Isabel Happened

So there was that hurricane last week, right? The good news is that there is no bad news — everything came through the storm ok. We were expecting that at best there would be a few blown out windows, but it seems that Church Hill didn’t really get hit that badly. One tree did get blown down, but it was a little ugly pine tree that I’d tried unsuccessfully to saw through a few weeks back. That tree is now gone but (as you can see in the photo) that hoopty car is still there…

painting

With a move-in date of mid-October getting closer and closer, we’ve started really pushing to get enough of the inside clean to the point that we could live there semi-comfortably. The more that we get done, the more completely fucking disgusting dirty the house seems to have been initially. Towards actually being able to move in, Ronni has started laying down some color upstairs and the tranformation has been immediate.

Our room is a color whose name I can’t remember. The room behind that is ‘Vapor’ and the room behind that is ‘Bark’. The bathroom is now mostly ‘Sea Glass’. Enthusiasm to see the colors on the walls has prevented us from actually finishing any one room, but it is all coming together.

The walls in the kitchen have been mostly re-drywalled. It is nice to have a few smooth surfaces. I’m at the point now of taping and mudding where pieces come together, and filling some holes in the remaining plaster. This is taking longer than it should maybe, but the room is getting there… As my initial attempt at hangiung drywall this is coming along well. We’ll see what it looks like w/ a coat of primer on it… There is still the matter of stripping the layers of paint from the molding and beadboard before we can get to painting the kitchen. The idea is to have this as a working kitchen soon after we move in.

ongoing

In the days after the hurricane, Carter hauled away the bulk of the refuse and debris that were collected behind the house. The scale of the trash was never truely apparent in the pictures; Carter has done an amzing thing. Friends w/ truck, broken window. Sadly, nothing useful or interesting (in a non-gross way) turned up in the pile. At the bottom, the primordial refuse seems to have been a mattress and box spring (making set #2 found so far in the house).

We’ve also finished a 2-step approach to clearing out something of a mold problem that we’d inherited. Until very recently, the house didn’t have nay ventilation along the foundation. This contributed to a very wet environment under the house which spawned a huge fungus (apparently — we refused to crawl under and look). This fungus came up through the floorboards downstairs, showing as a green/brown/orange powder in the middle of the floors. We’ve now got ventilation holes cut and had Orkin spray to kill the fungus (and, as a side effect, wipe out a bunch of black widow spiders too). We bleached the floors inside and the mold is now gone. It was kind of fun in a goofy way.

Ronni’s parents have helped us get a little pickup which has quickly become invaluable for carrying drywall, lawnmowers, supercans, etc. I don’t know how we thought that we’d pull this off without a truck of some kind… Ronni says that now that the truck is here, her car is not for hauling.

We’e still pursuing the Tax Abatement Program, but we’ve been delayed a little bit. Our application for a building permit (as part of the Abatement application) was initially denied. The fact that the house had been illegally converted to a duplex was a bit of a snag — the city wanted proof that we intended to convert the house back to a single-family structure. Basically this meant putting together a set of before+after floorplans. We should have this back on track in the coming week. We need to get this done before put too much more work into the house, though, so that we don’t mess up our initial assesment value.