I left off Part I with this picture :

This hole in my kitchen wall is a great example of why so much of our remodeling project is stalled right now and how the disease is spreading through the house. It’s pretty obvious how the spreading is working, stairs end in kitchen, therefore the kitchen has been infected. The stalling is a bit more complex.

You might not be able to tell very well from my picture but that wall has no insulation in it, and it is continuing to fall apart. Also the white thing in the wall  is a towel because when it rains really hard the roof leaks and the water comes into the house.  No doubt that has quite a bit to do with why the wall is falling apart.To fix this hole the remodeling disease is going to spread even further.

-There is no point replacing the wall ’till we fix the roof.

-The roof doesn’t just need fixing in that spot, it needs new shingles everywhere. (That project will be a spreading disease of it’s own I’m sure!)

-We can’t just rip out that chunk of wall and fix it without having half the ceiling cave down (it’s all plaster and lath in the kitchen).

-Which would be alright since there is a huge crack across the ceiling running through where the ceiling fan should be.

-I use the word should because I took the blades off when we did the electrical work  in order to access wires.  I had to get in there and accidentally messed with how it was anchored to the ceiling. Worried we would forget it was basically unanchored and turn it on causing it to crash across the room I just took the blades off. But it would be good to have a working fan again.

-There is no insulation in any of the kitchen anyway so after the ceiling comes down ripping apart all the falling down walls wouldn’t be a bad idea.

And all of a sudden we’ve gone from fixing a hole in the wall to re-roofing an entire house and ripping apart the kitchen… and as long as we are ripping apart the whole kitchen… I’m not even going to finish that, it gets too scary.

End result: After two years we still have a hole in our kitchen wall.

In addition to the hole, the pantry is still down to bare studs inside, (but with a working light), the stairs need to be finished, railings need to go up, trim needs to go on…

But lets not dwell on all that unfinished stuff lets talk about Clara’s room.

I had been stubbornly holding out trying to get the trim finished in Clara’s room until she moved in. Some people might argue that I was being unreasonably stubborn about this since it meant that Clara was still in our bedroom, but I had reasons.

You see the summer I was five my parents built a house.  When we moved in that fall we still didn’t have tile on the floor or many other finishing touches. Most of the important finishing work was completed fairly quickly, other things like closets not so much. Tyler and I each had a door-less closet in our room with holes in the walls on either side for a set of drawers to fit in.   My Dad put in drawers in about five years later. When I was in middle school  Dad did the drywall finishing work above them. I  had been used to having the wall open and had been storing things inside next to the drawers so that the finish work walled in one of my Moms birthday presents, but that is another story.  The closets never got real doors.  We begged my Granny for curtains that are still hanging today.  My point is that I knew that if Clara moved in before her room was done the odds of us ever finishing it would plummet. And the odds, lets just say it’s looking pretty ugly…

Trim and baseboards, the final step to a completely finished room, and not just finished completely, redone from the studs on in. Window trim and door casings went up in the last month… …but then we got to the baseboards, which of course led us to another nasty chain of events.

-The old baseboards do not fit anymore becuase we changed from plaster to drywall and took out a chimney from a corner, so we need to cut new ones.

-The baseboards in our bedroom are also off because of the closet work.

-It seems like someone ought to be able to figure out how to make all the baseboards fit on all the new walls  becuase we should have really close to enough and then we wouldn’t have to buy any new ones.

-I can’t figure that out. Math has never been my strong suit.

-One of the reasons I can’t figure it out is because we need new plinth blocks under the casing for the doors. For some reason those have been a favorite of teething dogs.

-The closets still don’t have casings or doors on them much less the plinth blocks on the bottom  making it very hard to determine if my math is right before I start turning 14 foot boards into toothpicks.

-The wood is a hundred years old, weird sizes and difficult to match to say the least.

Needless to say we did not get the baseboards done in Clara’s room before she moved in. Fortunately I don’t think there is any space to hide a birthday present behind them so if it takes us a few years at least we don’t have that to worry about!

Come back tomorrow for The Disease Part III The Sleep Crawler.