Hi everyone. This week we’ve had several areas that we have been working on and some areas, for which we are unfortunately stuck. Ah well, these are the joys of restoring and remodeling an old home. It’s all good and as you have seen, if we do find we have to wait in one area, if we look very hard, I think we can find SOMETHING else to work on in the meantime. LOL.

We had some more bay window progress this week. As you may recall, the scaffolding had been down after Paul completed the front work on the bay. With a little time in between some other jobs, we decided to set it back up, this time to be aligned to the left and it’s been there for the last few weeks. It’s always a scary thing for me, in not only the setup but the climbing to work on the top of it, but Paul has become comfortable (that’s a relative term considering it’s still scaffolding up 30 feet, ha). He has been able to tackle it, climbing up and down as needed and done a fantastic job.

The first week he had it up, as Paul tried to work wasps began to show up in large numbers flying in and out of the roof hole on the left. So down he came and we watched…

The wasps were trying build nests in the attic for the coming winter and using the left side as an entry point. Well, we have to address it, so here go! Off to the store to buy wasp and hornet spray and we then spent the next morning up in the attic, trying to find and destroy all of the nests they began. There were no lights in the attic yet, therefore I went too and was the one holding a light source…staying much further back, of course. lol. I was up there, shining the light for Paul, trying to scan so he could see and he was up front and center (ever the brave one!) crawling over rafters and searching out wasp dwellings, then backing up, holding the can out and spraying away!

Sorry, no pictures on this but trust me, it was another fun day. I need to start posting videos of our adventures, I think everyone would find that quite entertaining! Between the project interruptions (such as this) and the “remove one pipe and now there’s a whole other issue we found” people could see how the projects might appear to take longer.

Fortunately, in this case with our new resident wasps, the housing project appeared to still be mostly “under construction”, so we got in before anyone moved in and minimal issues. No eviction notices needed to be posted. lol.

Now it was back to work on the scaffolding. Paul spent the day back up, he began scraping, buying lumber and cutting new boards to repair and replace the damaged roof and eaves, then sealing it.

Note: with the change in the seasons, he knew he wouldn’t have time to finish that side with full scraping and painting, however his goal was to at least repair the roof and eaves area, which he did. And complete with new wooden brackets on the left now, just as in the front. Another shout out to Brian Somerville and his company, The Grit Shoppe for coming through again!

We still need to scrape and paint this left side, but at least it’s been rebuilt and the roof has been repaired and sealed for the season. I know Paul has incredible skill in the film production and music, but his skill in carpentry work is just as detailed and well done. He was even told by a neighbor that there were carpenters in town who would not have done such a detailed job as he did. It’s all about doing a good job and the best he can for this old house. As for the right side of the bay…we’ll seal it from the inside and tackle it come spring.

Another exciting event for us this week was trying to bring the inside back to life! Oh we still have a long ways to go on that front but the truth is, we need to start living there at some point, complete or not. Therefore, we made the decision to start “nesting” a bit. Let’s give it a good bath, unpack boxes, hang some pictures and lights and we’ll work the inside a room at a time.

That sounded nice and uneventful but the reality was, when we started doing this it was amazing to us, how WARM the house suddenly became in those rooms. You could see what it once was, yes even though the peeling paint. So we kept going…

A quick side note: Do we have heat yet in the house, you ask? Alas, the answer is not yet. Appalachian heating is doing a fantastic job, but they are now waiting on a few parts to come via shipment. This was why we began with “well, let’s start cleaning” and that project took on a bright life of its own.

Do you remember these? Check out the photos below. Paul was able to hang these this week!

When do you think there was the last time there were 3 lights on, visible through the front windows? The house is starting to come to life.