Gone Camping!

We didn't do the kind of camping that one would think of when you hear someone say they are camping for a couple of days!  But technically we did camp - we pitched a tent... inside our old house... 

I really appreciate my pioneer mothers.  We still had it so much better - so many more conveniences than they could ever imagine, even though it was the next day before we had running water, and a flushing toilet (Tim brought the handy dandy emergency hassock - aka porta potty)!   I also cooked in a microwave....  If it's any consolation, I did have plenty of dirty children to show for our experience!

Once we arrived at the house, we dove right into work!  These are the before and during photos of the 'sitting room.'  What would you call it?  It has two big pocket doors, and its the room you enter into first.  We needed to get the very aged rug off of the floor.  Callan was my big helper and Gracie Anne and Avery got into the fun as well.

 Heave-Ho!

We did it!  But a bunch of the foam has stuck to the wood floor.  We have just the tool and have spent Friday and Saturday scraping here and there.  Most of the foam is gone.  I'll post a photo later.  The floor is in pretty good shape!

Kitchen - wow! what a work out!

Lathe to come of later!  Callan was my handy dandy helper again!  What a great worker.  Here is a picture of us, after the kitchen demolition.  This kind of work is not beautiful!!  I'm going to see about picking up some swim goggles for eye protection.  My safety goggles were worthless!  And after getting clonked on the head with a big piece of plaster, I will definitely not forget to throw in a few hard hats!  We have more plaster to knock down!

You might be thinking Callan and I did all of the work.  We didn't!  Tim and Mason were down in the basement working their magic on the plumbing.  See that split in the valve fitting?  That is nothing!  There are splits all over in the plumbing!  We now have water down in the basement though! 



Camping...

The bathroom underway.  You can see where Tim removed the potty.  It was cracked.  A lesson to us all to NEVER leave a house with running water unheated in winter...



Ahhhh - the tub!  Can't wait to take a bubble bath in there!

I'm always thankful for Sundays!  I love the sabbath day and if it weren't for that day, we would end up working ourselves into the ground!  This hard work is worth it in the end and that is what we kept in our minds as we tired.  Another thing that helped along the way were the suprises we found!  First, in the kitchen, I was certain the bottom layer of linoleum was eternally glued to the floor, but after getting one of the cabinet bases out of the kitchen I grabbed all three layers of linoleum and they lifted right up! What I found underneath the linoleum were newspapers from 1945!  I had so much fun reading about the ladies' fashions and how the US was doing in WW II! 

This is fun too.  This was left behind in the kitchen.  I think it has charm if I can look far enough past all the dust and dirt!  Look what it says on the side!  So fun!  One of the first pay phones!!

This was really exciting!  I took a back full of garbage that was left behind out to the dumpster we've rented, but the bag tore on my way out.  I poked through to find this old speller!  I grabbed a couple of really old measuring cups too before making it to the dumpster!

This was such a find!  The window screens are really rusted and dirty on the outside.  On the inside, the tops of the windows were covered.  Wish you were here to hear my shout of excitement when I tore down the old curtains to find the beautiful geometric pattern on the tops of my windows.  Now I'm on the hunt for a window treatment that will show those off!