Here is a montage of people worshiping God by serving others. Enjoy!
With the strong possibility of our moving to Texas in the summer to pursue another PhD, this time in Theology and at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, some have wondered how much we still lack to do on our house. The answer is quite a lot!
The house we bought was a foreclosed home which had been empty for over a year before we bought it. The siding and several windows were rotting. The front porch had some rotting issues also. The roof, sump pump, and the air conditioner needed replacing. The fascia boards were rotten. Inside, the carpet was filthy and damaged. The kitchen floor turned out to be rotten down to the sub floor. The bathrooms were nasty. Most light fixtures had been taken /stolen by the previous owners. Most appliances had been removed. All in all ... it was a big mess.
Since then, the roof, the sump pump, and the AC unit have all been replaced (these are the only things we actually contracted out). About 60% of the siding has been replaced. Most (but not quite all) of the rotting issues with windows and fascia boards have been dealt with. As for the inside, one of the two full bathrooms and the half bath have been re-floored and are done, with the exception of some trim work. The master bath is still completely gutted - you can still see some studs. The kitchen floor has been tiled, the living room floor has been replaced with hardwood floors. Most of the upstairs hall and part of one of the three bedrooms have also been floored with hardwood floors. Most of the walls have been repaired and painted. The kitchen cabinets are in the process of being refinished. All the molding was very abused, so Cindy is repairing all of it and painting it white since we removed it to install the floors. The fireplace has been re-done.
What is still missing? The master bathroom needs to be put back together: floor, bathtub, sink, toilet, etc. The bedrooms need to be floored and their molding needs to be repaired, painted, and installed. The dining room (my tool shop) needs to be floored and have some sheet rock work done. We have a french door to install in the kitchen and the cabinets need to be finished. The counter top also needs to be finished. We have to floor the steps and finish its surrounding molding. 40% of the siding needs to be installed and the whole outside needs to be painted. We still have to build the porch for the kitchen french doors to open out to, and the deck needs to be repaired. The front porch still needs attention, as the posts are bad. We added the structure for a pergola on the deck outside the dining room french doors to provide structural support for an overhang over that door; now we have to finish it. Plus, many other little details need to be figured out and taken care of.
There. Now you know how you can pray for us or help us, if you are handy and want to do some construction.
The new surround is all homemade, including the fluting and slate inserts. It was an interesting project that required me to learn some new wood working techniques. I am indebted to Bink for his tips on Making Grooves in Wood where I leanerd how to cut nice fluting and to This Old House for thier Easy Mantel Makeover where I got very useful tips on how to tile a fireplace surround with slate. More than these, I need to thank my neighbor, Don, because without his planer, I could not have achieved this look, and Jackie at Sherwin Williams, for his superb stain matching skills which allowed us to match the new woodwork with the original mantel stain color. 
But all this cold unfortunately has also forced us to pick all of our green tomatoes that were still on the vine. Cindy is currently wrapping them in newspaper (a trick Grandmother Schoolbus' neighbor told us about in October). The hope is that they will slowly ripen and that we will have good tomatoes for a while longer.
Well it took a while, but the living room's wood floor is finally finished. This week we put in the final corner, finished the border that goes around the room, and set it up so that when we are ready, we can start flooring the dining room. Next flooring project: the upstairs hall and the steps.
In a previous post, I posted some pictures of our living room floor. Here are a couple of update pictures:
Now, if I can find time to finish the last corner and start the transition into the dining room, we'll be able to call the living room floors done.
Well, I did my doctoral work in combustion, but I learned how to set up and start a fire in a fireplace years earlier from my papà. So when it came to having our first fire in our fireplace, I used his patented fire stacking technique. Judge for yourself ...
Now, first you start with a good under layer of paper.
Then you add a good layer of small branches: kindling, as they sometimes call it.
Finally, you put on the smaller logs with the larger logs in waiting.
It is amazing what one can learn from the internet. I often joke with people that I have learned how to do all I have done on the house by surfing the web. While this is definitely an exaggeration of the truth, I have learned much from the web.
For example, I have learned how to install a new circuit breaker from the web, and, like Cindy likes to say, I am still alive to tell about it. I have also learned how to install wood flooring from the web. The process is very simple and with some ingenuity can be embellished: see the pictures of our Brazilian Cherry wood floors, with border, that I am currently installing in the living room and will eventually install throughout the house.
From time to time I reach an impasse or need some input, and so I go and search, search , search, until I find the answer. For example, several months ago our windshield wipers on the Saturn started misbehaving. I could turn them on, but could not turn them off unless I turned the car off at precisely the right time: when they were at their lowest position. Since we are in a drought, it has not been very inconvenient, but with the advent of fall and the lower temperatures in the morning which cause condensation on the windshield, it finally had to be fixed. So where did I turn to try to figure out what might be wrong with my 1998 Saturn SL2's windshield wipers? Well, you guessed it: the internet and my friend Google. I entered the search string: "1998 Saturn SL2 windshield wipers do not stop," selected the first proposed site which had a link to a site which contained the answer: replace the motor.
The answer at first did not make any sense. I talked it over with a couple of friends and did some tests and convinced myself that the motor was the problem. So I asked a friend if he could change the motor. And guess what? The site was right, changing the motor did fix the problem. So if you are having the same problem, now you have TWO sources confirming the solution. BTW, the reason it fixed the problem has to do with the gearing in the motor, but I won't go into that here.
So next time you have a question, hop on over to the information superhighway, you never know, you might find the answer to all your know how problems.
the original siding with rotten fascia boards (07/18/06)
close up of the porch with our new light, old everything else (11/02/06)
new second story, old first story (01/18/07)
siding and new fascia boards on the second story, new siding to the right of the front door. Old siding being ripped off where you see black to the left of the door. (06/14/07)
more siding has been removed where you see black (06/16/07)
all the old siding has been removed from the front and more new siding is going up (06/19/07)
more new siding is up to the left of the door (06/19/07)
look at all that new siding! (06/20/07) compare to ->
As most of you can tell, I have not written in almost a month. I have two series that are not yet finished, and I would love to spend some time finishing them, but I have been busily working on the house.
Hopefully, I will find some time in the near future to post some, but in the meantime, I am in blog-bernation (both writing and reading blogs).
So, life has been busy lately. I have not been reading or writing much, but I have been doing lots of thinking, thus hopefully I will have some time to write it down soon.
On the house front, with spring comes much yard work. Cindy has waged battle against the invasion of the weeds (click on the picture to see the transformation).
Finally the table saw is being set up in the dining room so that I can start cutting molding for the bathroom mirror and then have it set up to help with the hardwood floor installation.
Well, we have finished tiling the kitchen floor, or at least the part we will be tiling for now (the far end is still untiled to protect the tiles from being damaged during some future demolition). The accent tile really ties the whole floor together.
We used two different color grouts; this turned out to be less of a pain than first expected. We also inserted floor outlets for my desk and a future kitchen island. I am about to start the sealing process and then we can move the dining table in the kitchen while I transform the dining room into a wood shop for a time.
Just a word of encouragement to y'all tiling out there. Grout really makes a difference. You might look at your pre-grout work and even be slightly disappointed, but once the grout goes down ... wow, what a difference. I furnished the three pictures above to make my point. BTW - we are almost finished with the kitchen floor. Praise God!
Another tip: since we could not go without using the kitchen, I grouted the inside and I will grout the outside on Friday, that way there was always a part of the kitchen that we could walk on.
