Wow! It has been a while!
It seems that it has been a few months since we’ve had an update on the blog here. There are a few reasons, I suppose. We had our one-year anniversary (yay!), which caused some time to be used. I had a bunch of shows going on, and Jenny and I had family gatherings to attend on both sides. Add in Easter and some other miscellany, and we find ourselves in the second week of May. On top of all that, I had some ISP issues that forced me to choose a different provider. When that happened, IP addresses changed, and I had to reconfigure our firewall and router. Due to the way that this provider was allocating our IP addresses, I had to configure the router in a way that prevented us from being able to access this site from inside the house. I know–that sounds confusing. If you’re really interested, let me know. I can write volumes on the subject. Bleh.
Now it is May, and just tonight I decided to try something that I thought should fix our access to internal sites. I have no idea why I didn’t do this before, as the solution seems obvious now. In any case, as of tonight, I have finally restored full functionality, and we can finally get access to our internal sites again. That means that I can access the blog from home again (I could previously access it only from work), which means that I can finally do some updates and some much-needed work on it.
The status on things is changing for the better for the house, too, which is always good. To wit:
We have an electrician who is waiting for a free day to come to install our new service entrance. That’s going to be a good thing, and a big relief once it is here. We’ve been waiting for this so that we can fix some things and get some things upgraded, and so that we can get some things installed that have been waiting for us. For instance, my parents bought us a nice chest freezer as part of our wedding present. The deal was that they were going to use it to store food for the rehearsal dinner (which they catered themselves) and the “day-after” party, and then we were going to move it down to our house to live in our basement. Well, unfortunately, I became increasingly worried about available electrical capacity in the basement, after finding that most of the first floor was on one of two circuits, and one of those circuits powered the entire basement. I wanted to install new wiring and a new outlet for the freezer, but there was nowhere that I felt safe splicing it in, so we had to put that on the back burner for a bit. Of course, this isn’t a huge problem–my parents are making good use of the freezer for the moment–but we are excited at the possibility of being able to store larger quantities of frozen stuff, which means that we can cook for ourselves more by being able to store more leftovers and partial meals for reheating and finishing later. The electrician’s visit also means that I’ll be able to start rewiring things to be somewhat safer and more code-compliant, and I’ll be able to start working on moving the woodshop to our basement. Now that is an exciting thing!
We have some friendly folks who are going to help us with the porch this spring/summer. The one corner is sinking, which is causing some water to collect in places where it shouldn’t, which is leading to some rot issues. I’m excited about fixing these things, as Jenny and I really enjoy our front porch. I get a little nervous about having bunches of people on it right now, so this will be a good thing.
I’m still working on the living room. I had to stop working on the walls for a while, as the cold outside was hampering my ability to easily remove wallpaper. I did get a lot of wallpaper off, though, and began working on the ceiling. We’re not going to even try to get everything off of the ceiling. We’re just going to get it back to solid paper with a good bond, then sand the edges to make the transitions smooth. I started removing some of the loose bits, so that is going well. I also spent the better part of a day working on getting the big front window to open. It is one of the only windows in the house that is still original (the other three being the windows on the third floor), and it is the only one of those that was ever weighted. Fortunately, its chains and weights are still intact and functional (though the chains have a good coating of paint on them). It took me a long time to get all of the paint and old caulk out of the edges of that window. Finally, I found that I was able to move it just a bit. Some more work removing caulk residue and lots of built-up paint, and the window moved more! Yay! Well, almost yay. Unfortunately, years of paint and small bits of wood movement meant that the window panel was catching on a part of the upper framework. It looks like we’re going to have to strip the paint from the window in order to get it to clear the framework. I may actually go in with a sharp chisel to flatten the unseen side of this bit of framework, too, as it has bowed slightly from where it is supposed to be. Short of rebuilding the entire frame with new stock, I think that this is the way to go. This preserves the original wood and craftsmanship, and the only work that I need to do is on a side of the affected piece of wood that one cannot see without an angled mirror and a ladder.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to put some more time in on the house soon. I want to get the rest of that wallpaper off so that we can start scrubbing the walls. Then it’s on to getting the paint off of the wood. Woo hoo!
jonathan
