off, and coming dangerously close to my head.

Other than that things are great. Some more of the inside has been complete. Next post will have photos of nice things.

Meet Lucy Craigmile

Getting ready to move!

So we're planning on moving in this week. I took the week off of work to get the place liveable (although Charlie does most of the work). Here are some more in progress pictures.

Here's the bedroom with some new walls.

Charlie has turned my closet into the garbage room.

I've been painting our sweet claw foot tub that Charlie got on Craig's List. It was red. Now it's white.

Here's the new bathroom vanity, quite a difference.

The most fun for me the last few days has been re-opening all of our wedding gifts. We were saving them for a new house. So now we have all this nice stuff in a not so nice kitchen. I spent most of the day Sunday scrubbing down the cabinets. It's still kind of gross. Contact paper and new kitchen stuff makes it a little bit better. Eventually we'll have a new kitchen...and restored running water.

Here's the bathtub, ready to hook up:

We are totally ready to move in. Here's our living room/dining room, complete with a sawhorse that acts as dining room table, utility bench and footstool.

Here are some more pictures of the view, because this is what keeps me sane. Check out how "close" our nearest neighbor is. To give you an idea of how country this is, our neighbors have a horse, and the neighbors on the other side of them have those little miniature horses, or as Charlie put it "horselets". Sorry, no pictures of the horselets yet.

Some before pictures of the master bedroom. The walls have all been taken down now, and Charlie is putting up the new drywall as I type. This is the front of the house.
We have a huge picture window.
The floor looks like shit. We're putting down carpet.

And a BIG closet, which is all I really wanted. I've come a long way from sharing a closet with Michael. The closet even has it's own window!

Bathroom and bats

I'm a little behind on the pictures, but to keep you going...here's the bathroom in progress:
Here is some of the bat guano that rained down upon us when Charlie took the ceiling down. I know, gross, but it really got much worse than this. Charlie ended up dragging all of the insulation out of the attic, while I was outside pulling it off of the roof and chasing it around the yard on a windy day and stuffing it into our shed...in about 2 to 3 feet of snow. That was day #3 with the house. I was starting to hate the house and stopped taking pictures. I like it again now.

Here is some of the fantastic electrical work that was hidden behind the ceiling, one of the reasons Charlie is re-wiring everything.

Finally, the bathroom with some dry wall!

9989 Phillips Road

Here's our house in the country everyone!

And our view:

The plan is to finish the bathroom and bedroom before we move in, then on with the rest of the house, which basically needs every room re-done.

Here are some before pictures of the bathroom:

Who puts a ceiling fan in the bathroom?

This vanity was dated 2 weeks after Charlie was born. It had a built in hamper and Charlie found underwear jammed behind it that were probably just as old.

That photo spoke for itself....

and my personal favorite...the wallpapered light switch!

We have since demolished this room. More pictures to come!