Wood floor!!

Nate has found hardwood flooring under two layers of carpeting and a layer of fake wood laminate! This is still part of the living room project. Ben suggested he look, and lo and behold, there was wood.

Yesterday (Sunday) was a big day at The Burrow. There were lots of helpers there...Steve, Paula, Derrick, Terese, and Leo. Sam came by, Liz came by, Allie came by. The house absorbed everyone very easily and lots of work got done.


Paula was already putting a third coat of white paint on the trim in the living room when we arrived. Nate, Steve, and Derrick did the final push with moving all the stuff from the cottage.

We can thank Derrick for exhuming the bathtub madonna. He suggested that this will be the new "ice cooler" for beer during our campfires. Cool idea, hunh?

Paul caulked the roof and other places. Therese and Leo started scraping the laminate off the wood floor and were joined later by Nate, Steve, and Derrick. Jan washed windows and Paula washed and washed the bedrooms walls. Maegan kept the kitchen going and put up clean new blinds on all of the clean windows.

At the end of the day, a lot of work got done...just in time for the first official snowfall on The Burrow.

The Burrow is born...

The Burrow on Chapin was born on November 26, 2007 when we purchased the house at 10+9 Ch@pin Street. Nate and Maegan found this house and the four of us spent a little more than 5 weeks looking, deciding, and then finally buying this house. The plan is for Nate and Maegan to buy it free and clear in a couple of years.

[Information about the address was made purposefully obscure so that it doesn't show up in any web searches since this is really meant to be a family, not a public, blog.]

Tomorrow will make one week that we've owned the place, although it sure seems a lot longer since the kids have put in many long days and nights. I figured it was about time to document what's going on since each day brings new challenges and changes.

Here below is a brief chronology. I'll post pictures later.

Nov. 26 - The four of us went to the closing at 2:30 p.m. then we went to the house, unpacked the table and chairs and celebrated with champagne, wine and cheese.

Nov. 27 - Nate has the week off, so he is in charge of doing all the heavy work during the day. At some point during this whole past week the following has been accomplished:

In the living room, Nate tore down the ceiling tiles and tore up two layers of rug. Under the second rug was a fairly nice looking laminate floor, but the rug had been glued down really well to the floor and it's impossible to clean. It left just a bunch of black rubber.

We washed the walls with TSP, with Leo and Ericka's help. The house was lived in by heavy smokers and it really stinks. Each place we wash and clean helps a little bit. It helped a whole lot to get the ceiling down and the rugs out. Maegan began painting the walls a sage green. The trim is being painted white. It looks real nice, but the black stuff on the floor is getting all over.

Next decision is what to do about the ceiling...it has wood tacking strips on it that were put in with holding nails, a pain to take down. We may have decided to go with drywall.

Jan took down most of the blinds and tried to clean them. A terrible job not worth the effort. We decided to buy new ones.

Dec. 1 (Saturday) - The electrician went to the house to put in a new panel, but there was a problem because the meter was locked. At 7:30 that evening P&J got a call from Nate that the furnace wasn't working...so we went over and eventually solved that problem.