Finished!

The roof is finished - 100% done. The guys finished it up over the weekend - even Mike worked his butt off, despite looking like a chipmunk and feeling very shitay. I must say it's quite a relief. We still need to do some cleanup around the yard - small stuff. Luckily one of the guys had a magnet, so I think we managed to get most of the nails out of the yard.

And as if on cue, I got a call from the home owners insurance company, checking up on our progress. I was proud to tell them they could come by whenever they wanted. True, we were not able to complete everything on their list - but we put $10,000 or more into the house this summer, so I don't think anyone could argue that we've made no progress.

Let's see, the roof alone was $2700 total - materials and labor. The farmers porch was at least $6,000. Interior stair railing materials came to $1,000. Then there were little things like paint for the garage, misc home depot trips, storage stuff, etc. that probably add another couple hundred bucks. So, yeah - $10,000 is a pretty reasonable estimate. Wow - isn't that crazy? We would have never been able to do all that without the sale of Mike's motorcycle, all Mike's side jobs, my injury settlement, and psychotic winter saving.

I am just so proud! I can't wait to really show everything off at the upcoming Halloween party.

And in case you were all wondering, I was able to make it over to dadoo's house on Saturday with my one tile and pieces of hardwood for him to inspect. The good news is - we think it's going to fly. He's going to try and make the tile as flush as possible with the wood, so we're going to use a tile adhesive instead of traditional grout, which can be thicker. Unfortunately, we don't really know how it'll turn out until we do it. So much depends on how you lay down the adhesive and all that too. But worse case scenario, we'll just have to put a little wooden transition piece between the tile and hardwood.

So we scheduled that install for the weekend of the 18th! Purchasing the tile is no biggie, since it'll only be for under the french door and in the laundry closet. Turns out, we don't even have to rent the tile cutter - our friend TJ has one that he'll probably let us borrow for the day. Too coo! We'll definately be able to crank down the tile in a manner of one day - probably less.

If I can motivate Mike a little, I might be able to get him to install the hardwood the same day. All we'd have to do is rent the stapler again and I'm sure once we get our hardwooding system down again (he staples 'em, I cut 'em and lay 'em out for him) we'll have that one small room done in a matter of a couple hours or less!

I mean, come on, we did the entire upstairs in just two days - and the only reason it took us that long is we had to keep moving furniture around as we completed the rooms. Plus we were new to the whole process, so it took us a while to really get going with our system.

This weekend hopefully Mike will get to have a break and do something fun. Either that or he'll be working at TJ's house. Either way, I won't make him do anything after this past weekend... well, I might make him take out the window air conditioner....