Thanks Indeed

Turkey Day. A time to remember how thankful we are for family, friends, food… employment. And a big fat check from the MG guy! He’ll be here the first full week of December to load it up and take it away – thus ending our long long journey with that little red monster.

With money in hand, we were quick to disperse it. Mike paid off his friend for the purchase of his motorcycle. I paid off the credit card and repaid our savings for paying the credit card. I also paid off the fridge on the DeepHo card, bringing us back to a $0 balance on all fronts once again. What a great feeling! Much of the pressure we’d been building up over the past few months was gone immediately.

And, with our new found financial and obligatory freedom, we got right back to work on the house. I put up the tree and all the Christmas décor on Black Friday. (Staying as far from stores as humanly possible.) Mike picked up the Pex for the radiant heat on Saturday. Sunday, we really got down to business.

We didn’t get started until after lunch. (Notate that.) Then, Mike drained the heating system and disconnected the pipes downstairs. Upstairs, I moved the furniture in the kitchen and mudroom and disassembled the baseboards in both rooms. Then, it was off to the DeepHo for strapping and 2x6’s.

Upon our return, Mike quickly nailed up the strapping underneath the mudroom and drilled all the Pex tubing holes. Then, the difficult part. We both unrolled and tugged and pulled and fed and twisted and pulled and tugged and connected the tubing in and out of the floor joists. Not as easy as it sounds, since the tubing isn’t so flexible when hot water isn’t running through it.

We removed both baseboards from the kitchen and mudroom and put the former mudroom baseboard into the kitchen. (Wow, this means we finally can have an end-cap in the kitchen… no more no-name brand baseboard that we can’t find the ends to.)

And finally, around 6:30pm, Mike reconnected all the copper connections and pressurized the system. Kudos for re-using so many fittings too… although I wouldn’t advise doing such a thing. We had a couple leaks on first pressurization, but they were quickly fixed and the system was working beautifully by 8pm.

The whole job is made even more unbelievable when you take into account that we had to clean out and move just about our entire stock of lumber – which was all in the absolute worst spot ever. We had to remove it all from the saw horses, stack it, move the saw horses, and then put it all back on. What a pain in the butt… but good in helping us take stock of what we have. Lots of good sized trim pieces, for example. Plus, it was good reason to get rid of all the too-small or crappy bits. We threw those out the window.

Of course, that left us with a big mess outside to clean up at 8:30 at night. We were so toast, tired and achy at that point, but managed to clean at least the driveway.

And all those 2x6’s we also bought at HD? I bet you were wondering what those were for. Bathroom, baby, bathroom. Mike will begin framing TONIGHT. Boy, are we going to push forward with this one. It’s a Christmas gift to us and long time coming at that.

TUESDAY MORNING UPDATE:
Most of one wall is up!